Considerations for University Partners

University partners have many motivations for entering and sustaining relationships with nonprofit and community-based organizations. Whether these relationships are established at the individual, program, or unit level, they require time, energy, and commitment. This section draws upon the information shared by interviewees translated into questions for the university partners to consider.

1. Do you have the resources—including time—to support networking and planning for a new partnership or a new program or project within an existing partnership?

2. For research proposals and grants, have you involved partners from the outset in determining the research objectives, research design, and budget?

3. Have you determined the relative salaries of the project leads and included permanent university salaries as leverage where possible?

4. Have you determined the additional financial costs of the project for each partner? Have you examined the labor that partners will need to provide to make this partnership work and how that labor will be compensated?

5. Have you identified sources of funding and other resources that will not put you and your partners in the position of competing with other community organizations?

6. Have you built in flexibility to accommodate changing circumstances within the university or community organization? Have you established how you are going to communicate changes, such as the loss and additions of personnel within the university?

7. Have you established mechanisms for communicating that recognize diverse styles for sharing and receiving feedback?

8. Have you determined your expectations for disseminating results? In what venues, to what audiences, and by whom?

9. Have you examined the risks that partners will face in this partnership and identified safe guards for all participating organizations?

For Further Attention

After decades of studying the institutionalization of community engagement by universities, Barbara Holland (2016:74-75, 79) wrote:

The bottom line is that so long as community engagement work is enacted by a self-selecting group, with separate infrastructure, limited funding, and a random agenda of interaction across community issues and partners, campuses will struggle with sustainability, quality, extent of benefits to the institutional mission, and ability to measure activity impacts and outcomes… Going forward, we should see community engagement as core work; it is not an exotic activity for the few who have those motivations described in 1999. In the 21st century, engagement is strategic work, a valuable method of conducting scholarship, and an essential strategy to renew higher education’s role in public progress, in partnership with other sectors.

This study is one step in a process of increasing understanding, identifying areas for improvement, and making changes to advance community-university relationships at the University of Arizona. Participants shared a range of encounters and perspectives, reflecting on what they had experienced and what they would like to see in the future. Community actors can find it challenging to critique university partnerships and projects, whether because they share backgrounds with—or even received their degrees from—their university partners or because they lack common experiences and face vast power and resource differentials. Opportunities such as this one for community actors to confidentially share their knowledge and experiences are important and should be made available regularly to help both university and community participants stay on top of best practices and remain aware of areas that require attention.

To maximize participation, regular assessments of community-university relationships should be developed collaboratively with university and community actors. Efforts by the University to capitalize on these relationships can lead to pressure to take part in them. Special attention is needed to ensure the involvement of community organizations encompassing many types of interactions with the university and of university personnel representing all types of faculty—full and part-time; tenure-track, continuing status, career track, and adjunct—as well as graduate and undergraduate students and staff. Several topics raised during this study require a closer look. A few of those are shared here to illustrate the complexities of community-university relationships, especially as the number and type of relationships increase. For example, careful attention is needed to the dissemination of information about community-university collaborations. Experienced researchers recognize the publication of research findings as a particular form of communication and are aware that even research reports and academic journal articles have different purposes. Likewise, the meaning of co-authorship can vary, from communicating who contributed to the work to indicating that all co-authors support the arguments made in the publication. In academic writing, publications are mechanisms through which authors enter a scholarly debate, taking up theoretical and political positions, and it is important that partners are aware of that and have the option to participate or not. Likewise, often the style of scholarly communication assumes that of a debate, a place that is not immediately familiar or comfortable for all partners.

Further investigation is also needed on the benefits and drawbacks associated with various degrees of relationship formality. Contracts and agreements are mechanisms for clarifying roles, expected levels of effort, and distribution of resources, but they can limit flexibility. They help assess and manage financial and legal risk, but they offer no protection against risk to an organization’s standing in the community. For communities that have been harmed by university policies and practices—whether taking of land and constructing large buildings that destroy and change the character of neighborhoods, using communities as sites for training students without benefitting residents and instead reinforcing negative stereotypes, or excluding community members from university activities—the risk to those who engage in partnerships is very high. Failure can mean not only loss of a potential resource for the community but also alienation of the organization leader from the community.

As explored throughout this report, community-university relationships hold significant promise for helping the University of Arizona and community organizations meet complex and diverse needs within Tucson and Pima County. Key to successful collaboration is careful consideration of the capacity to really engage. Doing collaborative work requires extra commitment and effort, from both university and community partners, to ensuring there is the time, flexibility, patience, and energy to establish and sustain the relationship. Often, community-university relationships are also complicated by differences in the backgrounds, access to resources, and power between university and community actors and the people and communities they represent. When any partner is unprepared to devote the extra time and effort, the collaboration is likely to be unsuccessful and could even be harmful. The advice, wisdom, and insights shared in this document can help willing participants create a path forward together.