Part II: The Impact of Community-Campus Partnerships

1. What does community-campus partnerships mean to you? Why should we care?

To me, community-campus partnerships should be the cornerstone of academia. Everything we do – whether in arts and humanities, social science, health sciences, natural science or engineering – should be with the underlying quest for better serving the community – from our local neighborhood to our global community to the planet itself. The idea of thinking globally but acting locally is incredibly important. To me, the most important characteristic of community-campus partnerships is mutual respect. If the academy lacks humility – we invite accusations of being out of touch (or even elitist). There are different ways of knowing, and academics must recognize the huge amount of knowledge and expertise that exists within the community. We need to respect that knowledge in the planning, executing – and indeed budgeting – our teaching and research. The bi-directionality in this partnership requires that, on the one hand, we honour the agency of our community partners and be humbly willing to learn about their realities, and, on the other hand, commit ourselves to our ethical obligations of solidarity and local capacity building.

Why should we care?

Simply put, the honour, credibility and utility of academia is at stake.

2. Defining and measuring the impact of our work. Can it be done?

It can be done and must be done. The key is to ensure we know what we want to “measure” before we begin; we must think about our theory of change – how we think that our work can have impact, what do we want to accomplish, what are our outcomes of interest, what are ways to study this, and with whom. Involving partners – appropriately and with attention to respecting their agency and what they bring - is key to success. Different parties have different objectives for the work; the work must be designed to meet the various research, training and service objectives of the diverse partners- not just the academic goals, nor just the funder’s goal. The university may aim to publish in peer-reviewed journals, train graduate students and serve university committees, while the community partner may aim to have renewed funding from its donors, train its staff and continue to have impact on the community it serves. The clearer all parties are on the various objectives of the work, the easier it is to “measure” success, keeping in mind that some objectives are best assessed by qualitative methods (observation, interviews, discussions, document reviews, etc.); arts-based methods can be used to assess impact (songs, murals, photos, plays, etc.); and quantitative methods can be applied in the right circumstances (surveys, analysis of existing data, etc.) Moreover, a mixed methods approach is highly welcome.

If we don’t then what?

We lose the opportunity of improving our work and risk not being able to continue the work at all; or worse, we allow good initiatives to die and ill-focused resource-consuming and even potentially harmful initiatives to flourish without the guidance of well-constructed research.