A keynote address prepared for:
The University of Texas El Paso Center for Civic Engagement's 4th Annual Retreat;
The College of New Jersey Community-Engaged Learning Workshop
May 2002
In just a short two decades, colleges and universities across the country have begun to transform themselves from standoffish ivory tower islands to neighborly community citizens. Their practice has been imperfect at best, but the fact that they are even trying is notable.
There are many important questions to ask, however, to help these institutions become the kind of community members that their neighbors want. Will they be the neighbors who borrow without returning and criticize others for not keeping their yards neatly manicured? Will they be the bumbling neighbors who keep coming over to help, but because they are incompetent they make things worse rather than better? Or will they be the neighbors who loan tools, provide free help, and offer support in crisis?
So what does the future hold? I am not one of those social scientists who think we can predict the future. I have worked with too many community organizers and activists for that. For me, the future holds what we collectively make it. The odds may be against us, but those odds inform us of what we have to do.
Today, then, I would like to explore the future choices of community-university collaborations, starting with an exploration of what we know is already happening. I have had the honor of observing an expanding group of community-higher ed collaborations over the past three years, sponsored by Campus Compact and the Corella and Bertram F. Bonner Foundation. We are now learning enough from that research, and from others, to begin drawing some lessons.
In order to make choices about what kinds of community-university collaborations to create, we need to know something about the motivations participants bring to the table. Much of the collaboration that occurs between universities and communities occurs between specific individuals or offices of the institution and specific organizations in the community. So when we ask why to do it, we are often asking why students, faculty, and community organization members do it. We could also, I suppose, ask why higher level university administrators would support it, but it is too easy to lapse into cynicism there so we'll leave them out of it for the moment.
Students
Let's begin with students, for the most popular models of university-community collaboration over the past two decades have focused on them. And because they have been the most officially involved in these collaborations, they are also the players about which we know the most.
There are three main "why's" for involving students: they learn better, they become better citizens, and they develop more democratic attitudes.
The better learning justification comes from the field of experiential learning. Everyone, the experiential learning theorists argue, learns better by doing. It is one thing to read about how to build a birdhouse. It is another thing altogether to build one. And that seems to play itself out in successful community-university collaborations. In research on eleven campuses with such collaborations, one outcome the faculty noted was how much better the marginal students performed when they learned through doing. There is some indication they even performed better on traditional measures like exams (Stoecker, 2001).
But the original reason for involving students in collaborations came from a 1980s concern that students were disengaged (Boyer; 198; Goodlad, 1983). Growing up with Ronald Reagan and an antagonism toward immigrants, people of color, and people in poverty, students were perceived as self-centered and disengaged. Service learning was seen as a means of helping them overcome their prejudices and becoming better citizens in the patriotic language of the time. The argument was that actually putting students in contact with the people they stereotyped would help them overcome their prejudices and instill a sense of responsibility in them to help others rather than discriminate against them.
Connected to the citizenship motivation was the belief that by getting students to become better community citizens, it would also re-engage them in the practice of "little-d" democracy (though there was probably also some hope among educators that it would also make students "big-D" Democrats). The hope was that service learning would make students care not just about the people they were helping but would become more involved generally--voting, pressing for more democratic institutional practices, and becoming more engaged in all kinds of social institutions.
The research on these second two goals is mixed. It may even be that the kinds of collaborations we have been creating reinforce prejudices and do nothing for democratic disengagement, an issue to which we will return.
Faculty
Faculty are the other players on the higher ed side, and for those of us who do this kind of work, the motivations to not do it are often stronger. Faculty who engage in such collaboration are as likely to be punished by their institutions as rewarded. Those who do it, then, often see it as a kind of higher calling. For those of us engaged in such collaborations, the motivations are better teaching, more relevant research, and more connection to reality.
The teaching motivation comes in the same place for faculty as for students. Students not only learn better through experiential methods, it's more fun. And that goes for us teachers too. Only a few faculty out there are artful enough with a lecture that they can keep people awake and get them to learn something. Of course the same is true of experiential learning, which requires a deep sensitivity to the feelings of the student and a skill at facilitating reflective learning that many faculty also lack.
But teaching is often not enough for many of us in the profession today. Trained in PhD granting institutions where all we learned was research, we want our community work to reflect our research skills. Many of us, myself included, don't do community-university collaborations with students, but work directly with community organizations on community-based research projects. And believe me, it is a welcome relief to have someone actually care about the outcome of the research, in contrast to the "shelf research" so many of us produce that gets us status in higher education but no one ever reads.
Finally, those of us who chafed at the ivory tower attitude of higher education find in community-university collaborations a welcome relevance. It's scary to test all this theoretical stuff with real people, but as us faculty become more deeply involved with community organizations, we begin to realize that much of our theory is irrelevant, and we need to spend more time building knowledge connected to reality. It is here that we make the transition from merely helping communities to actually respecting the complementary knowledge of community and academy.
Community
The reasons given by community organizations for collaborating with universities are often the most straight-forward. The informal groups and nonprofit organizations that operate on a shoestring are often so busy just doing the work that they have little time to gather up the resources that would actually improve their work. Collaborating with students and faculty can help them fill that gap.
For many community groups, the collaboration helps them improve their information base. Sometimes it is just creating or updating a membership database. Sometimes it is a community survey. Sometimes it is research on best practices the group can draw on.
From the earliest days of such collaborations, community groups and organizations have also obtained skills and labor. Sometimes those skills involve access to advanced technology such as Geographic Information Systems analysis or water quality analysis. Sometimes the collaboration simply provides more hands to distribute meals in soup kitchens, or help set up chairs for a meeting.
In the most advanced cases, these collaborations have led to policy movements, as they did in the famous Appalachia land ownership study, where a massive investigation of land ownership across the region turned up evidence of low quality education, health care, and other services in areas where the land was controlled by coal companies.
This policy goal, however, is the last to really develop. It is the most risky for the academic--some have even had their careers threatened by their involvement in policy coalitions (Gedicks, 1996). And it requires a level of grass roots participation that neither academics nor many of the organizations with which they collaborate (which are often service organizations rather than community-based organizations) fully understand.
Social Change
The "should" for community-university collaboration that is only sporadically being realized is the goal of social change. So much collaboration began as institutionally-controlled and student-focused that the bigger goals of community empowerment and social change were left out entirely. And we are still suffering from that legacy.
The truly radical potential of such collaborations is in their ability to create social change by improving participation, more broadly distributing skills and information, and building a foundation for collective social action.
Participation means changing not just the access to policy makers, but the higher education institutions themselves and even the nonprofit organizations involved in those collaborations. Participation means that the people effected by the service, or the research, or the policy, are integrally involved in making decisions about it. Our collaborations should turn agency clients into organization participants, both in the agencies themselves and in the institutions of higher education that partner with them.
Going from a client model to a participant model, of course, requires providing those people labeled as clients with the opportunity to develop skills and gain information that will make participation possible. Tutoring school kids in reading and writing, using a mainstream literacy model, is a weak effort. Engaging kids in a social change project that requires them to read and write along the way is much more powerful. Georgetown University, in Washington DC, organized the kids in one neighborhood to do a study of that neighborhood's housing conditions, and the report they produced catalyzed tenant organizing in the neighborhood. In Appalachia, faculty from one college helped organize residents to study the college itself, identifying resources the college could make available to the community at little or no cost. This is fundamentally important, as it not only transforms the social conditions of the community, but it transforms the social conditions of how information is produced and who produces it.
The final way that these collaborations could promote social change is to actually build a foundation for social change. My first collaboration project was a collaborative needs and resources assessment of Toledo community development organizations, which helped to build a coalition that successfully lobbied for over $2 million to support community-based development work in Toledo. My current work with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), has focused on this. We just finished collecting baseline information on housing conditions and voting patterns in the neighborhoods where ACORN is organizing to develop goals for the organizing as well as to leverage funders by creating measurable objectives.
So now that we understand some of the motivations for having these partnerships in the first place, what kinds of collaborations can we choose?
There has been a historical trend from small student volunteer service projects to now also larger involvement of students and faculty over the past two decades.
Community Service
Historically, the new push for community-university collaborations began with community service programs. These were co-curricular programs disconnected from any classroom learning objectives. The Campus Outreach Opportunity League (2002), the Bonner Scholars program (Bonner Foundation, 2002), a variety of campus-based initiatives such as alternative spring breaks, and community service corps recruit students to partner with community agencies to provide services in poor communities. Neighborhood cleanups, house painting, tutorial/literacy programs, and soup kitchen service are common community service projects. These programs are the most basic of all the options. In addition to recruiting individual students to volunteer their services, the programs tend to be geared to helping individual clients, whether that is a child who needs help learning how to read or an impoverished elderly resident who needs their house painted.
Service Learning
Service learning tries to take the next step, linking that volunteer service work with in-class learning objectives. Those hours put in at the soup kitchen are reflected upon in journals and classroom discussion around questions of the causes of poverty or forms of social service. The focus in service learning is still on students, and the actual projects differ little from those in community service programs. The dominant model is still individual-to-individual service. In recent years there has been significant debate over how to make service learning more community-based and more social change oriented, however. Historically, there has been a specific absence of social change orientations in service learning, and an explicit emphasis on collaborations with agencies rather than community-based organizations (Stoecker, 2002). In the worst cases, communities were seen as "laboratories" for students to learn course concepts (see for example, Stephens, 1995), prompting one community activist to ask "what does that make us, the frogs?" (Beckwith 1996). Even in better cases, communities were still seen as only needy, and faculty were seen as only experts (Dorsey, 2001).
Very recently service learning has been changing, as some faculty are now drawing on people like Paulo Freire (1970), the famous Brazilian educator that helped organize peasants, as the models for their service learning activities (Robinson, 2000, 2000b). They are working with social change organizations and they are bringing community activists into the classroom as paid experts to help educate students.
Community-Based Research
Community-Based Research, or CBR, has a somewhat independent history from the community service and service learning programs. Drawing partly from the third world participatory research tradition (Brown and Tandon, 1983) and the earlier use of the name by the Loka Institute (2002), CBR is rooted in non-academic traditions. Today, in institutions of higher education, while CBR is often done through classes using students, it is just as often done without any students. Indeed, most of my CBR work does not involve students except in select cases where they have advanced research skills or knowledge that they can contribute to a project. Also, in contrast to traditional forms of service learning, CBR is community-led. Research projects are defined and chosen through a community-based process, and ideally led by a community based organization. In the CBR model, communities are seen as having strengths and resources as well as needs. Community-based forms of information, such as oral and artistic traditions, are respected as legitimate knowledge. Most importantly, the goal of CBR is to support community-based social change efforts.
At Mars Hill College in North Carolina, in the spring of 2000, a group of women students in a Women Writers class and Helpmate, an area organization serving abused women, participated in the national "Clothesline Project." The Clothesline Project is a national project presenting T-shirts hung on a clothesline, with different color shirts symbolizing different forms of discrimination and violence against women, and decorated by and in honor of women survivors and victims. The students researched regional, national, and global statistics on violence against women. They held a decorating day on campus producing their own T-shirts to be included with those of local women. On the day of the event, held on campus but inviting the whole community, the T-shirts were presented. Throughout the day, cut into an audio tape of music and poetry, were the statistics the students had uncovered.
Community Technical Assistance
A final, though as yet undeveloped, model of community-university collaboration takes the next step to a full partnership. As relationships between institutions of higher education and local communities grows, the sense of possibilities for collaboration also grows. There are projects that could use student volunteers, projects that could provide useful learning opportunities for students, projects requiring research, and a variety of training needs for things like writing grant applications, conducting GIS analyses, building board participation and skill and much more. A full service technical assistance program could meet all those needs and more.
One project of the Trenton Center, a consortium of Trenton area institutions of higher education and community organizations, was a set of technical assistance training workshops covering a wide range of training needs identified by area nonprofits, including GIS, strategic planning, and participatory neighborhood planning. For some workshops the Center identified trainers from local nonprofits rather than simply relying on the area universities and colleges. This is in addition to their role as a broker matching students, faculty, and community organization projects.
Whether it is community service, service learning, community based research, community technical assistance, or some combination, the next set of choices focuses on what kind of bureaucratic structure to use in managing it.
Like the elaboration of programmatic options, the place of community-university collaborations in the institution's organization chart has also become more elaborated. As Kathleen Staudt and Christine Thurlow Brenner (n.d.) note, many new programs in universities begin in "enclave offices" where they sometimes remain. But as community-university collaborations have become more popular and diverse, so has their organizational status in their host institutions. There is now a range of small enclave structures to large full service centers (Stoecker, 2001).
The almost volunteer center
At a number of small colleges and community colleges, both coordinating the entire CBR effort, and managing individual projects, falls on the shoulders of one or two individuals working overtime. When they go on sabbatical, take a new job, or just burn out, the entire program falters. Those committed individuals are also often too busy just managing existing projects to make really strong inroads into the institution, which is one of the most important and challenging aspects of community-university collaborations. Yet, any brand new effort is often the result of one or two people making enormous sacrifices. Ultimately, they don't do it all alone, but they are the fulcrum upon which success balances. And the advantage of such a center is that it can practice a fair amount of autonomy because of the low resource ties to its host institution. The Center for Community Research at Hood College, a private women's liberal arts college in Frederick Maryland, is managed primarily on the shoulders of sociology professor Kerry Strand. The Center itself formalized in the second year of the program. In the summer Kerry sends out a request for proposals to area organizations, and then recruits students and faculty to fill as many of the proposals as possible. Partly because of resource constraints and partly because of the Center's emphasis on empowering women students, as many projects as possible are student-managed. They have worked on assessments of services for the homeless and for incarcerated women, a study of discrimination against gays and lesbians, research on the use of breast cancer screening programs, and other projects. The influence of these efforts has begun to move throughout the college as faculty in Environmental Science and Policy have become involved in a project to help preserve an historic Civil War battlefield site.
The student-based center
Students are often ahead of faculty in their commitment to community service and social change. They are adept at seeking out their own opportunities, and sometimes recruiting faculty to join in with them. At Princeton University, the impetus for community service, service learning, and CBR initially came from current and former students. Before service learning had even gained national popularity, Princeton students had formed the Student Volunteers Council to identify volunteer opportunities in the community and recruit students to them. Former students from the class of 1955, including Ralph Nader, came to support these student-generated efforts through "Project 55." Project 55, building on their support for an internship program and experiential learning at Princeton, donated the first staff to help found the Community-Based Learning Initiative (CBLI). After two years the University raised the funds to take over the project. Today, CBLI coordinator Trisha Thorme, with the community partners and faculty member teaching a course, develops a set of possible CBLI projects that students can opt into. Students doing junior or senior research projects will also work with the CBLI coordinator to develop those research projects as CBR with a community-based organization or effort. The energy generated by students for this work has gradually been infecting more and more faculty. In the early days some faculty would only grade a final paper and have no other contact with the project. Now nearly all faculty are involved in the projects, and the research they have helped students generate is having an increasing public impact. CBLI also helps faculty develop CBR courses, and is up to nine courses offered in fall of 2000. Courses have included research on the State of the African Community in Trenton with the Trenton Urban League, research on handgun locking devices with the Coalition for Peace Action, and other projects.
The department-based center
In many institutions where thinking about community-university partnerships is just beginning to take hold, a core group often forms within a single department. This is the case at Concord College, a small public liberal arts school in southern West Virginia. There the Social Work department, through the leadership of John David Smith, is the center for CBR on campus. It is an interesting case, as Social Work has been doing service learning for as long as they have been an academic profession and find the current fervor for that model to be both long overdue and somewhat amusing. Their advantage, of course, is that they have a curriculum and a practice where community connections are already established and the challenge has been to turn the service activities of their students into research and action opportunities. The transition they made was incorporating community-based research into their curriculum, which they did through the creation of an advanced research class. Located in a department, their challenges have been in expanding outside of the department. The "natural fit" of CBR in the Social Work department, which has long and tight connections with area organizations, does not extend to other departments where "it's totally academic and there are no natural connections to the community." Consequently, building a program seen as more than just an expected department activity has been difficult.
The relatively autonomous center
Relatively autonomous centers are an interesting hybrid of challenges and strengths. These centers are typically funded by external grants and contract projects rather than by hard budget lines within the institutions themselves. Consequently, they have a lot of autonomy from the institution to work collaboratively for the benefit of their community partners. Of course, being dependent on short term external funds also looms as a constant distraction and requires constant fundraising work and an entrepreneurial approach to finding new fundable projects.
The Center for Assessment and Research Alliances (CARA) at Mars Hill College in western North Carolina is rooted in a long tradition of community service and collaboration. Mars Hill College, a liberal arts college with Christian roots that still influence its sense of service, was recently named the first "College of Promise" in North Carolina in conjunction with Colin Powell's America's Promise program. Directed by Thomas Plaut, CARA is one of the means Mars Hill College uses to express their culture of engagement, in addition to the Lifeworks center which coordinates service learning activities. Research alliances between community groups and agencies began at Mars Hill with its Community Development Institute in the 1970s. The agencies needed research and the college had the expertise and equipment to help them meet those needs. The college faculty needed to educate students and fund computer hardware and software for teaching and research. CARA grew through the "win-win" collaborative ventures that this complementarity produced and now has an innovative and sophisticated data analysis center geared toward both community and student development. Through the 1990s they have been providing affordable fee-based assessment and evaluation services for a 911-installation project and other health initiatives, schools, the Red Cross, a sustainable farming project, and the Bonner Foundation. Students are recruited from research classes as "apprentices" to CARA for basic data gathering, entry and cleaning work. A few become intrigued are trained as CARA staff "sojourners," who help design projects and carry them through to completion. Each year two or three students are named CARA Fellows, who are responsible for running the center, helping organize projects and training and supervising apprentices and sojourners. Apprentices are paid $6 an hour, sojourners $8, and Fellows $10. Faculty are recruited project-by-project and often they already are involved with an agency or community group. If the project is big enough, CARA can buy faculty time to reduce their course load.
The full service center:
Imagine you had enough money to have the center of your dreams. "Yeah, in your dreams" you say. Yet, the University of Michigan's Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning, with its $5 million endowment, perhaps comes closer than any other. This center has been able to sponsor major speaking events, faculty colloquia, student projects, and major programs all with a CBR focus. With eight staff, the Center is a serious presence on campus that is quite exceptional for a major research university. This center has a size and mass that can survive faculty and staff turnover, have an influence throughout the university, and serve as an important bridge with the community. They house the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, maintain an extensive web site with training materials and a searchable database for partnership development, and sponsor a graduate-level course in CBR. Perhaps most importantly, the Center helps connect a wide-ranging and diverse group of faculty from 20 departments across the university who are doing CBR. The University of Michigan is one of the places where service learning and CBR has become integrated across the campus units and throughout the curriculum.
Such efforts are not exclusive to large research universities. The Appalachian Center for Community Service at Emory and Henry College, in the Western corner of Virginia, has a smaller funding base and less secure staff, but is also an example of a full service center. While emphasizing service learning more than CBR, their practice is expanding and their example is important. Through the leadership of 1999 Carnegie Baccalaureate Professor of the year Steve Fisher, the center provides all of the staff support for managing CBR and service learning projects, including recruiting faculty, identifying placements, placing students and managing the accounting of their hours, managing correspondence with community organizations, and doing follow-up. They so far work with up to 400 students annually. It also manages the Public Policy and Community Service major and minor. Currently Steve Fisher receives a one-course release and a small stipend to direct the Center, though it can take up more than half of his time. Tal Stanley, who holds a full-time position coordinating the SL/CBR activities of the Center, was originally hired by grant money. Now the College is funding his position, and the Center is building an endowment to make his position secure well into the future.
There is an old adage in the community organizing profession that says if an organization doesn't grow it dies (Beckwith and Lopez, 1997). Whether that is true for the community-university collaboration world remains to be seen. There are programs trying to grow and expand, and others who have chosen to stay focused, providing yet another dimension of choices.
Single Campus Center
This currently remains the most popular model. Individual institutions establish a program of collaboration within their own organizational confines. In many cases these programs partner with a single neighboring community. The federal Community Outreach Partnership Center, or COPC program, has promoted this kind of center. It is also popular with large urban institutions that border poor neighborhoods, allowing them to help improve the neighborhood and their own image at the same time. Most of these programs also practice some form of specialization. The University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia at Temple University, which until recently was a single campus center, focuses its efforts on youth and community development. A few single campus centers develop out of a diverse accumulation of projects seeking institutional support, and are part of a growth pattern within the institution from perhaps an almost volunteer center to a larger, stronger institutionally supported effort. Georgetown University began with a service learning program under the auspices of the Volunteer and Public Service (VPS) Center . Housed in student services, their efforts have expanded on the academic side to develop the Center for Urban Research and Teaching (CURT) and the Partners in Urban Research and Service-learning (PURS) to enhance the research focus of their work and cement the linkages between the university and the community. The culmination of these projects has resulted in the creation of the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service, an academic unit combining all of the other programs and housing seven staff. On the service learning side, the VPS Center sponsors tutoring programs for elementary students, immigrant students, and juvenile offenders. In addition they have helped build support from up to one-quarter of the faculty who allow students to integrate service learning into their course work, and 30 service learning courses (including five with community-based research projects. On the CBR side, the Center has sponsored asset-mapping projects in area neighborhoods and public housing communities and a wide variety of other projects. In addition, they have formed the Youth Action Research Group to help area high school students learn and do CBR projects. The UTEP Center for Civic Engagement and the Institute for Community-Based Teaching and Learning appears to be developing a similar internal complexity.
Metropolitan Network
Metropolitan networks supporting community-university collaboration are not new. The grandparent of them all, the Policy Research Action Group in Chicago that includes the University of Illinois at Chicago, DePaul University, Loyola University, Chicago State University, and a couple dozen community organizations, has been around since 1989. But these networks have been rare. In the past two years an effort has been underway, sponsored by the Bonner Foundation, to build networks of institutions doing community-based research in six metropolitan regions: Trenton New Jersey, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Richmond Virginia, East St. Louis Illinois, and Denver. Most of these networks expanded from strong single-campus centers. The goal of the project is to expand CBR activities through institutions in the metro area. In three cases these networks are very broadly based. The Trenton network, for example, has institution partners ranging from Princeton University to Mercer County community college, and an equally broad range of community organization partners. In some cases the networks are skill focused. The Philadelphia network is focusing on developing institutional and community organization expertise in the areas of youth programming and community development. Most of the projects sponsored by these networks currently involve individuals from single institutions partnering with individual organizations. The hope is that over time the networks will solidify enough to move from these independent projects to joint projects involving multiple institution partners and multiple community organizations. The first of those projects is now occurring through the Trenton Center, which is organizing a major asthma action research project involving government and nonprofit agencies and at least three of its member institutions.
Regional Network
One of the most intriguing developments coming out of the Bonner CBR network program is the spawning of regional networks. Just a couple weeks ago, representatives of the Richmond, Trenton, Philadelphia, and DC networks met to discuss forming a regional network to promote community-based research around youth, community development, and information infrastructure issues. In addition, institutions across the Appalachian region have also formed a network called Just Connections. Just Connections, the most developed of the regional networks, is an independent nonprofit organization involving a collaboration of 5 institutions and a growing number of community organizations and groups across four states in Appalachia. In an area of the country where both information and economic resources are widely dispersed, Just Connections allows for an accumulation of information and expertise that maximizes the impact of what would otherwise be isolated projects. The projects are still separate and independent, but benefit from the network by being able to tap network expertise in project development, and spread project results throughout the network.
OK, you have been very patient. All that has come before was primer or foundation for the tricky issues that community-university partnerships face in the future. Now comes the topcoat, and it may or may not be pretty.
The choices that community-university partnerships make on the questions of why to do it (involving motivations for students, faculty, communities, and social change), what to do (community service, service learning, community-based research, and community technical assistance), where to do it (almost volunteer center, student based center, or department based center, relatively autonomous center, full service center), and how big to make it (single campus center, metropolitan network, or regional network) have implications for a set of tensions that exist in those partnerships. Those tensions are between emphasizing service versus emphasizing social change, institutionalizing a partnership program versus building its independence, and specializing versus diversifying.
Service vs. Social Change
As important as service work is, we keep avoiding the question of whether it is truly helpful. Many of us know the argument that service work is a safety valve--providing just enough help to contain social unrest without addressing the causes of the problem to begin with (Piven and Cloward, 1979). In the worst cases, social service work can be social control, opposed to rather than complementary with social change--especially when the social change emphasizes structural change rather than incremental adjustment. The two world views of these approaches can also be quite antagonistic. A service perspective often emphasizes the commonality across groups in society, and win-win solutions. In sociology we call it a functionalist perspective. A social change perspective more often emphasizes differences between class, race, and sex/gender groups. It also disputes that win-win solutions are possible, as the haves are unlikely to give up their advantage without a fight. In sociology this is called the conflict perspective.
The service approach is much more comfortable in community service and service learning programs. With the goal set as helping individuals, rather than organizing groups to change the conditions that caused the problem community service and service learning provide a kind of student-based social services program. There are service learning programs that actually adopt a conflict perspective, but they are exceedingly rare, with probably the most explicitly conflict-oriented service learning program being at the University of Colorado at Denver (Robinson, 2000. 2000b). As I noted above, these programs tend to be driven by students and administrators. With most universities divided into a "student affairs" division and a "faculty affairs" division, service programs are typically housed in student affairs away from the control of faculty. And while there has been recent lip service given to how the projects should be community driven, the reality is that very few projects are actually created through grass-roots processes, with most being designed to meet the institutions curriculum needs or a social service agency's needs. The level of control needed to manage programs such as this also means that they fit best in single campus centers.
In contrast, the social change approach is most comfortable in community based research programs, though it can also fit in the community technical assistance model because of the diversity that includes. As opposed to service, which is geared to addressing immediate needs, research is geared to uncovering fundamental causes that can be used in social change efforts. CBR has also developed as an explicitly community-driven process, particularly as it has developed outside of the normal higher education curriculum process. Social change then means not just changing the cause of the problem, but changing the power relations even in the process of trying to solve the problem by putting communities rather than agencies and institutions in the driver's seat. And because the social change model is more community-driven, and social change often requires participation beyond a single community, such programs are much less likely to be geographically fixed by the institution, making metropolitan and regional networks very important foundations. In fact, as we will see next, those networks may themselves become community-based.
Institutionalization vs. Independence
One of the other tensions in community-university partnerships is who benefits. The federal COPC program that I discussed earlier, specifies that universities, not communities, get the grant funds. That's in contrast to a similar Canadian government program that funds joint community-university partnerships or even community-based partnerships.
Institutionalization is one of those wonderful words with multiple meanings. On the one hand, it refers to making something stable and predictable and a normal part of society. On the other hand, it can imply taking something sick and locking it away. And in our context it can also mean taking a community-university program and locating it in a higher education institution. You can decide for yourselves whether those meanings should be combined. For the moment, I will focus on the third meaning, headquartering a partnership in an institution in contrast to creating an independent organization.
The programs that are most easily institutionalized are the service programs that are the least controversial and "safest" to house in mainstream institutions. And the more specialized the better. It is much easier to manage a specialized program than an expanding diversifying program that may stretch the boundaries of institutional acceptability. Likewise, single campus centers are more compatible with institutionalization because the locus of decision-making for multi-campus and multi-organizational networks is so uncertain.
Institutionalized partnerships are by far the most common, but we are very recently seeing in the United States a very interesting alternative model. The two CBR networks in Trenton New Jersey and Appalachia that I discussed earlier have formed their own independent nonprofit organizations. The Trenton Center, in New Jersey, just last week got their federal nonprofit status. Both of these programs sponsor some service activities, but they emphasize community-based research. Just Connections, in Appalachia, has been focusing most recently on education access and quality, in one case organizing parents and students of the local schools to do an assess educational quality and discrimination issues. Because independent efforts need to cover their own overhead, buy-in from multiple institutions and multiple community organizations is important. The Trenton Center even uses a fee for service model in some cases to build its operating budget. Both of these independent efforts also structured their boards to have a majority of community organization representatives on their boards to make the organizational process as community-driven as possible.
Specialization vs. Diversification
Wrapped up in the tensions of service vs. social change and institutionalization vs. independence is the tension between specialization and diversification. Us academics were taught to specialize--not just to specialize in a discipline but in a sub-area of a discipline. When I left graduate school in 1988 I was a specialist in social movements. But some community activists, thankfully, quickly disabused me of the fact that I was a specialist, and even of the belief that I should be. In Toledo I quickly found myself learning about community development, foundation funding, urban political economy, and all kinds of related stuff that graduate school had poorly prepared me for.
Because academia is still about disciplinary specialization, community-university partnerships are still pushed to specialize. There are centers dedicated to community service, or to service learning. There are department-based partnerships. And because so many of these programs are institutionalized, the pressures to specialize continue. Even the faculty who get involved in CBR projects only take on those projects that fit their specialty--a luxury possible in major research institutions but not in smaller colleges and universities. Avoiding messy relationships with neighboring institutions also makes it easier to specialize.
But community issues don't occur in disciplinary packages, they don't fit abstract single-term curricular designs, and they often require combinations of expertise not found in a single location. So for those whose goal is social change, diversification is almost a necessity. A social change oriented community-university partnership has to shift as the issues and conditions shift. They need to provide the wide range of information, technical assistance and other resources needed for full-scale social change efforts. They need to see and address the relationship between small isolated issues and bigger structures. All of those pressures press such partnerships to become full-service, community-driven, multi-locational.
You can see here, much as I have tried to present the choices facing community-university partnerships, there are some choices I think are good and some I think are bad. Of course, the choices I think are best--those that emphasize social change, independence, and diversification--are also the riskiest. They are summed up perhaps best by a quote from the late Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Brazil:
'When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist' -- late Archbishop Dom Helder Camara of Recife, Brazil (1909-1999)
These tensions are also explicit in our work. At a recent meeting of the Just Connections CBR network in Appalachia, as people began to reflect on why they were there, one participant noted:
'We got into this because we wanted to make a difference. But now we are here together because we got these grants to do community-based research. Maybe our focus has become too narrow. I have to keep reminding myself the reason to do this is to create social change.'
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