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Introduction to the Bonner HICEPs:
The Bonner High-Impact Initiative is being designed with the conviction that the thoughtful integration of high-impact educational practices with community engagement can enable individual campuses and the national network to significantly strengthen their Bonner Programs (or other co-curricular developmental programs), as well as institutional civic engagement. We believe that the Bonner Program's proven success as a co-curricular, intensive service program also rests on a number of high-impact community engagement practices (HICEPs) that have been developed and spread across campuses.
High impact community partnership practices can act as multipliers for engaged learning and high-impact practices. While many know that service-learning is a high-impact practice, this initiative and experience from multiple campuses is explore how all of the HIPs—including global immersions and deliberative democracy dialogues, a newest practice—can also be linked to HICEPs. We continue to refine our language and approach for how to describe these high-impact community engagement practices, but they are framed around a strategic, team-based, multi-year relationships program model, such as that of the Bonner Scholar or Leader Program or others. Because of this structure, students can engage in developmental direct-service multi-year student positions and projects. Campuses work in a deep, intentional way with a set of committed community partners including non-profit and governmental agencies, schools, and consortia.
This structure enables academic service-learning and community-based research to involve multi-year faculty commitments and partnerships that continue beyond one term or semester (10 -15 weeks) and can be offered in a sequence, with a continuing relationship with the partner). Additionally, these partnerships allow for the integration of other forms of engagement, including public policy research to identify best practices, effective program models and related policy news for community partners (i.e, this connects with our PolicyOptions.org model). Finally, this approach to campus-community partnerships allow for evidence-driven program planning, capacity building, and assessment. For instance, the campus partners can engage in research projects to help an agency identify the best approaches for collective impact. This provides an opportunity for coalition-building and sharing of best practices across institutions and agencies. Examples such as the Learning to End Hunger consortia in New Jersey convene representatives of multiple agencies to share their work and models.
These themes summarize the key principles of the approach, which are fundamental to the Bonner Program:
Asset Based: rather than viewing neighborhoods and communities from a deficit point-of-view, we seek to identify and build upon the strengths and assets of each partner and community. Students and others are trained in this orientation.
Place Based: we also believe in the importance of place – including listening to residents and leaders – and understanding the learning and meaning that is derived from engaging in a community.
Mutually Beneficial and Reciprocal: staff and students who build and manage Bonner Programs and Centers invest in building relationships that are intentional, aim to add value for each party, and demonstrate reciprocity.
Developmental: just as our work with students is developmental, so too is our work on partnerships. Programs and institutions acknowledge that it takes experience to build and sustain partnerships that can include students working at different levels, connections with faculty members and academic courses, and even long-range community impact goals.
Deep: an aim is to have partners connected with multiple resources on campus, such as the involvement of long-term student volunteers, research projects, and even resource development.
Sustained: because of the multi-year involvement of Bonner students and the establishment of campus infrastructure (such as staffing and centers) to manage partnerships and projects, partners can look for longer-term engagement by their partnering college or university. This supports long-range visioning, planning, and even impact assessment.
Focus on Capacity Building: we have adopted goals for building the capacity of organizations and communities, including strategies for direct service, volunteer management, program development, communications, organizational development, research, and assessment.
Partners as Co-Educators: we believe and intentially engage partner staff as well as clients in co-educator roles, valuing their knowledge about their communities, issues, and approaches for change.
Connective: when the knowledge and skills of all who are involved in the engagement is sought and respected, mentoring and learning take on new dimensions. Teaching and learning becomes a dialectical process for all.
Democratic: we seek to foster “democratic engagement,” meaning that all contributors are valued in helping to address issues (like education and hunger), create knowledge (through scholarship and action), and be a part of a larger eco-system of individuals and organizations working for a healthy and just society
Auditing Your High-Impact Community Engagement Practices:
The following questions might help those involved in designing collaborative projects and curriculum to intentionally build in HICEPs.
Place (Place-Based)
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Is the community engagement systematically informed by an understanding of the place and community voice (i.e., roles in program and institutional decisions)?
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Are community assets and needs systematically informing the community engagement?
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Relevant structures: Community Asset Mapping; Community Advisory Boards; town-hall meetings and forums; community representation as Trustees.
Humility (Valuing the Knowledge of All and including Co-Educators)
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Does the campus (involved members and more broadly) demonstrate that the knowledge of the partner and community is valued as key assets?
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Is the knowledge of all stakeholders (community and campus) valued and incorporated as assets in the partnership and projects?
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Relevant structures: Community Asset Map results; detailed inventories; integration of data in making focused choices; knowledge shar- ing; coeducator roles; learning circles.
Integration (Integrated)
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Does the community engagement include both the student development insights of cocurricular experience and the contextualization of academic learning?
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Are the positions through which we partners involve students and faculty leveraging the academic knowledge and skills available?
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Relevant structures: faculty members with long-term relationships to partner sites and teams of students; placements that are embedded in coursework.
Depth (Deep)
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Is the community engagement embedded within a structure of strategic developmental sustained partnerships?
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Have the organization and the college agreed to build and implement a multiyear, developmental partnership?
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Relevant structures: multiyear partnership agreements; strategic plans with partners; detailed job descriptions for VISTAs (Volunteers in Service to America); community learning agreements; and positions that involve multisemester evolution for students.
Development (Developmental)
- Is the community engagement developmentally appropriate for the stage of the undergraduate (or graduate) student or other volunteer?
- Is the organization able to specify the developmental needs of each position and able to match volunteers appropriately?
- Relevant structures: developmental placements; outcome-oriented job descriptions for volunteers who also show growth over time.
Sequence (Scaffolded)
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Could the community engagement project and/or courses be offered and linked across multiple semesters and experiences?
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Can the organization work with the college to access volunteers and resources year round?
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Relevant structures: programs that operate year round (i.e., summer internships/fellowships/programs); course sequence opportunities for stu- dents; academic programs with sequences; shared campus–community calendars.
Teams (Collaborative)
- Is the community engagement structured to maximize the effective use of student learning, collaboration, and leadership (i.e., site/issue teams)?
- Can the organization integrate team-based management and student leadership such that the positions offer developmental work and opportunities?
- Relevant structures: site- or issue-based teams; management approaches that involve student leadership or VISTAs at sites; volunteer manage- ment strategies that engage volunteers at multiple levels.
Reflection
- Does the community engagement involve structured (and unstructured) rigorous reflection?
- Do the volunteers participate in reflection through which they understand the community context?
- Relevant structures: structured and unstructured reflection opportunities; trainings and facilitation that support ongoing reflection; blogs; vlogs; journaling; e-portfolios; course-based reflection assignments.
Mentors
- Does the community engagement involve dialogue and guidance (from faculty, staff, and partners) as supervisors, participants, and facilitators?
- Are there opportunities for the volunteers (students and faculty) to be mentored, including by partners, faculty, students, and others with knowledge and experience to share?
- Relevant structures: Bonner Buddies (pairings of upper-class and under-class students; families [groups of students across class years used during meetings and trainings]; retreat programming; shadowing of new Bonners with veterans; required 1-to-1 meetings; advising structures; faculty and dean mentors (often tied to cohorts, sites, or classes).
Learning
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Is there an intentional opportunity for stakeholders (faculty, staff, students, and partners) to reflect on, share, and articulate their own learning (learning approaches and outcomes) as they engage in collaborative community-based initiatives, reflect upon and assimilate content, meaning, and action?
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Is the learning process co-constructed; is it inclusive of both community and campus constituents as authentic collaborators as teachers, learners, and scholars?
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Relevant structures: engaging partners as coeducators; engaging partners in helping students process their learning and growth through reflection; partners teaching in classroom contexts
Capacity
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Is the community engagement focused around capacity-building needs of the partner or constituency in ways that contribute to enhancing its work (i.e., program design, CBR and policy research, assessment, resource development, organizational development)?
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Can the partnership result in increased capacity by both the institution and community constituents to address and solve problems?
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Relevant structures: community-based research projects and commu- nity-based participatory research; policy research assignments for the partner and the production of issue briefs; issue-oriented capacity- building initiatives such as when a campus conducts a community health index study for the local area; board development (utilizing campus resources or individuals); fundraising and resource sharing; community economic development projects; new program design; the integration of proven program models to improve service delivery and/ or organizational capacity.
Evidence (Proven)
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Is the community engagement informed by evidence-based practice and proven program models?
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Can the partnership help the organization or community constituency identify relevant program models, approaches, or evidence to inform, enhance, or deepen its work?
- Relevant structures: the production and integration of proven program models; research on behalf of a partner/agency; community-wide edu- cational settings (i.e., town-hall meetings and forums); deliberative democracy forums that integrate dialogue about effectiveness; issue- based gatherings of nonprofit partners to foster coalitions.
Impact
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Is the community engagement organized to achieve measurable com- munity impact (i.e., qualitative and quantitative)?
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Relevant structures: community-listening projects that work with part- ners to identify intended outcomes and then find or create measures for them; capacity-building metrics and rubrics; evidence-based pro- gram design and implementation; logic modeling; strategic planning with community partners to share community indicators; outcome- based program design.
(NOTE: This is also drawn from the chapter in Deepening Community Engagement in Higher Education, where we were able to share the HICEPs with a broader audience (Hoy & Johnson, 2013).
In practice, the HICEPS are generally clustered as they are structured into and play out within a particular relationship with a community partner; for example, the integration of a site-based team involving freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors serving at a local school or youth development program may enable a focus on place, humility, depth, sequence, mentors, and capacity building. These principles can be helpful not only for short- and long-range planning but also for learning outcome design and assess- ment. They can act as magnifiers for engaged learning, especially because they provide a way for students and faculty to live the mission of public engagement in a tangible way, tied to a real community and the potential for impact.
Additional Bonner Resources for Community Partnerships
You can find other resources related to these community partnership practices here on the wiki under:
Co-Curricular Student Development Model and Practices:
Developmental and team-oriented Community Partnership practices including:
While building and integrating these high-impact strategies, the institution will also build the capacity and infrastructure to provide public policy research and support issue-oriented community strategies for specific program model and issue areas. Campuses involved will be supported in developing higher-level student and faculty engagement to integrate public policy research, networking, and capacity building capabilities (using the Bonner Foundation’s PolicyOptions model) for local non-profit and government agencies.
This initiative builds upon twenty years of Bonner Program development, as well as our past efforts to engage faculty and staff in establishing community-based research courses and civic engagement certificates, concentrations, or minors.
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