The Challenges of Putting Community First: Reflections on a University Center’s Process

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to share tensions experienced by the Center for Community-Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) at the University of Colorado Boulder during its attempts to facilitate social justice-oriented community change. These tensions speak to larger questions about the goals of communitycampus engagement (CCE) programs, especially regarding the nature of power, interests, and definitions of community and impact. This paper documents CU Engage's learning process through three illustrative stages: an exploratory community-based project, a qualitative self-study, and a collaboratively generated conceptual framework for public impact. Through this process, CU Engage has begun to develop an approach that applies, extends, and complicates existing frameworks of collective impact and community first. Tensions that arose highlight three imperatives: (1) integration of participatory processes into CCE programs to supplement organizational partnerships with direct community input, (2) attention to power and structural constraints in community-centered work, and (3) creation of conceptual tools that guide collaborative work. The Center for Community-Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) was launched at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014. Prior to this, the university had a number of well-established service-learning programs located in different units across campus; the creation of CU Engage organized them into one administrative and academic unit. The motivating vision was that CU Engage could become more than the sum of its parts; in collaboration with community partners, major impacts could be produced by leveraging existing programs and the broader resources of the university. CU Engage worked toward fulfilling this vision through a deliberate process that involved three separate stages, each utilizing different methodological approaches. First, the center mapped stakeholders, conducted ethnographic research, and held dialogic cafecitos with residents in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project with the goal of understanding the local landscape 54 | CHRISTOPHER WEGEMER, TAFADZWA TIVARINGE, ROUDY HILDRETH, JENNIFER PACHEO, AND MANUELA SIFUENTES and potential partner organizations. Second, CU Engage conducted a formal self-study using semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of existing university programs and affiliated community organizations to assess perceptions of the impacts of partnerships. Third, through iterative and reflexive processes involving staff members, CU Engage developed new practices and created strategies that could increase the effectiveness of its partnerships. The authors of this article combined and synthesized the findings in consultation with relevant community-campus engagement (CCE) literatures and models, drawing heavily from community first (Andrée, 2016; CFICE, 2018), collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011), and community-based participatory research (Wallerstein & Duran, 2017). The purpose of this article is to share tensions faced ...

Navigating the Boundaries of Youth Violence Prevention and Reduction: Reflections on Power in Community Engaged Scholarship

“…Recognising that persistent societal problems require authentic knowledge co-creation (Ramaley 2014;Saltmarsh & Hartley 2011;Wegemer et al 2020), community-engaged scholars have been compelled to grapple with power asymmetries in community-university partnerships. Community-engaged scholars generally work from the assumption that deliberate practices are required to moderate researchers' power vis-a-vis that of the community (Stoecker, Hilgendorf & Tryon 2009;Wallerstein & Duran 2017).…”