Community-University Partnerships: Achieving continuity in the face of change

A challenge most community-university partnerships will face after having established themselves is how to maintain continuity in the face of change. The problems besetting communities continually shift as new issues bubble up. Similarly, the goals of the university partners often fluctuate. And the partners themselves shift: people working in non-government organizations often move in and out of positions and university partners may change with tenure or shifts in university priorities. In light of all of this flux, can stable community-university partnerships be built and, if so, how

Community-University Partnerships: Achieving continuity in the face of change

A challenge that community-university partnerships everywhere will face is how to maintain continuity in the face of change. The problems besetting communities continually shift and the goals of the university partners often fluctuate. This article describes a decade-long strategy one university has successfully used to address this problem. Over the past ten years, a community-university partnership at the University of Massachusetts Lowell has used summer content funding to respond creativity to shifting priorities. Each summer a research-action project is developed that targets a different content issue that has emerged with unexpected urgency. Teams of graduate students and high school students are charged with investigating this issue under the auspices of the partnership. These highly varied topics have included immigrant businesses, youth asset mapping, women owned businesses, the housing crisis, social program cutbacks, sustainability, and economic development and the arts. Despite their obvious differences, these topics share underlying features that further partnership commitment and continuity. Each has an urgency: the information is needed quickly, often because some immediate policy change is under consideration. Each topic has the advantage of drawing on multiple domains: the topics are inherently interdisciplinary and because they do not “belong” to any single field, they lend themselves to disciplines pooling their efforts to achieve greater understanding. Each also has high visibility: their salience has meant that people were often willing to devote scarce resources to the issues and also that media attention could easily be gained to highlight the advantages of students, partners, and the university working together. And the topics themselves are generative: they have the potential to contribute in many different ways to teaching, research, and outreach. This paper ends with a broader consideration of how partnerships can implement this model for establishing continuity in the face of rapidly shifting priorities and needs

The Role of Research Centers in Fulfilling the Community Engagement Mission of Public Research Universities

Institutions of higher education are seen by the public as having unique resources to identify and solve complex societal problems. Public universities, in particular, were originally established to be of service to communities and the nation to advance public good and solve problems. However, community engagement is not an easy task for universities, and many have moved their service missions from the core of the institution to the periphery. When universities recommit to their civic missions, it requires a shift in the culture that permeates the entire campus. Part of that culture includes research centers, which are ubiquitous at public research universities and have been seen as possessing characteristics that can propel an engagement mission. However, little is known about whether research centers contribute to the civic mission of the institution and if and how universities have leveraged them to foster institutional change.The purpose of this two-phase study was to 1) determine if research centers at public research universities are contributing to the community engagement mission, 2) identify the types and characteristics of research centers that contribute to that mission, and 3) discover the role, if any, of research centers in advancing institutionalization of community engagement. Change theory provides the theoretical foundation for this study. Phase I examined the characteristics of research centers that can propel an engagement mission at four engaged universities. A research center characteristic matrix was developed that can be used to identify the centers that are the most engaged and have the potential for the most power and influence to be effective in change processes to institutionalize engagement. Phase II was a case study of one university that included interviews with faculty and administration, and analysis of documents. Results indicate actualizing an engagement mission is challenged by lack of mission clarity, limited supports, declining budgets, the traditional culture of the academy, and the overarching tension between research and engagement. Centers face the same challenges and a lack of recognition, and they are used sparingly as role models to propel institutionalization. Implications for universities, research centers, and the Carnegie Engagement classification application process are explored