90 Minute Sessions

Confirmed Sessions

The Battle between "Helping" and "Serving": Creating Learning Environments that Model Reciprocity
Presenter: Rosangela Boyd

Utilizing Rachel Remen's Helping, Fixing or Serving paradigm this interactive and reflective presentation will facilitate a discussion on how to promote meaningful learning and service outcomes while forging reciprocal campus-community partnerships. With the assumption that community engaged partnerships must challenge students' notions of helping and fixing to prepare them to emerge as leaders for social change, the session will explore the roles of faculty, supporting staff and community partners in creating a learning environment that fosters equality and reciprocity in relationships, instills the desire to move beyond quick-fixes into understanding the root causes of social issues, and encourages continued commitment to social change. Participants will work collaboratively to examine challenges and opportunities inherent in promoting this learning paradigm shift throughout the different phases of partnership building and sustainability.

Building Capacity for Partnership Assessment and Improvement: A Visual Approach
Presenters: Mary F. Price, Starla Officer

Building the capacity of individuals to critically evaluate the quality of relationships embedded in collaborative projects is vital to improving outcomes for those involved in and affected by partnership activities. Drawing from research focused on expanding the conceptual model of partnerships and measuring attributes of partnership relationships, this session will engage participants in an interactive reflection activity in which individuals graphically model relationships contributing to a given collaboration. The resulting graphic model will reveal implicit assumptions, untapped or underdeveloped resources, and asymmetries of communication between and among individuals/groups. To date, this method has been used with faculty engaged in improving service learning partnerships; however it can be used with any constituency. Session facilitators will also present strategies for using this method across multiple stakeholders, for program evaluation, and/or research purposes.

The CBR Fellows Program: Enhancing Student and Community Outcomes
Presenters: Anna Sims Bartel, Georgia Nigro

With funding from a National CBR Networking Initiative Innovation Subgrant, Bates College's Harward Center for Community Partnerships created a co-curricular CBR Fellows Program that empowers undergraduate students to learn with and across boundaries of discipline and purpose: community, student, staff, and faculty partners collaborate on projects of appropriate scale that meet community needs, creating CBR that is more empowering and responsive than many course-based models. Nearly all Fellows' projects grow out of long-term engagement with their community partners, so mutual trust grounds their collaboration. And as the model works with small teams, community partners are vital co-teachers whose concerns are co-equal.  The program uses at least three of the "Five High-Impact Practices" from AACU's 2010 publication, offering a new model for rigorous CBR with significant community voice and impact. Community partners have expressed interest in their own parallel Fellows program in the future.

A Collaborative Partnership Response to a City Need-CHEF (Creating Health Education through Food)
Presenters: Brenda Pipitone, Joe Stapleton

CHEF not only demonstrates successful on-the-ground application strategies for theoretical partnership frameworks, it provides a highly relevant and relatable case study of the North American campus-community landscape today. Communities across the continent are ripe with opportunities to develop impactful solutions by uniting core competencies and building shared capacity. CHEF tells the story of how education, health, government, and social service organizations tackled health and poverty issues in Toronto. It exemplifies both common and basic tenets of social partnership theory, and the three interactive and cyclical concurrent processes involved in social partnership development. This presentation explores models, mutual benefits, and the unique art of community partner ‘brokering'. Our goal is to spur dialogue, research and adaptation of best practices related to the role post-secondary education institutions can play in brokering impactful and lasting community partnerships.

Devising an Assessment Strategy of Civic Engagement Activities at Anchor Institutions
Presenters: Marcine Pickron-Davis, Steven Kauffman

Anchor institutions are defined as stakeholders that can rethink their range of resources to contribute more directly to the improvement of their communities, cities, and regions (Toolkit for Anchor Institutions, March 2008). This presentation and discussion will introduce participants to a civic engagement assessment tool and strategy developed at Widener University that will enable our institution to rethink allocation of internal and external resources. This civic engagement assessment tool will provide data to more closely examine the university's role in the community, to explore strengths and areas for improvement, and to pose questions and seek answers on how to contribute to neighborhood sustainability. This session will help attendees identify meaningful local community and economic impact at their respective institutions. The session will guide participants through a series of exercises and discussions about issues that must be addressed for an effective assessment.

Engaged Knowledge Citizens: Exploring the Aspirations and Decisions of Graduate Students, Early Career Scholars, and Practitioners
Presenter: Timothy Eatman

The professoriate of American higher education is in the midst of a significant and multidimensional demographic shift. At the same time we are witnessing the prevalence of important sustained conversations about re-conceptualizing knowledge creation and implications for faculty roles and rewards. In this context understanding the needs of emerging scholars and practitioners committed to publicly engaged scholarship is an essential element of responding to transnational economic and social concerns. Situated at the intersection of academic mission and academic practice these understandings are relevant to the development of graduate programs, faculty and staff hiring and the nurturance of a climate within the academy that acknowledges the critical importance of developing community partnerships with integrity.

Five Points of Partnership: A Campus and Community Partnership Approach to Building Healthier Co
Presenters: Leah Ashwill, Terry Shoemaker, Courte Voorhees, Nadia DeLeon

Five Points of Partnership workshop will prepare participants to effectively participate in creating healthier communities and overcoming complex societal problems that require collaborative solutions. Participants will discuss what makes healthy communities, examine the decline in civic participation, define individual roles in active citizenship, engage in a five-step process of developing effective partnerships, discuss opportunities for incorporating engaged teaching, research and service into partnership activities, and process next steps and opportunities to engage respective campuses and communities in partnership endeavors. Five Points of Partnership and WKU's Campus & Community Network provide replicable opportunities for engaged scholarship activities such as service-learning and community-based research. This session will provide steps in developing an applied learning experience aimed at building capacity for democratic engagement.

Magical Thinking's Importance in Trust Building in Impoverished Communities
Presenter: Ruth (Toni) Pickard

This multimedia presentation will share stories from residents in the most ethnically diverse, urban neighborhood in Kansas that demonstrate the fragility of community-campus relationships during the "courtship" period when trust is being tested. Using clips from video-taped interviews of partners whose willingness to suspend suspicion of one another's credibility ultimately led to a vibrant 13-year partnership which significantly enriched both groups. Not only did community resources develop where none had previously existed, but the resulting organization became a popular host for a wide range of academic experiences. Commitment to CBPR framed the original initiative but more importantly, the lessons learned from thousands of partner encounters allowed us to access depths of understanding about such relationships that are rarely found in the literature. Using guided imaginary interviews, participants will learn the value of magical thinking's role.

Six Conversations that Transform Partnerships by Building Individual Ownership and Commitment
Presenters: Gail Hilleke, Margaret Rahn

If we continue to have the same conversations we have always had, we often reach an impasse in our partnerships or find ourselves working against each other in our efforts to move our communities forward. In this experiential workshop, participants will practice Six Conversations that will give them tools to create a future that is distinct from the past, bringing of reconciliation to the community. This session is based on the work of Peter Block, an organization development expert who developed the six conversations after years of consulting with organizations and not seeing lasting change. The methodology is simple and the impact is lasting. The work is based on creating a future where accountability is chosen, ownership is co-created and individuals are committed to the success of their community with no promise of personal rewards. Participants will understand how to take these simple techniques and use them to transform their own community, organization and life!

Social Solidarity and the Assessment of University-Community Partnerships in International Settings
Presenters: Mark Falbo, Heather Burk

Creating and sustaining international "partnerships" pose unique challenges. Based on the Dutch sociologist, Aafke Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift (2005), the presenters offer a social solidarity rubric to assess progress towards transformative partnerships in international settings. Using such an tool can assist partners to assess progress towards a robust relationship by clarifying operational assumptions and making benefits explicit. The purpose of the social solidarity rubric is to provide a framework to assist US based higher education institutions in institutionalization partnerships in international community-based settings, by focusing on latent factors like trust, power, sustainability, and reciprocity. Participants may find this discussion and rubric useful in framing critical issues related to international university-community partnerships, or as part of a continuous improvement planning for emerging and developed partnerships in international contexts.

Strengthening Partnerships through Written Agreements
Presenter: Carole Beere

This very practical, "how to" session will present specific information on developing successful partnerships that adhere to standards of best practices. The session is organized around the idea of a signed, written agreement negotiated by all of the partners. Experience suggests that a signed agreement leads to a more focused and productive partnership than would otherwise exist. It ensures that the partners have a shared understanding of the important issues prior to undertaking the work of the partnership, and in so doing, avoids many of the problems that might otherwise develop. Both the process of reaching agreement and the final document are important. During the session, the presenters and the participants will develop the elements of a written agreement and explore the process, challenges, and advantages of developing an agreement. The information in this session will be useful regardless of the setting, the partnership, or the experience level of the partners.

Student Leaders Strengthening Community Partnerships and Enhancing Student Learning
Presenters: Andrea Wise, Hilary Douglas, Jasmine Giblin

Service-learning is designed to be beneficial to community organizations, but with many experiencing budget cuts and staff layoffs, organizations have less time to oversee service-learners. University of San Francisco assists community organizations to coordinate service-learning through the Advocates for Community Engagement (ACE) program, which places student leaders on-site at organizations. ACEs function as student and faculty recruiters, liaisons, project managers, logistical administrators, and reflection leaders to enhance service-learning experiences and strengthen relationships among stakeholders. As peer leaders, ACEs provide resources, guidance, and reflection to deepen student learning. In this session, a community partner, ACE, and service-learning administrator will discuss the ACE goals and outcomes, training curriculum, and practical application. Participants will brainstorm, discuss, and plan a similar student leadership program/role for their own use.

Student Learning about Health and Communication from the Interdisciplinary Puppetry Partnership
Presenters: Rebecca Dumlao, Kelly Jarrell, Leslie Moore

Diabetes affects 10.2% of people across Eastern North Carolina. This problem develops from poor eating patterns learned early in life, so our initiative shares healthy eating messages with children using child-sized puppets. Honors undergraduates were trained as puppeteers by theatre/performance faculty and internationally-known puppetry experts. Students were coached about working collaboratively in the community. Relevant topics from medicine, nutrition, family studies and communication were shared by faculty and practitioners. Students carried out a series of puppet shows at local afterschool programs. This session details themes and levels of critical thinking identified in written reflections. The session explores ways interdisciplinary partnerships can transform student understanding about a societal problem and encourage action using puppetry. Implications for future research and other puppetry initiatives developed collaboratively with community organizations will be shared.

Transforming Partnerships for Change
Presenters: Corey Dolgon, Barbara Holland

Literature positions reciprocity as a fundamental aspect of partnerships but universities and communities continue to grapple with the nature of partner relationships. At the same time that we create, maintain, and nurture our campus-community partnerships, our ultimate goals of mutual transformation and capacity building require we also critique the nature of these partnerships in two fundamental ways. First we have to deconstruct the powerful structural and institutional forces that make such partnerships difficult in the first place. We need to examine the patterns and traditions of politics and elite interests that separate most colleges and universities from the communities that surround them? And we need to ask, "How can we work across both academic and community organizations to break down historic barriers and build new skills and values that facilitate reciprocity?" Second, we have to create a collective vision of what these relationships should become as we move from more traditional "partnership" with overlapping interests to a more collaborative model. In this presentation/workshop/collaboration, Holland and Dolgon will look at the institutional and structural challenges both campus and community people face in developing and maintaining relationships. We will offer a brief case study or two to demonstrate these challenges and how some have succeeded and others failed in addressing the challenges. We'll conclude by facilitating a discussion about the potential for transcending the traditional notions of partnerships and creating more collaborative and democratic relationships.