Best Practices in University-Community Partnerships

JOPERD • Volume 77 No. 4 • April 2006 U niversities have a civic responsibility to address the current needs in society. To that end, they have attempted various forms of university-community collaborations with schools, community agencies, and neighborhood organizations that serve children, youths, and families (Cox, 2000). The belief is that bridging the gap between the privileged demographic of universities and underserved neighboring schools and youth agencies will provide positive reinforcement to disadvantaged youths from role models who can encourage and enlighten them. Unfortunately, the internal organization and structural logic of universities, on the one hand, and of schools and youth agencies, on the other, are often disparate. When taken together, they can actually operate at cross-purposes. Such collaborative constituents need to work together by adapting their individual practices and purposes to the goals for which the partnerships are formed. However, best intentions alone are often insuffi cient to surmount bureaucratic misunderstandings or the unintended misappropriation of valuable time and resources. While each side of the equation has a level of expertise facilitating their own organization, they rarely have expertise in interorganizational collaboration (Amen, 2001). For example, the Good Community Collaborative (2000), a partnership between the University of South Florida and three community agencies, failed due to different decision-making processes and a lack of communication in regard to what the collaboration was really about. Similarly, Kirschenbaum and Reagan (2001) describe a university-community collaboration that failed due to poor communication, transience of school staff, and a lack of shared interest in the program. Clearly, some sort of analysis was required to navigate these shortcomings and to propose just how universities can better prepare their members for engagement with their community organizations. In contrast, several atypical examples have demonstrated successful communication and planning from both sides of the collaboration (Butler & Mergardt, 1994; Fullan, 1992; Leithwood, 1990). The failed partnerships might have benefi ted from specifi c strategies for developing and sustaining successful universitycommunity collaborations. The Youth Leader Partnership (YLP) is a group of six kinesiology and physical education faculty members from fi ve different universities (Walsh, 2002). Their task is to facilitate effective university-community collaborations that can specifi cally meet the needs of underserved youths. They emphasize establishing physical-activity-based youth-development programs for underserved youths at schools or youth agencies in the communities that surround universities. Their collaborations have the following four purposes: (1) provide a service to the youths in their programs; (2) train undergraduate and graduate students how to develop, implement, and evaluate such programs (by the second year of internship, students often begin their own programs); (3) conduct research projects on the impact of these programs and disseminate fi ndings through workshops, presentaBest Practices in University-Community Partnerships