Community Partners as Service-Learning Co-Leaders

Nisse Goldberg,Laura C Atkins

doi:10.33596/coll.50

Abstract

Community partners contribute to fostering and sustaining service-learning partnerships. In the service-learning pedagogy, their leadership roles, although identified as partners and co-collaborator, have been under-investigated in the context of their perceptions and contributions. To contribute to the understanding of partners’ collaborative involvement, and leadership strategies, we interviewed four partners from two non-profit agencies that had collaborated on projects with a small liberal arts university for more than six years. The partners described their motivations for committing to the partnership, discussed the perceived benefits of the collaboration, and explained the strategies they implemented to address partnership challenges. We demonstrate that in service-learning collaborations, active community partners exhibit leadership competencies of knowing, being and doing, and they display the five components of leadership success outlined in the Relational Leadership Model: supporting purpose, sustaining process, ensuring ethics, maintaining inclusiveness, and creating empowerment.

Highlights

This study investigated the role of the community partner to understand how leadership principles intersect with their motivations and views of risks and challenges associated with service-learning collaboration
We suggest that applying the Relational Leadership Model framework illuminates the partners’ leadership knowledge, commitment, attitudes, and skills, and in doing so provides a new lens for understanding and enhancing the partners’ legitimate place as co-leaders in the collaboration

Summary

Introduction

This study investigated the role of the community partner to understand how leadership principles intersect with their motivations and views of risks and challenges associated with service-learning collaboration. Partners are often motivated by capacity building opportunities for their organizations (Bell & Carlson, 2009; Hogan, Tynan, Covill, Kilmer, & Cook, 2017) that enable reallocation of limited resources to other projects (Blouin & Perry, 2009). Extending these ideas, Bell and Carlson (2009) identified four additional motivations for partners to engage in service-learning projects: to teach students about their core mission and expose them to careers in the nonprofit sector; to cultivate future employees, volunteers, and donors; to assist with projects that require unique skills and knowledge; and to strengthen relationships with colleges and universities

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