Guide to Campus-Community Partnerships

Colleges and universities in the Racial Legacies and Learning: An American Dialogue project are forging campus-community partnerships and conducting study-dialogues on issues of race and racial reconciliation. As AAC&U's newly appointed President, Carol Schneider has put it, "AAC&U expects that these campus-community partnerships will initiate the birth of a new kind of dialogue and learning between campuses and their surrounding communities."

Strong campus-community partnerships require a joining of equals for this common task. Colleges and universities and local community leaders and organizations each bring valuable resources to this important national dialogue. Colleges and universities can provide access to new scholarship on race and racial reconciliation. They can help develop community-based research agendas and provide facilities and forums for campus-community study and discussion. Community leaders and groups in turn offer a wider range of information about the local conditions for racial dialogue than is often available on any campus. They provide the context of local municipal leadership structures and can provide the local history of race relations that may or may not be known to those on campus.

I. First Steps: Developing Effective Leadership Teams

Many campuses lack close relationships with their local communities. Interactions between a community and its local college or university are often confined to public attendance at sporting or performing arts events, participation in lectures, or community-service projects. While these activities create a level of familiarity for the parties, rarely do they connect the campus to the community or the community to the campus in a long-term, substantive way.

The first step to developing strong campus-community partnerships should be the establishment of an effective campus-community leadership team that includes campus personnel, students, and community organizations. A campus-community partnership requires a leadership team that is sensitive to both campus and community perceptions of this relationship and this project. Cultivating leadership on campus and within the community requires the active participation of senior campus personnel, influential student leaders, and high-level community leaders. These leaders must play a critical role in positioning this project as a priority for the campus and within the community to generate momentum and participation.

Because students are integral to this project, exploring avenues to ensure their participation should be a priority.

II. Building a Campus-Community Partnership - The Four R's

Before recruiting all of the community partners, the campus contact may want to convene a group of community leaders to discuss the project and to seek suggestions for possible additional community partners.

The following "Four-R" process can be used to identify both campus and community advocates: Research, Recruit, Retain, and Reward

Researching Potential Partners

Understanding where the formal and informal power structures reside on the campus and within the community may point you to the type of individuals and organizations you will want to involve in this project.

Individuals operating within the formal power structures are often easy to identify but sometimes difficult to reach. Individuals operating within the informal power structure are less likely to be as publicly recognized. These are the people whose names you may hear mentioned when community issues are raised. They are the "volunteer's volunteer." They may be involved with groups that are not part of the mainstream.

Whether your partners operate within the formal or informal power structure, they should provide access and credibility. You might ask yourself if your potential partners can help you reach a wider audience? Do they bring an audience that has not had an opportunity to discuss these issues? It might also be helpful to know how this potential partner is viewed within the community and/or by neighbors, faculty, colleagues, and others.

Natalie Johnson, national coordinator for this project, has met with several national civic and youth groups interested in fostering campus-community partnerships. If you would like to learn more about these groups, please see the Selected Community Groups Forming Campus Partnerships on the Resource page for Creating Campus-Community Partnerships.

While these national contacts may prove very useful, we encourage you to think creatively about enlisting local organizations and individuals as Potential Community Partners. In Bridging the Racial Divide, the Center for Living Democracy identifies community institutions necessary for the successful development of interracial dialogues. These include:

Religious organizations
Community-based not-for-profits
Schools and universities
Local government
Local business
National government
State Government
Local media


Recruiting Partners

Once you have identified your potential campus and community partners, meet with them to determine their level of interest and their own thoughts on the project's central goals. The key to recruitment is finding the right fit.

After you have identified appropriate partners and discussed the project with them, you should extend formal offers to join the partnership. This invitation should be issued by the President or Chancellor and should:

• Acknowledge the special role this individual or group plays on campus or within the community;
• Provide background information about the Racial Legacies and Learning project and your campus' involvement (you may want to provide community members with a copy of the Project Overview as an introduction to the project)
• Suggest a link between the work of this individual or group and the Racial Legacies and Learning project;
• Request their participation as either a campus advocate or a community advocate;
• Invite them to a coordinating meeting. Include your projects schedule of key dates and meetings with this invitation.

Retaining Partners

Once you have assembled a core set of partners for the project, how do you keep them engaged? An equitable organizational structure of the group will help members believe that their membership and participation is essential and valued. There will be many issues and commitments competing for participants' attention. To counter this in some measure, you might want to delegate certain responsibilities to different project participants. Some questions to consider include:

• What can each group (individual) best offer the project? What are their strengths? How can they best be used for this project?
• What are your common and individual goals for the project? What type of activities is each group interested in pursuing that can be incorporated into this project?
• Are there particular skills that certain participants would like to acquire by participating in the project? Can you structure the group so that there is a multiplicity of learning occurring?

Do your best to insure that individuals leave each meeting with appropriate tasks that allow them to contribute to moving the project forward.

Rewarding Participants

Can you provide rewards that meet both the intrinsic and extrinsic needs of your advocates? Exploring and learning from our racial legacies will be hard work for everyone involved. If individuals perceive that it will be all work and no pleasure, they may distance themselves from the project. Rewards may be as simple as an individual thank you note at an unexpected moment or as involved as a local or state government proclamation on behalf of the group's work. Other rewards for participation that you might make clear to participants include:

• Opportunities for both individuals and organizations to work with and form lasting relationships with new groups;
• On-going partnership activities for both the campus and the community.

Pay some attention at the beginning of the process to how you will reward individuals throughout the project and keep them engaged. This will enhance the group's sense of cohesion and commitment.

1>III. Tips on Planning Effective Campus-Community Events

Composing a group for the exploration of racism and racial reconciliation is a sensitive undertaking. There are a few guidelines that we believe are important for a successful project. The partnership should:

• Begin at home. We encourage you to work with your partners to develop a set of activities and an agenda for new learning that is reflective of your own campus missions and the make-up of your own communities.
• Be diverse. It is obviously essential to bring together people of a wide variety of backgrounds to plan and attend your project events.
• Recognize and support the need for new learning. The goal for your fall events should not simply be to discuss contentious issues, but rather to learn about America's racial legacies and to foster skills to facilitate continued and effective communication across differences.
• Use skilled facilitators to conduct productive conversations. Draw on members of your own community to enlist appropriate facilitators.
• Be flexible enough to accept new members who may be different from other group members and from campus participants, but who are interested in and committed to interracial dialogue.
• Link the national context for race relations with your local context.

There is no magic formula for determining a community partner or how many people should participate. Creating an open and inclusive process for selecting a diverse set of partners will go a long way toward establishing the credibility of this project.

IV. Making the Most of Your Partnership

Having selected, invited, and assembled a committed group of campus and community leaders, what will they do together for this project? Part of your planning should be dedicated to building the group's understanding of the question guiding this project:

How can higher education, with its local communities, prepare graduates to address the legacies of racism and the opportunities for racial reconciliation in the United States?

There may be a need for education within the group before you can proceed to plan for the fall. We have organized a selection of Bibliographies to provide you with reference materials on best practices for Interracial Dialogues as well as materials that are suitable for a reading group or a class assignment. While there is a wide range of activities that you may want to explore for your project, here are just a few examples of campus-community activities:

• Community service projects sponsored by the campus-community partnerships;
• Op-ed pieces written by group members for local papers;
• Seminars, lectures, and workshops;
• Book clubs/ reading groups.

V. Audience Development

As you plan for your events you should consider who your target audience will be. How can you get the word out to them and what can you do to ensure their attendance or participation? We encourage you to create a comprehensive communications plan for your project that considers:

• Target audience;
• Modes of outreach and publicity;
• Impact of event on the audience;
• Media targets--both on and off campus.

We have developed a guide to Creating a Communications Plan for suggestions on how to generate positive media coverage of your events. Remember that the Ford Foundation's Campus Diversity Initiative Public Information Project will release a national poll on public attitudes toward campus diversity on October 6, 1998. This poll maybe useful for your work in a number of ways. It is a source of additional knowledge for your study-dialogues. It also can be used to generate media coverage for your campus-community partnership.

V. Conclusion

We believe that each partnership will generate activities that not only advance intergroup relations within your locality but will model for others what campuses together with their communities can accomplish. We look forward to learning about the variety of approaches that you have explored with your community partners to generate new possibilities for our multiracial future.