Community-university Partnership Research Articles

Shifting Discourse and Practice on Food Banks: Insights from a Community–University Partnership

In the context of an entrenched food bank system, there is broad recognition of the need to move beyond charity-based models of emergency food provision. Drawing on our experiences from a multi-year community–university partnership in the city of Guelph and Wellington County, Canada, we describe the process whereby discourse and practice surrounding emergency food provision shifted over time. We detail the results of two interconnected research projects (one with service providers and one with service users) that contributed to these shifts. In addition, we detail the collaborative process following the completion of the projects, which culminated in the creation of a new organization with a mandate to address some of the challenges highlighted through the research projects. We demonstrate how a community–university partnership can contribute to shifts within discourse and practice surrounding emergency food provision with the intention of enhancing community food security.

The Taming Wicked Problems Framework: A plausible biosocial contribution to ‘ending AIDS by 2030’

In 2014, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) published the Gap Report, which states that a new biosocial response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic is required to reinforce the biomedical strategy – Vision 90:90:90 – which is designed to end AIDS by 2030. This article provides a descriptive account of how a community–university partnership developed and piloted an innovative, transdisciplinary approach to HIV and AIDS management that could represent a nascent biosocial candidate to reinforce the biomedical strategy. The biosocial strategy has been labelled as the Taming Wicked Problems Framework that is influenced by ontological perspectives associated with complexity theory. The article focuses on how the Taming Wicked Problems Framework was developed by co-opting and repurposing management techniques associated with complexity into an action-oriented HIV and AIDS combination intervention. Three years after the pilot began, the Taming Wicked Problems Framework continues to provision the partnership with opportunities to ‘tame’ non-linear, biosocial aspects of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in rural South Africa. However, with the benefit of hindsight, there are some improvements and caveats that are highlighted so that future applications will be more robust. It is suggested that the Taming Wicked Problems Framework could represent one localised biosocial response that could contribute to ending AIDS by 2030.

A success/failure paradox: reflection on a university-community engagement in Australia

ABSTRACTThere has been an increasing interest within the academic literature on the role played by Higher Education Institutions in the social and economic development of their communities. The Australia Government has recently released its National Science and Innovation Agenda (NISA) which is designed to incentivise university-community research partnerships. In this article, the identified lack of Australian university-community engagement will be problematised through the experience of academics who undertook such an engagement in a regional university setting. A completed research project is used as a lens through which institutional factors impacting on collaborative projects between universities and their communities are identified. The difficulties of university-community engagement are unpacked and problematised so that the various forces contributing to the shortage of university-community partnerships can be better identified and understood. The unitary manner in which university-community research is to be reported under NISA is highlighted as a key barrier to regional research partnerships.

Community–University Health Research Partnerships

AbstractIn recent years, there have been positive changes to the health research landscape, with increasing interest amongst community organisations and university investigators in establishing research partnerships and with more funding opportunities for community-engaged work. However, creating a community–university partnership requires new skills, new types of knowledge, and new ways of creating and maintaining relationships. On both sides of the research equation, people are looking for guidance. The discussion here uses our experience to offer concrete tips in plain language for strategies that can be used to build capacity for community–university partnerships for organisations and researchers in pre-partnership and early partnership stages. We comment on debates about epistemology and knowledge production in research and how anthropologists are well positioned to contribute to this process.

2187 The role of community in an evolving community-university pilot award program

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To fulfill the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute’s (Indiana CTSI) Community Health Partnerships’ (CHeP) mission of improving the health of Indiana residents through community-university partnerships, CHeP engaged with community partners to develop and implement a pilot award program for community-based participatory research, the Trailblazer Award (TA). The objective is to describe the engagement processes throughout the pilot program timeline and as the pilot program evolved over the 6-year period since the program started. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: Though a process of engagement with community stakeholders, we assessed the process for each year of the TA, noting what changes occurred and how they occurred. Engagement for the TA process occurred during the following phases: RFA development, review, active project support, dissemination of project results, and project/partnership follow-up. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: During the RFA development phase, we decided to focus the award on health equity for 5 years; and we implemented structural changes to encourage new partnerships in underrepresented and rural areas. During the review phase, we incorporated both community and university reviewers and co-moderators. To increase capacity among our reviewer pool, we offered webinars and repeated opportunities to serve as reviewers. During the project support phase, we added the following: community-based CITI training; opportunities for networking with peer awardee teams; and community and academic co-led sessions on addressing recruitment barriers, grant writing, and dissemination to a community audiences. Through our active engagement of the CHeP Advisory Board, one Board member (from Indiana State Department of Health) leveraged matching funds for the TA, effectively doubling the number of projects supported each year. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: Whereas previous work has reported on engagement during the review process of pilot award applications, we discuss ways to extend engagement to include other aspects of a pilot program both before and after the review process. In our process, several key partners offered insightful changes that have resulted in a more engaged program.

Community engagement in global health education supports equity and advances local priorities: an eight year Ecuador-Canada partnership

Global health education initiatives inconsistently balance trainee growth and benefits to host communities. This report describes a global health elective for medical trainees that focuses on community engagement and participatory research to provide mutually beneficial outcomes for the communities and trainees. An eight-year university-community partnership, the Chilcapamba to Montreal Global Health Elective is a two-month shared decision-making research and clinical observership experience in rural Ecuador for medical trainees at McGill University, Canada. Research topics are set by matching community-identified priorities with skillsets and interests of trainees, taking into consideration local potential impact. Community outcomes included development of a Community Health Worker program, new collaborations with local organizations, community identification of health priorities, and generation of health improvement recommendations. Collaborative academic outputs included multiple bursary awards, conference presentations and published manuscripts. This medical global health elective engages communities using participatory research to prioritise socially responsible and locally beneficial outcomes.

From ecosystem services to Ecological Devices: The CoPED Summer School experience in the Simeto River Valley, Italy

While limits of natural resources and climate change are forcing communities all over the world to redefine relationships with their own living environments, this challenge can be interpreted in several ways, depending on a broad variety of different values and beliefs. Not all communities worldwide share the same understanding of values such as love for humankind, sensitivity for other forms of life on earth, care for the breathable air and drinkable water, and appreciation for the soil we plough and build upon. As a matter of fact, too often these values are threatened by other social values, such as monetary efficiency and economic growth, which push societies in a quite different direction. For instance, the ecosystem service concept, with its emphasis on how humans can better take advantage of natural ecosystems, is an attempt to address the environmental crisis while maintaining a utilitarian and human-centric perspective.This paper argues for the need and shows the possibility for planning researchers to address environmental issues while framing the concept of ecosystem services within a broader value-centered framework. Drawing from Complexity Theory, Deep Ecology and a relational approach to Ecology, this paper proposes the use in planning practice of the concept of Ecological Device that is inclusive of the Ecosystem Service one. An Ecological Device is intended as a project for eco-systemic improvements whose emphasis is not on the maximization of benefits for humans but is on the creation of multispecies and multi-actors functional and emotional relationships (entanglements). In particular, this paper presents one effort to shape Ecological Devices by a long-term, community-university partnership in the Simeto River Valley (Sicily, Italy) in the context of an annual, action-research summer school called CoPED (Community Planning and Ecological Design). The authors, who are also the founders and instructors of the summer school, show the possibilities for ecological devices generated through a highly pragmatic and engaged approach to research to address environmental technical issues as deeply interconnected with social and political dynamics.

Community-University Engagement: Case Study of a Partnership on Coast Salish Territory in British Columbia

In the context of expanding community engagement efforts by universities and growing awareness of the past and current impacts of settler-colonialism in Canada, this study explores one Indigenous-settler, community-university partnership. Building on a framework of community-university engagement and decolonization, this case study explores a partnership between Fraser Valley Aboriginal Children and Family Services Society (Xyolhemeylh) and the Division of Health Care Communication at the University of British Columbia (UBC-DHCC). This partnership, called the “Community as Teacher” program, began in 2006 and engages groups of UBC health professional students in three-day cultural summer camps. This qualitative case study draws on analysis of program documents and interviews with Xyolhemeylh and UBC-DHCC participants. The findings of the study are framed within “Four Rs”—relevance, risk-taking, respect, and relationship-building—which extend existing frameworks of Indigenous community-university engagement (Butin, 2010; Kirkness & Barnhardt, 1991). Committed to a foundation of mutual relevance to their missions, both community and university partners undertook risk-taking, based on their respective contexts, in establishing and investing in the relationship. Respect, expressed as working “in a good way,” likewise formed the basis for interpersonal relationship-building. By outlining the findings in relation to these four themes, this study provides a potential framework for practitioners and researchers in Indigenous-university partnerships

Community-University Partnerships for Social Justice: An Interview with Joan Kuyek

In this section, co-editor of this issue Nancy Van Styvendale interviews Joan Kuyek, an Ontario-based social and environmental justice activist with nearly fifty years of experience as a community organizer and educator. The interview discusses the realities, challenges, and benefits of such community-university partnerships, including the more specific experience of working with faculty and students involved in community service-learning (CSL).

Experiential Learning in Circles of Safety: Reflections on Walls to Bridges and Dewey’s Theory of Experience

This paper discusses a Winnipeg-based community-university partnership structured as a set of interlinked “Circles of Safety” to support criminalized women while incarcerated and after their release. The four Circles include university, community, social co-operatives, and corrections; these circles contain the action research activities we are undertaking to provide greater safety for women transitioning from prison into the community. The motivation for our prison education program, which draws on the American Inside-Out Program and the newer Canadian Walls to Bridges Program, comes from these four directions and is energized by a belief in the human right to education. This paper argues that the success of both American and Canadian programs is explained by an approach to prison education that is complementary to John Dewey’s principles of educative experience, specifically principles based on continuity and interaction. Adapting and extending Dewey, the Circles of Safety model described in this paper maintains the value of experiential learning, which is defined as learning in situations that begin with the experience that the learners already have and subject matter that is within the scope of their ordinary life-experience, leading to their formation of purpose.

Capital, Alienation, and Challenge: How U.S. Mexican Immigrant Students Build Pathways to College and Career Identities.

This article considers how the global "academic pipeline problem" constrains immigrant, low-income, and ethnic minority students' pathways to higher education, and how some students build pathways to college and career identities. After aligning theories of social capital, alienation/belonging, and challenge and their integration in Bridging Multiple Worlds Theory, we summarize six longitudinal studies based on this theory from a 23-year university-community partnership serving low-income, primarily U.S. Mexican immigrant youth. Spanning from childhood to early adulthood, the studies revealed two overarching findings: First, students built pathways to college and career identities while experiencing capital, alienation/belonging, and challenges across their evolving cultural worlds. Second, by "giving back" to families, peers, schools, and communities, students became cultural brokers and later, institutional agents, transforming institutional cultures. Findings highlight the value of integrating interdisciplinary theories, research evidence, and educational systems serving diverse communities to open individual pathways and academic pipelines in multicultural societies.

‘Pushing the outdoor play agenda’: exploring how practitioners conceptualise and operationalise nature play in a Canadian context

The purpose of this paper was to examine how practitioners think about and implement nature play in a Canadian context. Using data from interviews with 21 practitioners, we examined two overarching research questions: (1) How do practitioners conceptualise (think about and discuss) nature play? and (2) How do practitioners operationalise (i.e. plan and implement) nature play? The desire to examine how practitioners implement nature play opportunities derived directly from two practitioners who were working in the recreation sector at the time of the study. Their interest in understanding how nature play opportunities were being implemented was due to the increased focus on nature play in Canadian documents. To reflect this ‘practical’ interest, we developed a community-university partnership. We chose interpretive description (ID) as the method to generate applied, contextual knowledge. The findings revealed that despite the nostalgia that surrounds child-led, unstructured nature play, as well as an ever-growing movement to increase opportunities for freely chosen, self-directed nature play, practitioners more commonly supported structured, adult-led activities focused on skill development and risk avoidance. Highlighting a disjuncture between the values and assumptions currently guiding play research, policy, and practice, the discussion aims to destabilise the notion that play must be linked to measurable outcomes. Instead, we propose that the provision of nature play should be judged on whether it actually enables children to spontaneously and creatively play in natural settings, and call on professionals to acknowledge and challenge several opposing values and assumptions that appear to be encroaching on children’s nature play.

Learning in the third age: drawing wisdom from reflective stories in community art education

ABSTRACTThird-age learning is a subset of lifelong learning enjoyed by individuals in the stage of retirement, and often 60 years or older. Community art education (CAE) for learners in the third age commonly occurs in recreational settings, nursing homes, museums, libraries and places of worship. In addition to these informal learning sites, there are CAE programmes developed within postsecondary institutions that provide opportunities for artistic inquiry and instruction. In the following article, we share a case study involving third-age learners conducted in the 2014/2015 academic year. We begin by briefly describing an innovative CAE programme at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and then discuss a specific initiative undertaken in cooperation with the University’s alumnae extended education programme. Our study explored large questions about motivation, curriculum and pedagogy, but also focused on major themes in lifelong learning and the individual stories of the participants. One participant, named Reto, is featured in this article, and with his collaboration we offer a co-constructed narrative alongside an analysis of themes including personal development and social inclusion. The insights gained through our study have potential broad applicability for the general area of university–community partnerships and for CAE for the growing third-age population.

Aging & community health: a university–community partnership project

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to discuss how university–community partnerships can be utilized to provide affordable and accessible health care for the elderly at community health clinics. A review of community health clinics, usage data from 2013 to 2014 by a sample of aging individuals will be described along with faculty perspectives about the usefulness of the university partnership and suggestions for improving future partnerships. Recommendations for future university–community partnerships are discussed.

Spaces In-between: Text Poems from Community Practice and Research

A commitment on the part of the academy to address social issues has increased over the past three decades, resulting in service learning courses, volunteering opportunities, and community-university partnerships. Faculty, staff, and community practitioners collaborating to lead these efforts often carry enormous responsibility and answer to often competing interests of students, community members, and universities. Using the experience of an scholar/artist/teacher in a university-community partnership founded by the first author in a racially polarized town, this article explores the potential of arts-based methods, specifically poetry and collage, to mitigate the consequence of this work. The format is a dialogue between two engaged teacher/researcher/practitioners and friends to clarify the hidden experience of the researcher with narrative truth to articulate and share not only experiences, but also lessons learned as a contribution to our fellow teacher/researcher/practitioners.

Toward Optimizing Global Learning Opportunities for US Physical Therapy Students: A Description of Current Practices and Initial Recommendations

Purpose. To examine and describe the structure, curricular objectives, and outcome measurement practices of faculty developing and providing international opportunities in physical therapy education programs and to provide guidance and initial recommendations for faculty. Background. Physical therapy educational programs are adding international opportunities as a way to address the increasingly global nature of the profession. Guidelines to enhance practice, optimize the experience, and provide structure for managing risk are warranted. Methods. A researcher-developed survey was distributed to 216 physical therapy education programs and professional listservs. Respondents from 56 programs (26%) returned the survey. Data were analyzed descriptively. Results. Most respondents cited global understanding as critical to the physical therapy profession, and the reason for involving students in global learning opportunities. Knowledge of the host site, sustainability, and potential strength of partnership were cited as the most important factors when choosing an international community partner. Risk management efforts included supplemental insurance, availability of emergency contact information, safe transportation and housing plans, and plans for adverse occurrences. Conclusion. This study supplements previous literature in designing international student experiences. Activities addressing clear purposes and expected outcomes for all participants, including the community partner, and the university-community partnership before, during, and after the experience are essential.

Enhancing the Quality and Relevance of Teaching and Learning through University Community Partnerships: the Case of Art at Makerere University

A key gap in writing on the University Community Partnership (UCP) approach to higher education delivery relates to the fact that, in general, the fruitfulness of the approach is taken for granted. Furthermore, the usefulness of UCPs is tacitly expected to be two-way with universities helping their communities to address some of their challenges and the experience of partnership helping the universities to enhance their relevance. However, this paper reports the findings of a study that presents a different picture. Investigating the implementation and impact of the UCP approach to the delivery of the Bachelor of Industrial and Fine Arts program at Makerere University’s Margaret Trowel School of Industrial and Fine Arts (MTSIFA), the study found that contrary to the widely held view that the approach to higher education delivery results into universities helping their communities to deal with some of their challenges, at the MTSIFA, the approach has not resulted into service learning. However, it has helped the school to close critical gaps in studio support for its students, thereby enhancing the quality and relevance of teaching and learning. Therefore, using this case, the study argues that UCPs present a panacea to some of the resources constraints inherent to massification that many HEIs in Africa are grappling with.

Sharing for the Greater Good: A High School and Community College Partnership to Cultivate Information Literacy in a Rural Community

“Mind the gap” is a phrase heard umpteen times when riding the London Underground subway system. That same advice was heeded in eastern Oregon, where it prompted an Information Literacy (IL) collaboration project between a high school and a community college librarian who forged a “dynamic duo” in an attempt to bridge noticeable gaps in the information literacy skills of their students.

Nursing Case Management Strategies for Adults with Serious Mental Illness Seeking Dental Services

ABSTRACTA university-community partnership initiated a dental screening and nursing case management program for Medicaid-insured adults with serious mental illness (SMI). Forty-three adults with SMI participated in dental screening; 72% participated in case management. Per client, an average of six case management contacts was made. After 6 months, 87% (27/31) had attended at least one dental appointment, with a 13% no-show rate; 8 completed treatment, 4 had ongoing treatment, 12 had interrupted care, and 3 were lost to follow-up. Adults with SMI experienced high unmet dental needs; nursing case management strategies aided clients to initiate and complete dental care.

A University-Community Partnership in Teacher Education From the Perspectives of Community-Based Teacher Educators

This article examines the experiences of a group of nine community-based mentors of teacher candidates who partnered for several years through a local, community-based organization with the graduate elementary and secondary teacher education programs at a research university in the Pacific Northwest. Following a brief discussion of the history of partnerships between teacher education programs and local communities, we report the findings of a study of the perspectives of these community mentors on their work with teacher candidates and university teacher educators.