Healthy Community – University Partnerships

Kate Derickson

Co-Director of the CREATE Initiative

Director of Urban Studies

Professor of Geography, Environment and Society

Co-Investigator, LTER Nature and Wealth

My collaborations

• Member, Gullah/Geechee Sustainability Think Tank, St. Helena Island, South Carolina
• Collaborator, The GalGael Trust, Glasgow, Scotland
• Collaborator, The Turkey Creek Community Initiative, Gulfport, Mississippi
• Collaborator, West Atlanta Watershed Alliance, Atlanta, GA

Community engagement approaches that have fallen out of favor

• Extractive: business-as-usual, in which “best practices” emerge from university research with the expectation that communities should change their priorities and practices accordingly

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• Directive: which centers questions that the researcher and their colleagues are interested in, unfolds according to university timelines, and seldom results in research findings or products that meet the needs of communities.

Unhealthy collaboration approaches

• Proximity: researchers attend meetings, gain insight, but do not allow their research agendas to be shaped by community concerns

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• Dependency: researcher are wholly dependent on community to create scholarly outputs, requires buy in at every stage, taxes community capacity for scholarly ends

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• Imposition: university priorities, timelines and objectives drive the engagement and by extension, the timelines of community efforts

Healthy community-university partnerships

• Clear about where their goals, activities, objectives and theories of change overlap (and eventually, where they do not)

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• Respect the norms, time, and timelines of community partner organizations and their constituencies while minimizing the impositions of university norms and timelines

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• Researchers are clear on their value proposition to the partnership (which may change over time) and uphold it

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• Are transparent at all times – grant applications, budgeting, resource allocation

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Healthy partnerships can take the following forms:

Shared interests: researchers and community-based organizations or groups convene and converse around shared interests in topics, issues, and approaches.  They share findings, exchange resources, and leave open the possibility of short- or long-term collaboration as opportunities arise.

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Healthy partnerships can take the following forms:

Shared goals: researchers and community-based collaborators have a shared and explicit theory of change, conception of justice, and desired outcomes. Researchers create products for collaborators as well as products oriented toward their research communities that translate their findings to scholarly audiences.

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Healthy partnerships can take the following forms:

Shared activities: Researchers and community members identify research processes and products that address shared interests and advance shared goals.  They work together in an ongoing way to conduct research, share findings and resources. �

Challenges from the University side of things:

• Who speaks for whom? How representative are the “grass tops” of the “grass roots”?
• Community priorities change, sometimes quickly
• Research fatigue
• Timeline alignment
• University or funder bureaucracy and norms can be hostile to genuine partnership

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Approaches I’ve used:

• Work with organizations, not individuals
• Prioritize relationships over outputs
• Avoid instrumentalism – funnel resources and show up when there are no material benefits for researcher
• Faculty or permanent staff hold and cultivate relationships; students contribute to existing shared activities and interests
• Ethos of resourcefulness: research is to resource partners in their efforts
• Preserve independent scholarly pursuits