Sustainable Engagement? Reflections on the development of a creative community-university partnership

Abstract

The current economic crisis provides an opportunity for urban universities to rethink and reshape their relationships with the communities in which they are located. Creative partnerships among universities, city agencies and community organisations have the potential to leverage the strengths of all three to: (1) identify and articulate community-defined needs and priorities; (2) systematically identify and map community resources; (3) provide students with service learning and field research opportunities;and (4) is a unique collaboration which will serve to bring the resources of these universities to bear on community defined issues and needs (Eisman 2010b).

Nature, Benefits, Challenges and Opportunities of University-Community Engagement: In the Case of University of Gondar, Ethiopia

“…He argued that the process of partnership building is affected significantly by several variables, such as lack of symmetry between partners, different perceptions of partnership, role conflicts, different organizational cultures, institutional context, unequal power relations, and inequitable access to decision-making processes. McRae (2009) identified four specific areas of tension-resources/money, reciprocity, relationship building, and recognition of community-university partnerships-and Shea (2011) categorized the potential threats to university-community partnerships into three groups: (1) asymmetries (of power, information, and organizational capacity); (2) inadequacies (of rewards, resources, and infrastructure); and (3) divergences (in focus, priorities, and norms). Stoecker (2016) explored the contradictions, unrealized potential, and unrecognized urgency of the causes, risks, and rewards of service-learning.…”

A robust University-NGO partnership: Analysing school efficiencies in Bolivia with community-based management techniques

“…The partnership satisfies Boyer's (1996) call for vigour and the desire for continuity in the face of change (Silka et al 2008), in that joint actions and impact have grown over time even in the face of more than one leadership change in each organisation. Shea (2011) cites three main sustainability factors -trust, participation, and commitment -for successful partnerships and identifies threats to those factors, which she classifies in three categories: asymmetry threats, inadequacy threats, and divergence threats. Most threats identified, such as lack of focus, differences in power, asymmetric information, insufficient resources and different priorities either were non-existent throughout the history of the SJU-FyA:B relationship or were addressed early on.…”

31. Exhilarated Learning and the Scholarship of Engagement: From Here (the University) to the Horizon (the Community)

“…Whereas there appears to be good evidence for instructional application, the difficulty may be to implement these useful ideas more fully in the increasingly important area of communityuniversity engagement. Engaged scholars will have to overcome the conundrums of university reward structures (Nicotera, Cutforth, Fretz, & Thompson, 2011) and find creative approaches to pursue sustainable engagement (Shea, 2011). Successful navigation of these challenges will result in personally and professionally meaningful contributions from here to the horizon.…”