The University of Michigan's Detroit Community Outreach Partnership Center generates faculty-student teams who work on community development projects with Detroit's community organizations. Projects are designed to enrich students' experiential learning in community settings and to help build communities' organizational capacity. This relationship has exposed a culture clash between universities and community organizations in at least three major areas: the style of work, social justice understanding, and power relations. Further, although the COPC is committed to a community-driven planning model, the nature of the community-university relationship tends to push the work toward a consultant-driven model. Improving community-university collaboration will require restructuring of university pedagogy.

This research note investigates class tension between rural women in the context of a grassroots women's development project in the village of Guadalupe in the Mexican state of Querétaro. These tensions affected the cooperative's internal dynamics, economic choices, and inevitably its lack of success. My study found these class tensions to be gendered in that they were manifestations of patriarchy as well as dependent capitalism.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract