Campus Community Partnerships

DOWNLOAD:
"Creating, Running, and Sustaining Campus-Community Service-Learning Partnerships: Lessons from Practitioners" (3 MB pdf)
By Richard Schramm, University of Vermont
Prepared for Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont Campus Compacts

(Excerpted from the publication:)

"Campus-community partnerships are an essential element in community service-learning. Partnerships are the structure for identifying community needs, developing appropriate student projects, fostering experiential education, carrying out required planning and logistics and sharing feedback on the process and results.

Because of their importance, the elements of successful campus-community partnerships have gotten a lot of attention; however, less has been done to identify “best” or even “promising” practices that are used to create, run and sustain good partnerships. The purpose of this handbook is to record and share the voices of partnership practitioners on what they have done that has worked well in their partnership efforts.

This need, and the value of practitioner voices in addressing it, became apparent as the Campus Compacts of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont brought together campus and community partnership members in a variety of activities funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service. Under this Learn and Serve grant, the Campus Compacts of Northern New England offered summits, sub-grants and trainings all aimed at creating and strengthening partnerships among institutions of higher education and community partners and meeting community needs.

As this grant neared completion, the Northern New England Campus Compacts decided to draw on this experience and create a handbook to document and share the wisdom of these many practitioners. Cheryl Whitney Lower of Vermont Campus Compact and Maryli Tiemann of Maine Campus Compact were particularly instrumental in the creation of this handbook, with other important contributions from state Campus Compact Executive Directors, Amy Gibans McGlashan (Vermont), Liz McCabe Park (Maine) and Deborah Scire (New Hampshire), as well as Amy Escoto and Alice Elliott, former Campus Compact staff. Many thanks also to Lyn DeGraff of Middlebury College who formatted this handbook and offered invaluable advice.

Thanks are also due to the many campus faculty and staff, and their community partners, who completed surveys or were interviewed to provide the substance of this handbook. Their voices, and the important practices they describe, make up most of what this handbook has to offer. In addition we thank the other campuses in Northern New England who may not be included in this publication, but have also worked on strengthening campus community partnerships, and from whom we have learned a great deal.

Grateful acknowledgement goes to the Corporation for National and Community Service for its support of this important project, and specifically to retired program officer, Valerie Wheeler, for her enthusiastic and unwavering support of the work of the Northern New England Collaborative."