Cultivating mutually beneficial university and nonprofit partnerships

Featuring KER academic fellow Erica Hodges from ASU and The Society of St. Vincent De Paul

“Complex social and economic issues in the community like poverty, homelessness, and immigration cannot be addressed by one organization, entity, or sector,” says Erica Hodges, ASU and The Society of St. Vincent de Paul program manager. Strengthening and expanding partnerships between universities and nonprofits, in particular, has vast potential to create more resilient community support systems.

But how do we measure a partnership’s success in building community resilience? “It’s hard to measure partnership because it’s so dynamic and diverse,” Hodges says, who seeks to pin down novel best practices for effective and lasting collaboration.

During her fellowship, Hodges analyzed data on the ASU and St. Vincent de Paul partnership to identify critical elements of successful collaboration and to create a framework for evaluating and improving university-nonprofit partnerships that seek to enhance resilience.

She found volunteerism to be a consistent component and noted that staff capacity in leadership and coordination is essential for maintaining these kinds of partnerships. Additionally, lasting partnerships exhibit reciprocity in which their goals and values align.

“In order to have a basis for a longstanding partnership, there has to be a really clear return on investment,” Hodges explains. “Reciprocity has to be a part of it, and it needs to be really clearly understood and stated. It can’t be assumed.”

Hodges then applied her framework, facilitating meetings with the partners responsible for the Phoenix Welcome Center, a relief center for asylum seekers. “The focus was to determine if the university and nonprofit partnership framework could be used to create community resilience,” Hodges says.

Working alongside the 2020 cohort — each member embedded in a community-university partnership - influenced the design of her model. “I think the takeaway is that even though it may only take one person - a champion - to initiate something really powerful, it does take a whole community to realize that and to make it sustainable.”