University-community Collaboration Research Articles

University-Community Partnerships: A Local Planning Co-Production Study on Calabarzon, Philippines

University-community partnerships provide opportunities for collaborations and meaningful engagement with community partners, in order to promote sustainable community development. To date, studies on university-community partnerships have largely neglected partnership potential and readiness prior to partnership formation. These factors enable expectations and targets to be negotiated and potential problems to be anticipated, prior to any formal collaboration. Hence, this study investigates the optimal preconditions—including environment, resources, and motivation—to facilitate successful university-community collaboration for local urban planning. Specifically, a sample of local government units (LGUs) and universities in the Calabarzon region of the Philippines were interviewed and observed to determine their needs and access to planning resources at universities, as well as factors that would ensure sustained partnerships. The results show that there is a need for university-community partnerships in local planning, since LGUs have limited technical capacity in preparing comprehensive land use plans, particularly with respect to data analysis, technical writing, project development, and hazard mapping. Conversely, LGUs have more financial resources than universities. Local universities were determined to be uniquely suited to meet the technical and human resource needs of LGUs. Importantly, though, previous partnership experience was found to dramatically influence both parties’ decisions regarding whether or not to pursue a partnership. Accordingly, there is a need to temper the desires and expectations of partner organizations, and lay down the foundations of sustainable university-community partnership prior to partnership formation. Toward this end, policies that bolster partnership institutionalization, funding, and systematic monitoring and evaluation systems can enhance the utility of such partnerships moving forward.

A conceptual model for establishing collaborative partnerships between universities and Native American communities.

Collaborative partnerships are increasingly recognised as valuable and essential tools for improving community health. To present the process used to establish a collaboration between a university and a community, including a description of the conceptual model that provided guidance for one such project. While numerous studies explore the potential benefits of such efforts, few have addressed how to initiate partnerships. The initiation phase and formative work required are arguably the most crucial step, as they become the foundation on which all future efforts are built and through which sustainability is achieved. These formative steps are essential when working with Native American communities, which experience severe health disparities, but for which limited initiatives are available for community health interventions. The approach used in this project can guide the establishment of a university-community collaboration, from initiation to evaluation.

Collaboration with Urban Community Stakeholders: Refining Paraprofessional‐led Services to Promote Positive Parenting

This paper describes the process of a community-academic partnership to navigate implementation challenges for a school-based service model led by paraprofessionals to promote positive parenting in high poverty urban communities. We describe the process by which we (a) identified implementation challenges, (b) sustained a university-community collaboration to redesign the paraprofessional service model, and (c) assessed the feasibility of the new model involving four social service agencies in 16 schools with over 600 families. The structure and process of the collaboration and refinement are described with attention to who was best positioned to engage in the collaboration and how the partnership worked to balance scientific rigor with responsiveness to paraprofessional workforce strengths. Feasibility data indicated that the revised model was successfully implemented by paraprofessional staff; 92.2% of possible staff monthly reports were completed and discussion of key goals was incorporated into 94.2% of interactions. Continual monitoring provided critical feedback from stakeholders as we drew on and interpreted these various sources of information to build and refine the service model. We suggest that these processes are critical steps to bridge the research-to-practice gap, by promoting practices that are aligned with the needs of children and families, and the staff who serve them.

Measuring a university-community collaboration using social network analysis

Measuring a university-community collaboration using social network analysis

Towards a Framework for Building Community-University Resilience Research Agendas

In this paper, we ask: “How can we scope multiyear, multiscalar community–university collaborations that draw on the university’s diverse resources and contribute to community resilience”? We approach this question by presenting the development and application of the Advancing Collaborative Transdisciplinary Scholarship Framework (the “ACTS Framework”) which we argue has been successful at helping us better understand, foster, and work towards communities’ resilience. The ACTS Framework, informed by our collective expertise in critical community-engaged scholarship (CES) and community resilience, contributes to knowledge and practice in critical CES, in particular by providing guidance for scoping and sustaining complex community–university collaborations. The structured yet iterative process involved in the framework development and application affirms and extends the work of other scholars interested in the links between CES and community resilience. Our contributions offer two other important practices—centring community concerns and facilitating cross-project collaboration—to critical CES knowledge and practice and highlight two promising practices of linking structures that facilitate community–university collaborations—specifically, a well-organized institutional memory and holding and bridging relationships.

California Gold Country’s Digital Heritage: Innovations in Community Engaged Research and Training

This article presents the results of the Historic Coulterville Digital Preservation Project, an important digital humanities research collaboration which started in the Fall 2015 between the University of California Merced Resource Center for Community Engaged Scholarship, the John Muir Geotourism Center, the Northern Mariposa County History Center, and faculty and graduate students of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Graduate Program at UC Merced. Dictated by the needs and goals of the community members of the gold rush town of Coulterville, in the Sierra Foothills of California, who are invested in the preservation of their cultural heritage, the project focused on digital historic preservation in four areas of focus: i) the archives and photographs at the Northern Mariposa County History Center, ii) the Coulterville cemeteries, iii) oral histories of Coulterville, and iv) the digital documentation of Coulterville Main Street Historic District. Combined, these four areas of focus presented a breadth of subject matter through which to test various digital preservation methods in a real-world scenario as well as provided both the students and the community members the opportunity to study subjects in greater depth that were of mutual interest. The project provides an example of the potential for community-university research collaborations to benefit local communities while also providing training and networking opportunities for students, and new scholarship case studies for the scholars.

Characteristics of American Indian Female Caregivers on a Southwest American Indian Reservation.

American Indian (AI) caregivers have been excluded from national survey efforts. Drawing from a 2012 survey administered on the Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona, 20% of adults are caregivers. More information is needed to guide program development tailored to Hopi needs. In a University-Community collaboration, a 58 question survey was administered to self-identified caregivers of a family member about amount and type of care provided, difficulties, caregiver health, and desired support services. Characteristics of caregivers and their experiences were described. Forty-four (44) female Hopi caregivers were interviewed from June-October 2017, mean age of 59years (± 12.6) with mean 5.5year (± 4.4) history of providing care. Over 84% provided care to either a parent or grandparent. Most caregivers provided transportation (93.2%), housework (93.2%), and medical related care (72.7%). Caregivers stated they had difficulties with not having enough time for family and or friends (88.6%), financial burdens (75.0%), and not having enough time for themselves (61.4%). The most frequently identified difficulty was stress (45.5%). Caregivers would like additional services, with 76.7% asking for training. Over 77% would not consider placing their relative in an assisted living facility. Compared to national data, Hopi female caregivers are older, provide more care hours/week, more caregiving duties, and for a longer number of years. Stress is the most reported difficulty, although lower than national levels. As caregivers are resistant to placing the recipient in assisted living, educational efforts should focus on training caregivers to assist the care recipient and decreasing caregiver stress.

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from Feeding Laramie Valley

First paragraphs: Having Feeding Laramie Valley become part of the Food Dignity research project was a unique oppor­tunity to contribute to a new body of knowledge associated with food systems work—to have the voices of the people of our community and our organization be heard. Not just heard, but taken seriously and emulated. And, because we would be part of a national collective of other communities, with the added benefit of being partnered with several highly regarded universities, our voices would take on a new identity—one of expertise in helping to define best practices for addressing local food insecurity. That sounds good. Solid, confident, visionary. Small-town nonprofit does good, benefits from networking and collaboration. It’s even kind of true. But as is typical for a fledgling grassroots organization bent on accomplishing frontline social reform, the way we might publicly characterize our efforts doesn’t always fall in line with the full reality of how we actually experience them. In the course of scrambling for support and recognition, com­mu­nity-based organizations learn what language to use, what partnerships to foster, and most impor­tantly what narratives to put forth in representing our missions. It’s how we crack open doors to institutions and power brokers capable of backing us—and legitimizing our work. It’s how we man­age to gradually then steadily tap into streams of funding that will not only grow, but become con­sistent and sustainable. Refining the presentation of our activism is how we survive.... See the press release for this article.

Introduction to the Food Dignity Values Statement

First paragraph: The Food Dignity Values Statement was drafted at a national project meeting in May 2014, three years into the community-university collaboration that was the Food Dignity action research project. The project brought together academics from four universities and community leaders from five community-based organizations working to streng­then their local food systems. The goal was an action-research collaboration to support and learn from and with these community organizations about how to build equitable, sustainable, and just local food systems: “Food dignity as a premise and Food Dignity as a research project are both steeped in recognizing that community people hold the knowledge and ability to ask the right questions and find the right answers to their own needs” (Porter, Herrera, Marshall, & Woodsum, 2014, p. 124)....

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from Dig Deep Farms

First paragraphs: We found a way to grow carrots, to look people straight in the eye and say, “That’s good community policing.” It was an unusual process that ultimately led the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in San Lean­dro, California to become one of the five commu­nity sites across the country participating in the Food Dignity Research project. Signing on to that project opened a new door for us to execute the vision we had for our work in community food production as part of community policing. The most beneficial aspect of it was to be with people who were like-minded and didn’t think we were crazy.  In 2009, elements of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office and the leadership of the Alameda County Deputy Sheriffs’ Activities League, Inc., (a nonprofit corporation established to leverage crime prevention efforts of the sheriff’s office), came to a conclusion: poverty, in all its various aspects, is a root driver of crime. Therefore, to credibly address crime in the poor, underserved communities of Ashland and Cherryland, we had to first address the issue of poverty.... See the press release for this article.

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from Blue Mountain Associates

First paragraphs: If I can do something to help my people, and to help other people understand Indian people better and to appreciate our culture, then I have done what my father asked me to do in 1969 when he asked me to come home to the reservation and help my people in whatever way I could. In the last 50 or 60 years of my life, with the assistance of other people, I have been able to make some changes. When my son, Jim Sutter, and I came back home to Wind River Indian Reservation, we knew our people needed health and human services, not just more clinical services. We thought we espe­cially needed to help people with food and nutri­tion. More generally, I thought that other people—researchers, academics, historians—need a better picture of what we Indians are all about in ways that neither glorify us nor demean us. Too often we are portrayed only on one side or the other.... See the press release for this article.

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from the Whole Community Project

First paragraph: When asked to tell the story of how and why I was invited and decided to join the Food Dignity research project, I found myself traveling back over a long road full of unexpected turns, bumps, discoveries, and delights. And as I began to reflect over the five years spent implementing that project in Tompkins County, New York, I was once more awed by the countless stories to be told and knew that, at best, I could offer merely a glimpse of the wonderful and challenging experi­ences that were ultimately instrumental in learning valuable lessons for cultivating sustainable food systems. In sharing the process and results of being part of such a unique opportunity, I hope to both inspire and challenge readers to explore the possi­bilities that can exist when the sustainability of our food systems places a high value on everyone experiencing “dignity” in their relationship to food—whether as a consumer, entrepreneur, farmer, composter, or activist.... See the press release for this article.

Entering into a Community-University Collaboration: Reflections from East New York Farms!

First paragraphs: I worked as the director of the East New York Farms! (ENYF) Project for seven years, from 2006 to 2013. As media interest and general excite­ment about sustainable food grew during that time, assessing potential opportunities for “partnership” and participation in the broader world of sustain­able food work (that is, outside East New York) became an increasingly important part of my role and an increasingly significant way in which we defined what we were, and were not, about. The route to participation by ENYF in Food Dignity started with Megan Gregory, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, inviting our then farm manager, David Vigil, and some of our youth leaders to speak at a conference in Ithaca, New York. I remember David coming back and telling me that “they treated us like royalty,” as he described being picked up in Ithaca, taken out to dinner at the world-famous Moosewood Restaurant, and generally welcomed and appreciated by Megan and the other hosts at Cornell. We accepted the invita­tion to this conference largely because of the leadership-development opportunity it afforded to our youth members to share their experiences in food justice work and hear from others. Had it been an invitation for just our staff to speak, we may not have felt that we could justify committing the time to this; invitations to food-related con­ferences were frequent, but we always prioritized our work on the ground.... See the press release for this article.

Critical Geography as Theory and Praxis: The Community–University Imperative for Social Change

ABSTRACTUniversity administrators, faculty, and staff must engage in newly fashioned community-university collaborations that better address systemic inequities and injustice during this complex time in U.S. history. Graduate students are tomorrow’s higher education leaders with the potential to fund, design, and facilitate curricular and cocurricular opportunities, including community engagement and service-learning initiatives. As such, we analyzed graduate students’ text and talk through critical discourse analysis and identified discourses—and pedagogical possibilities—that facilitated more socially just community-university collaborations. What emerged were 3 specific discourses of community-university collaboration that graduate students use: (a) discourses of volunteerism and service, (b) discourses of student outcomes, and (c) discourses of systems of power, where the first 2 discourses confirmed existing literature. Uniquely, some students shifted discourses over time. In addition, the 3rd discourse of systems of power reflected an expressed vision for social justice and included concepts of critical geography. In sum, a critical analysis of space emerged as a useful tool for building and sustaining social justice-oriented talk, understandings, and practices of community-university engagement. The current study advances new understandings about critical geography as a theoretical approach and analytical tool for community-university engagement and service learning.

Measuring a university-community collaboration using social network analysis

One of the roles of a modern university is to engage with the education community as a co-creator of society's collective knowledge. Co-creation, however, is known to be a complex task that relies on collaboration across a network of participants. This paper shows how social network analysis was used to chart, retrospectively, the development of a knowledge co-creation network established through collaboration between educators, scientists and secondary school teachers. The analysis suggests that such measurements may be useful in establishment and sustainability of a well-connected collaborative project network. In the case of this particular project, the analysis suggests ways in which the project could have been optimised through consideration of progression and effectiveness measures. A surprising result was that pre-service teacher in initial teacher education programs may serve as an effective way to sustain project outcomes. Potential application of this type of analysis is discussed as a way of ensuring effective progress in university-community engagement projects.

Welcome to the inaugural issue of Collaborations: A Journal of Community-based Research and Practice

This is an introduction to the inaugural issue of Collaborations: A Journal of Community-based Research and Practice. Collaborations is a free, open access, online journal, sponsored by the University of Miami and Rutgers University. We’ve created this journal to be a home for sharing research, practice, and learning emanating from community-university collaborations.

PROMOTING HEALTHY AGING IN DIVERSE OLDER COMMUNITIES THROUGH ACADEMIC-COMMUNITY RESEARCH

AbstractAs global aging brings increased diversity in race/ethnicity, language and culture, ability, sexual orientation, gender identity, and access to economic and other resources, supporting the health and well-being of older adults and their communities is complicated by cultural and geographic diversity, and growing structural inequities. Community-based scholarship plays an essential role in understanding and addressing the needs that emerge from disparities and intersectionalities that shape the lives of older adults in multicultural communities. This symposium highlights innovative research and describes the challenges and rewards of academic-community relations that build knowledge and promote healthy aging through community-based inquiry. First, we present a study exploring long-term and advanced care planning among multicultural members of an urban LGBTQ senior center. Second, preliminary findings are shared from a community-based initiative to address knowledge and service-utilization gaps regarding Alzheimer’s disease among urban Latino elders. Third, we describe a university-community collaboration using social network analysis to improve provider knowledge and support for caregivers of individuals with dementia. Fourth, results are shared from a study of intergenerational transmission of cultural identity among older Pacific Islanders in Hawai’i. Finally, we present an ethnographic study of academic-community relationships in a rural U.S. college town, and perceptions of multiple stakeholders who influence the aging experience in their community. Through a variety of methods, these studies share a commitment to community-based research that aims to support collaboration, empower communities, and ultimately transform practice and policy to better meet the diverse needs of urban and rural older adults around the globe.

Leveraging 3D Technology for Students with Autism: An innovative university-community collaboration for skill development and vocational exploration

This article describes a university-community collaboration in which an inter-professional team partnered to provide students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) a paid job opportunity to apply 3D modelling skills for a local construction company. Providing meaningful vocational opportunities to improve the transition to adulthood for individuals with ASD is imperative, as individuals with ASD have unemployment rates that are some of the highest of all disabilities. This novel evidence-supported educational program was designed to develop 3D technology skills, explore vocational careers and promote social engagement through shared interests for transition-age youth with ASD. Both parents and students reported many successful outcomes, including increase in student self-confidence, social and technology skill development and the opportunity for vocational exploration by these young people. Implications of the case study are reported in relation to university-community partnerships and the critical role of community collaboration in addressing the high rates of unemployment in individuals with autism.

Management Education for Sustainable Development: Integrating Ecology and Community Values in Social Impact Practicums

This study explores a management education model to help integrate sustainable development ideas into university curricula and programs. This pedagogical model emphasizes a community-based approach along with other proven methods for university-community collaborations and course-based social impact analysis. The Laudato Si’ encyclical’s notion of integral ecology, along with the need to create community-benefit academic programs, inspired the establishment of a partnership between the University of San Francisco’s Master of Nonprofit Administration program and the Foundation for Sustainability Development. This partnership experience expanded into development practicum courses and solidified into strategies for integrating experiential learning and organizational development through community-based analysis. The graduate level pedagogical models discussed here are relevant to other academic institutions and programs who would like to educate students with a community-centered approach.

Finding, Serving, and Housing the Homeless: Using Collaborative Research to Prepare Social Work Students for Research and Practice

ABSTRACTSocial work plays a key role in engaging with clients and communities directly affected by housing insecurity and homelessness, and advocating for the right to safe and affordable housing. This article describes methodologies of the Point-in-Time Count and Homeless Management Information Systems and proposes strategies for integrating additional content around homelessness into the social work curriculum in research courses and beyond. This integration can meet student needs regarding experiential research, as well as agency and community needs for effective collection and use of data. A case example and proposed best practices describe opportunities for university–community collaborations in homelessness research.