Resources > Bibliography > Q - T

  • Real Partnerships.  Marga Incorporated and the Association for Community and Higher Education Partnerships.  New York, NY:  Marga Inc., 2005.
  • Reardon, K.M.  “Enhancing the Capacity of Community-Based Organizations in East St. Louis.”  Journal of Planning Education and Research.  Vol. 17, No. 4.  Tallahassee, FL:  Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, 1998.

"This article describes the efforts of students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to strengthen the organizing, planning, and development capacity of community-based organizations seeking to enhance the quality of life in East St. Louis's poorest residential neighborhoods. The article demonstrates the effectiveness of the university's empowerment planning approach to capacity-building that integrates the concepts and methods of participatory action research, direct action organizing, and critical theory into a new paradigm for community planning. The article concludes with a preliminary assessment of the empowerment planning approach's effectiveness in capacity-building in East St. Louis."

  • Reardon, K.M.  Rebuilding the Social Capital of America’s Most Distressed Urban Neighborhoods through Empowerment Planning and Preparing Students and Citizens for Democratic Planning.  Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.  Chicago, IL:  1999.
  • The Roper Group.  An Overview of Community Development Leadership Training Programs and Lessons Learned from Selected Colleges and Universities.  New York, NY:  Seedco, 2001. (To purchase this article - http://www.seedco.org/archive/cdltp.php)

"This report focuses on three key training issues influencing community development: developing the human resources within the field; managing the existing organizations and practitioners; and building the leadership voice that can tell the story of community development to a broader audience."  

  • Rubin, Victor.  “Evaluating University-Community Partnerships:  An Examination of the Evolution of Questions and Approaches.”  Cityscape:  A Journal of Policy Development and Research.  Vol. 5, No. 1.  Washington, DC:  U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research, 2000. http://www.huduser.org/Periodicals/CITYSCPE/VOL5NUM1/rubin.pdf

"As more partnerships between institutions of higher education and local communities are developed, a small but rapidly growing literature about the partnerships has emerged. They have become the subject of reflections by founders, surveys, interviews, case studies, content analyses, comparative frameworks, and databases, along with the methodological debates about how best to use these tools. This article examines the types of questions being asked, the scope of data collection and methods of analysis, the relationship of the authors to the partnerships, and the intended uses of the work. The development of an intellectually rigorous framework for evaluation of partnerships requires more than appropriate indicators of effective process or outcomes. The research must be based in the formulation of meaningful questions that relate to the core objectives of the partnerships and the programs that support them."

  • Rubin, Victor. “How Community Building is Finding its Way Into the Graduate Curriculum.”  Metropolitics:  Building Community Block by Block.  Vol. 4, No. 1.  New York, NY:  Center for Urban Research and Policy, Columbia University, 2001.
  • Rubin, Victor. “The Roles of Universities in Community-Building Initiatives.”  Journal of Planning and Education Research.  Vol. 17, No. 4.  Tallahassee, FL:  Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, 1998.

"Examines the roles played by universities in three distinct community-building initiatives in Oakland (California) over a five-year period, and outlines four lessons for university-community partnerships. The lessons affirm that the contributions universities can make to community-building are very important, and that the process of maintaining effective partnerships is complex, with a number of potential pitfalls."

  • Silka, L. “Paradoxes of Partnerships: Reflections on University-Community Collaborations.”  Research in Politics and Society.  Vol. 7, pp. 335-359.  JAI Press Inc., 1999.

"Community-university partnerships are widely touted as ways that universities and communities can achieve positive ends, and such partnerships are at the heart of many attempts by universities to become more involved in their surrounding communities. The ease of maintaining partnerships and having them result in unambiguous "goods" have often been treated as a given. Partnerships, when examined more closely, turn out not to mirror the simple positive rhetoric that so often marks their advocacy. In fact these partnerships are often paradoxical in process, dynamics, and outcomes. In this chapter, contradictory claims are juxtaposed that raise questions about partnerships: Are these activities peripheral to the academic endeavor or at the very heart?

Do these activities represent a useful approach because they are robust, easy to create and fit with faculty roles? Or do they draw faculty into unfamiliar terrain that fragments the professorate and diverts attention from the knowledge generation function of universities? As this chapter will show, the increasingly common practice of emphasizing community-university partnerships make us confront questions about the nature of expertise, about the nature of expertise, about disciplinary allegiances, about reward systems, about local application versus national prominence, and about the uneasy relationship that urban universities maintain with their surrounding communities. The chapter concludes with an analysis of ways that partnerships can become powerful tools by which urban universities can examine questions of how knowledge will be produced and used."

"This guidebook provides practical information for developing educational partnerships, which is based on the experiences of 30 different partnerships in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement's (OERI) Educational Partnership Program. Conclusions about the process of developing a partnership are offered. First, partnerships should be developed if there is a shared concern about a real problem that can be best addressed by organizations from different sectors working together. Second, beginning a successful partnership requires communication among participants about the nature of the concerns, the feasibility of a partnership to address those concerns, organization, roles and responsibilities, and the content and focus of activities. Third, successful partnerships require leadership to build commitment and gather resources, use evaluation and strategic and adaptive planning, and acknowledge and confront problems. Finally, there is no single way to ensure successful partnership development. However, successful partnerships exhibit open information sharing at every point. Specific sections address the following questions: What are the steps to developing a successful educational partnership? How does a successful partnership begin? How do successful partnerships begin implementation? What is the role of evaluation and planning?; what happens when things go wrong? and Will the effort be worthwhile? The appendix contains the Educational Partnerships program directory."