Community-university partnerships: achieving the promise in the face of changing goals, changing funding patterns, and competing priorities.
An important challenge that community-university partnerships face is how to maintain themselves in the face of changing goals, priorities, and funding. Partnerships often form as a result of some sort of "spark:" an incident, perhaps, or the identification of a shared need or common concern. Often, external funding is sought to provide the majority of resources for the establishment of a partnership and for the implementation of the partnership's action plan. Whatever external funding is obtained is typically of short duration. The funding will not continue over time. And usually the funding comes with stipulations about allowable partnership approaches; inevitably the priorities of one funder will differ from those of another. These issues of the maintenance of partnership in the face of shifting funding and priorities are ones that confront most community-university partnerships. This article examines these issues through the lens of an environmental justice partnership that has existed for nearly a decade, has undergone many changes in who is involved, and has operated with funding from many different sources, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Housing and Urban Development, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In addition, the entities in the partnerships, while they share certain environmental objectives, are sometimes at odds on particular goals when the needs of the agencies differ. Further complicating this issue of continuity is the reality that partners, on occasion, must shift priorities after partnership goals are established. The experiences of this environmental justice partnership shed light on the kinds of struggles community-university partnerships face when they hope to avoid being undermined by the larger concerns of the funders or by the power brokers in their individual organizations. This article examines approaches that community-university partnerships might take to remain resilient in the face of changing goals, priorities and funding.
Center for Family, Work & Community, UMASS Lowell, 600 Suffolk St. Wannalacit Building Lowell, MA 01854, USA. Linda_Silka@uml.edu
Linda
L
Silka
Robin
R
Toof
David
D
Turcotte
Julie
J
Villareal
Laura
L
Buxbaum
Paulette
P
Renault-Caragianes
D002202:Capital Financing; D003159:Community-Institutional Relations / Q000191:economics; D004779:Environment Design; D004782:Environmental Health; D006798:Housing; D006801:Humans; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D012935:Social Justice; D014495:Universities / Q000191:economics / Q000458:organization & administration; D014504:Urban Health