Our 13-year community-responsive scholar-activist research and service-learning endeavor aimed to strengthen retention by affirming undergraduate students' sense of belonging and identities. This article examines findings related to students' perceptions about their engagement in scholar-activism and offers analysis about the implications of these initiatives for universities interested in training students in community-based participatory research (CBPR) and engagement. Open-ended survey questions posed to 59 students were analyzed using summative content analysis. In our case study, community-responsive scholar-activist research and service-learning initiatives promoted a critical sense of belonging by providing opportunities for students to become aware of and contribute to the social, political, and economic needs of rural farmworkers. These activities also provided spaces for students to learn collaboratively with peers, project partners, and community members who share similar experiences and backgrounds, thereby nurturing a sense of identity and pride about their own immigrant and/or farmworking cultures. Likewise, this program provided opportunities for students to build relationships with faculty and staff dedicated to advocacy for scholars from racially, culturally, and linguistically marginalized communities, which can rectify a sense of exclusionary or censoring practices within the broader university community. Implications of this research suggest that incorporating community-responsive activist research and service-learning initiatives into university curriculums can provide undergraduate students with the support and skills needed to adapt to their new environment while engaging communities in fruitful collaborations.
The purpose of this article is to consider elements of our success in building authentic relationships as a team of university and community members that developed a community of practice aimed at anti-racism education and activism. Our team co-created a field trip to develop and assess anti-racism and activism in Indiana. As we consistently met, our relationships deepened, which yielded deeper conversations about race and racism. Using critical reflection as our guide, we invoke the metaphor of weaving to explain how these processes were integral to the development of relationships within our community of practice. Warp threads represent the structures we put in place to create and maintain the structure of our CoP: a) sustained commitment; b) creation of working agreements; c) purposefully getting to know one another; and d) reflection about our process. These elements supported our weft threads: the dialogue, sharing, and listening, developed through trust and open conversation, which strengthened our relationships. These processes have potential to be elements of success for those interested in creating communities of practice with similar goals.
Aims: This study examines key facilitating and hindering factors to the success of community-academic partnerships (CAPs)—interorganizational collaboratives extending beyond research boundaries to integrate community perspectives into evidence-based interventions. In collaboration with a public health consortium in Flint, Michigan, the study sought to identify and understand key determinants to the development of CAPs and extend this narrative to the Flint community's experience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Participants were key representatives from 25 organizations leading public health equity efforts in Flint, Michigan as part of the Partnership Consortium Core. Guided by the Model of Research Community Partnership, a sequential mixed methods approach (QUAN → QUAL) was applied to provide an assessment of determinants to a CAP's initial formation as categorized by interpersonal processes, operational processes, and network processes. Quantitative survey data identified key facilitating and hindering factors; qualitative interview data then expanded on responses and elaborated on factors with context and experiences from partners. Results: Results contribute rich details on process and perspectives of a CAP developed in Flint. Facilitating factors related to interpersonal processes and hindering factors related to operational processes were most frequently endorsed. Conclusions: Eliciting community partner perspectives are important to develop key strategies that can better meet community concerns. By identifying facilitating and hindering factors to CAP success throughout its formation phase, we provide clinical and community researchers with insights into approaches that may benefit future collaborations facing crises or challenges for improved partnership outcomes across interpersonal, operational, and network processes of CAPs.
Using quantitative and qualitative thematic analysis from an evaluation survey and intensive interviews from the Lifecourse Initiative for Healthy Families (LIHF), this article explores the unequal power dynamics between academic and community partners in an initiative that addresses disparities in Black infant mortality in Southeastern Wisconsin. Initiated and funded by a public health endowment fund at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health(UW-SMPH), LIHF began in 2009 in Beloit, Kenosha, Milwaukee, and Racine, Wisconsin. LIHF is a multi-year community-academic partnership which included community-based planning, establishment of funded and centrally supported community collaboratives, and 1–3-year project grants. Survey and interview respondents revealed that many Black community members and academics perceived white academic partners as avoiding addressing root causes of systemic racism, maintenance of structural power imbalances, and how these disparities are related to the very long history of racism and disparities throughout the state. The white respondents (mostly) saw a lack of willingness and/or capacity for the Black community partners most vocally involved to effectively deal with the policy, systems and environments that contributed to the disparities. This was further hampered by the structure of the initiative which seperated the fiscal and administrative control from implementation. Evaluation participants expressed concerns regarding the structure of the Initiatives which failed to center the voices of those most impacted. Evaluators concluded that if the community and academic partners are interested in making long-term impacts, they will have to let go of traditional ways of community-academic collaborations and begin to embrace future possibilities to more effectively impact communities of color.
Pursuing community-engaged scholarship compels faculty to identify, foster, and adapt partnerships to benefit local communities through collaboration while meeting academic demands. Project KINEs was created as a partnership between [University A], [University B], and [State] community stakeholders. The goal of the project was the facilitation and integration of Kinesiology concepts, including sport sciences and health lessons, into Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) education curricula in local middle school classrooms. In its first conception, educators were provided in-depth training, curriculum development seminars, and specialized equipment to implement novel strategies to connect human movement to STEAM lessons. Over the course of two years, Project KINEs evolved into a community-engaged scholarship endeavor where university faculty worked to connect specialized training from within and across institutions to pursue public issues tied to STEAM education. Through engaged forms of teaching and research, the project directors learned that applying academic expertise is only one component of a complex and rewarding system. Focusing on public needs while navigating the expectations of project stakeholders requires a collaborative team that acknowledges the unique contribution of each member. Project KINEs evolved from a local project aiming to impact young students’ STEAM experiences and grew to create opportunities for researchers across campuses, provide undergraduates practical lesson planning experiences, facilitate teacher education programs, and partner with ongoing large-scale grant ventures. Perspectives and examples are shared to aid fellow faculty and outreach-oriented stakeholders interested in pursuing community-engaged scholarship.
This article examines the use of an urban neighborhood as a place-based source for student research and related community engagement opportunities. With a sustained, programmatic commitment to the neighborhood, Northern Kentucky University (NKU) sought to build trust over ten years with residents, the nonprofit agencies serving them, and others in the community. These partners generated community engagement opportunities that were valued by the neighborhood and valuable to students’ learning.
This case study examines outcomes from a university project that emanated from a grant for a public humanities collaboration. It involved undergraduate research as well as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at a midsize private university in the Midwest. The university worked with the local library system and its Center for Black Literature and Culture (CBLC) and K-12 schools to create community engagement initiatives based on student research done in the universities special collections archives of the poet, Etheridge Knight, Jr. It also included Knight’s family, local poets, the university’s Center for Citizenship and Community, and university faculty. The findings include that the project provided an explicit connection between Knight and existing university coursework and student learning, facilitated community engagement, and created an appreciation of both local community and personal sense of community.
Community initiatives are started in a variety of ways including tackling tenacious community issues and addressing persistent disparities across residents. An urban/rural, county-wide initiative in the southeastern United States, gathered a cross-sector group to create a culture of literacy. Armed with an “all children are our children” attitude, stakeholders transformed thoughts into programs and initiatives (i.e., Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and Campaign for Grade Level Reading) by cultivating reciprocal relationships and partnerships. Through chronicling the history of the coalition and analyzing interviews with 19 foundational community stakeholders, this paper will discuss how the partnership formed and how individual motivations reinforced stakeholders’ investment of time and commitment to the cause, becoming a springboard into a more permanent community initiative.
Community-based courses in the social sciences run the risk of dampening students’ enthusiasm for work that addresses social problems by exposing them to the full complexity of an issue without the corresponding lesson that their work can make a difference. In this case study, we discuss two such courses: an undergraduate sociology course and a graduate public administration course which both focused on affordable housing and gentrification in a historically African American town in coastal North Carolina. The case study explores the techniques that we incorporated into the courses to overcome disappointment and support students’ nascent desire become change agents after graduation. Our data source is student reflections written before, during, and at the completion of their work. From the comparison of the graduate and undergraduate courses, we conclude that the two-semester course structure, collaboration between the undergraduate and graduate courses, opportunities for intellectual and professional growth, and the strong community partnership were sufficient to overcome disappointment and empower students to continue working on intractable problems in the future.
The Great Lakes Colleges Association (www.glca.org) recently organized a convening of the Opening Doors of Dialogue Program, a Mellon Foundation funded initiative. The focus of that convening was on bringing together campus and community leaders across the GLCA engaged in and committed to community-engaged partnerships in their respective communities. Lessons learned, as well as associated opportunities and challenges, were shared. As scholar-practitioners, our role was to help identify common themes and trends across the partnerships and conversations, and to help set an agenda about the role of community-engaged partnerships in liberal arts colleges. The focus of this manuscript is on those trends and agenda setting considerations.
In local emergency preparedness planning, there is a lack of disability inclusion and equity. We conceptualize this problem as an adaptive challenge, an issue that is hard to define, hard to solve and must be solved by people most impacted. This conceptualization led us to utilize action research to describe how disability inclusion and equity may be built in this area. Building on previously develop models of increasing inclusion through capacity-building, we describe results of virtually convened Action Learning groups to add to the understanding of the facilitators of disability inclusion and equity in local emergency planning. We found that participants utilized four main themes in their capacity-building work: partnership, interests and values, forward motion, and organizational development. These themes were strengthened by elements of adaptive thinking that connected the main themes to each other. These included: network exchange, envision what’s next, systematic reflection, and valuing partnership. We discuss our findings’ implications and suggest further research to conceptualize and enact disability inclusion and equity.
