Dating to Marriage: The Opportunities & Challenges of Long-Term University Commitment to Community

Randy Stoecker

Keynote Address, U-Links Celebration of Research, 2006

Thank you.  It’s wonderful to be here.  I travel a lot, and it can sometimes be a fairly lonely experience.  But there are certainly places where I go that I feel like I have come home.  This is one of those places, so thank you to Kate, Heather, Marie and Don, Jim, Caroline and Eric, and the many others of you who have helped me feel at home both last fall and the past few days. 

I want to have a bit of fun this afternoon.  Because, after all, this is a celebration, and what would a celebration be without a bit of fun.  A friend of mine, Nick Cutforth, who has been doing community based research, or CBR, nearly as long as I have, has spent some time talking about how relationships develop through community based research. And he compares it to how relationships build from dating to more serious relationships.  He hasn’t taken it quite as far as I will today, however.  I want to see just how far this metaphor goes, so we are going to push it to its absolute limits.  The exercise has been useful for me, and I hope it might be for you as well. 

So let’s begin by looking at dating.  When we go on a CBR date, we are engaging in brief, low risk, low cost encounters.  These are small projects, and if they don’t work out, neither party has invested much so the risk is worth it.  I still remember my first CBR date, and apologies to those of you who have now heard this story for the umpteenth time.  But it’s my favorite story.  It was 1985 and I had to go interview someone for the qualitative research methods class I was taking.  I decided to interview the staff person from the neighborhood organization in the community I was living in.  I’d moved to the Minneapolis neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside to attend graduate school, and had been intrigued by how the run-down housing all around me was being transformed with new roofs, windows, insulation, etc.  So I went to the neighborhood organization office, where I found Tim Mungavan, who expressed his resentment at all the students who had been interviewing him, taking his time, and not returning as much as a copy of a paper to him.  He made me promise to give him a copy of what I wrote.  Well I was pretty intimidated and when I came back with a copy of my paper I asked him if there was anything else I could do.  He pointed to a doorway off his office and explained the fire marshal wanted them to clean up the hallway leading off that doorway.  He asked me if I would clean it up.  Well, even though I thought it beneath me, I agreed, and I’m glad I did, because I found that hallway filled with old neighborhood newspapers and correspondence that told the story of how the neighborhood had fought off an outside developer that would have leveled the neighborhood and then organized their own community-controlled redevelopment.  When I had finished cleaning that hallway I had all my data just where I wanted it and wrote my PhD dissertation about the neighborhood.

Some of you are also having your first CBR dates, whether you are a community organization or a student.  It can feel pretty awkward, just like a real first date can feel.  But when it goes well, you start thinking about a second date, and start wondering if you might take a next step toward a deeper commitment.  It’s certainly not sleeping together, but it is often a much riskier project where both researcher and community organization can feel more vulnerable.

For me, doing evaluation research is often the more vulnerable second date.  About two months ago I finished facilitating a neighborhood development planning meeting—that was our first date.  That went well enough and now they have asked me to help them evaluate a summer leadership development project they are doing.  Such an evaluation can reveal an organization’s deepest weaknesses as well as the researcher’s own skill weaknesses.  And evaluations matter, especially if they are going to be given to funders, so organizations often scrutinize evaluation research much more than other kinds of information gathering. 

So what does it take to move to that next level of commitment that requires baring one’s vulnerabilities?  From my experience there are really three things.  One is feeling confident the other party will follow through on projects.  I remember when I had managed another evaluation project with a crime prevention program.  I and a group of students had surveyed a neighborhood as part of the evaluation, but had gotten a very low return rate.  When we presented our findings, the neighborhood organization was quite disappointed, and basically said they were expecting us to go back out into the neighborhood to get a better return.  Well it was the end of the semester, but I convinced a couple of students to sign up for summer independent study credit and we tripled the number of surveys for that organization.

The second thing to consider in whether to go to the next level is the stability of your partner.  This is often a challenge for community organizations, who live on the edge of viable funding.  I had a group of students working with a neighborhood organization last semester, compiling a directory of service organizations active in the neighborhood.  But the sponsoring organization was beset by internal conflicts and also had to fight off a city funding cut.  Consequently, they were not available to guide the students, who felt like they were adrift on the project.

The third issue in deciding to go to the next level is whether your partner can meet deadlines.  My colleague Nick Cutforth, whom I mentioned above, describes one of his first dates with a community organization where the students didn’t finish the project at the end of the term, and he was left to pick up the pieces and try to create some results for the organization. 

If you do decide to move to the next level, you can then start going steady.  When you are going steady, you are doing regular projects, but you still have separate homes.  Last semester, when I arrived at my new position at the University of Wisconsin, I got connected to a local community leadership program, that needed a variety of research support.  I met with them a couple of times, and helped them with some of the research data they had collected from the people who had gone through their leadership program, but they had not analyzed.  They liked those first dates and invited me to assist them with an evaluation of the overall program, and we are still working together nearly 8 months later.  I am now on one of their board committees, and have been invited to do some of their training.

Here, the big question is whether to move in together.  U-Links and the Trent Centre for Community Based Education may be the best example of that next level.  In the cases of both U-Links and TCCBE you are sharing budgets and leadership from universities and community organizations, and you have created common addresses.  These are among the best examples of true partnership that exist in North America and perhaps the world.

What characterizes such partnerships?  First is the fact that they involve long-term agreements.  These are not project to project agreements, but multi-year contracts that commit to partnership over an extended period of time.  They are also multi-role relationships that involve not just students doing a few research projects, but commit the university or college to providing technical assistance, and they funnel higher ed students into community projects and local students into the university or college.  As U-links and the TCCBE extend beyond CBR into service learning (where students work with community organizations not just on research projects but on almost anything they need) using the multi-year McConnell grant, they are creating that long-term commitment and those multi-role relationships that are central to such partnerships.

Well, when this really works out, we get to marriage.  And I must ask you to keep your imaginations in check a bit at this point.  Remember, it’s only a metaphor.  I am not advocating anything about actual marriage.  But it is still useful to play with the metaphor, because we are beginning to see different kinds of community-academy marriage out there. 

The first is the group marriage.  Probably the most amazing example of group marriage in CBR is a group in the Appalachian region of the United States called Just Connections.  This is a group of community organizations and small college faculty who have been together for over a decade—through times of good funding and no funding—to conduct CBR and service learning projects from West Virginia to Northern Georgia. 

For those of you who never had that Introduction to Anthropology course, polygamy and polyandry refer to a husband with many wives or a wife with many husbands.  We see many examples out there of a university working with many different community organizations.  And we also see cases of community organizations who have really figured out the system and are able to get accounting students to help with their books, sociology students to help with their membership rosters, geography students to help map their service area, psychology students to help with organizational development, and even a few faculty to do the odd advanced project. 

Then we see some arranged marriages.  And these may be the most difficult.  Probably the best example of this is the required service learning course.  Students who have to do some kind of service (and sometimes resent it) are sent out to community organizations who often feel like they have to accept them (and sometimes resent it).  I have talked with some Peterborough organizations who dread those calls from the grade 10 students who are required to do service learning. 

And finally there is the shotgun marriage.  I’ve known more than a few community-university partnerships that were doing just fine until they suddenly found out they were the parents of a bouncing baby grant and had to quickly renegotiate their relationship to accommodate their new-found wealth.  This happened to me a few years ago, when I and a community organization learned in November that we had finally received the grant we had jointly applied for, and suddenly had to find a bunch of students for the research project that was starting in January.  It is not easy to put together a brand new course with only 45 days notice.

Now, of course, just like in actual marriage, there are many challenges on the road to a truly mutually fulfilling partnership.  And what is most interesting is that the challenges to marriage identified by divorce lawyers are virtually the same as the challenges facing community-university partnerships. 

The first issue is communication.  It doesn’t matter how many of these projects I do, at some point in the project something has slipped through the cracks.  The community organizations doesn’t realize they were supposed to review drafts of the survey, or I didn’t realize they expected me to book the meeting room to present the results to the public.  Constant effective communication is necessary to make these projects succeed. 

The second issue is finances.  When the grant runs out and the university refuses to fill in the gap, many partnership programs die.  In other cases, the funds are distributed unequally. I know of one partnership where the college got a grant to support its students and faculty, but the community organization provided the equivalent of $9,000 in labor and supplies out of its own pocket.  That can quickly produce resentments and strain the relationship.

The third issue is a lack of commitment.  Maybe the faculty person works with one organization for a year or two and then decides it wasn’t that interesting after all.  Or maybe the university provides a little bit of money to get faculty doing CBR the first semester and then expects them to keep doing it on their own.  Or maybe the organization is only interested in research that will serve their short-term interests rather than projects that may provide a long-term vision or plan for them to follow.

The fourth issue is a change in priorities. This can be related to the financial issue above.  Because when the grant runs out, rather than trying to provide more funds to continue the same project, they go after a new grant with a new focus. On the organization side, when the director changes, the commitment that organization had made to the CBR project may end all together as the new director either doesn’t even know what was happening, or is so busy getting up to speed with all the other things the organization is doing that they don’t have time for a little research project.  

Finally, there is infidelity.  It may seem that the problem of infidelity doesn’t apply. But you might be surprised.  I was working with one college who was trying to deal with the political fallout of a resentful and powerful community organization that thought they were going to have exclusive access to the college, and they were really angry when they found out the college was going to partner with other organizations as well.  And I have just been organizing a public event with a consortium of community organizations to discuss the results of an action research project on service learning, and some of the member organizations asked us to limit the invitations to the event because they were concerned about competition from other groups that would then also learn about how to develop successful service learning and steal their students. 

Of course, if you can avoid all these challenges, you get to reap the benefits.  And just like marriage gives you access to all of those interesting in-laws, friends, and professional contacts of your spouse, so too does a long-term academy-community partnership give you access to all kinds of networks.  As I have continued working with the grassroots leadership program in Wisconsin, I have been brought into contact with a variety of other area organizations, giving me access to future student placements, and even joint projects that we can use to expand the impact of a single CBR project.  Some of the organizations I am working with, because they have specific needs around housing issues, I am also able to connect with one of my colleagues whose expertise in housing surpasses my own. 

The relationship, when it is based on the trust that can only be built over time, can also give each other access to resources.  Community organizations can access grants that can fund me to do their evaluation research.  I can access used computers, meeting space, and training facilities to support their work.

There is also joy to be had in such long term relationships.  I have not actually been working with the Madison grassroots leadership program for that long, but already I look forward to every meeting I have.  For in a city that is so horribly segregated, this program is one of the most integrated groups I have found, and it is a pure joy to see so many different people working together so effectively.  Every time I leave my office, get on my bicycle, and cross over to the “other side” of Madison I feel a sense of relief that I am becoming a small part of the solution, with the guidance of my partner organization.

These are also  the relationships that give my professional life meaning.  One of my favorite authors, a guy by the name of Saul Alinsky, who was a good old fashioned U.S. rabble rouser, once said that “The word ‘academic’ is a synonym for irrelevant.”  As an academic, I have tried as hard as I can to not be irrelevant, but I have not been able to do it alone.  I’ve made a lot of mistakes, as I imagine those of you who are exhibiting your projects today have also.  But it has been my organization partners who have forgiven me and stuck with me, and have taught me to stick with them when they make mistakes, or go through turmoil, or suffer internal problems.

Perhaps even beyond meaning, such deep partnerships give immortality.  Remember the story I told of Tim Mungavan, who asked me to clean that hallway?  I still work with that neighborhood, even though I have to get on planes to do it.  I ended up writing not just a dissertation, but a book about that neighborhood, in the hopes that their story would remain long after they were gone.  They, in turn, as they were rezoning the neighborhood to accommodate their redevelopment, named a neighborhood plat after me, which will remain in the county records office long after I am gone.  May your partnerships return such depth of understanding, warmth of support, and success of impact.  Thank you.