The Nashman Center would like to thank all the participants of this energizing and productive event, including 6 faculty/administrators, 8 community organization 
representatives, and 12 students. Community partners represented ArtReach GW, For Love of Children, Horton's Kids, Latino Student Fund, Little Friends for Peace, and Raising a Village.
The aim of these meetings is to approach the cycle of strategic planning, implementation of new plans, and assessment of progress in a way that involves all stakeholders in all stages of the process.
Participants listened carefully to each other’s experiences and perspectives, used emerging themes to imagine an ideal campus-community partnership, and then set concrete, shared goals for the coming year. Everyone (students, faculty, community partners, and Nashman Center staff) has roles to play in the coming year to achieve the goals outlined here.
The conversation identified many important elements of the ideal campus-community partnership: responsibility/accountability, communication, trust, mutual understanding, open sharing of ideas, sustained partnerships, and respect for each other’s knowledge/perspectives. To reach for this ideal, participants collectively identified the most important concrete goal we can all agree to work on in the coming year.
Concrete Goals for the Coming Year
Build deeper relationships across all stakeholder groups (community partners, faculty, students, Nashman Center staff).
Closer relationships build trust and understanding. Both the content and tone of our communications are clearer when we more fully understand each other’s context. We will all have a role to play in creating formal opportunities for relationship-building and in taking advantage of informal moments to connect and get to know each other.
Stronger relationships are connected to many aspects of the ideal partnership we identified: connecting service to personal passions, engaging with a sense of responsibility and accountability, empowering all stakeholders to contribute collaboratively to joint planning, and developing mutual comfort in sharing and receiving feedback.
Communicate expectations more clearly and sooner.
Establishing shared expectations early helps create the accountability that is imperative to building trust and ensuring the sustainability of relationships. It is particularly crucial for campus-community partnerships related to youth development.
Creating clarity about the expectations all stakeholders have and sharing those expectations sooner will help everyone feel more confident about the project they decide to commit themselves to. By establishing clear expectations, making sure students know about service-components to courses before registration, and developing passion and shared responsibility among students for communities they are entering into, we can help to develop a culture of accountability and ownership among all stakeholders.
This goal will include improved written communications, remembering the availability of GWServes as a tool to reach each other. It will also involve re-imagining our orientation and on-boarding processes. The timing of both written and in-person communications will be pushed sooner, particularly regarding courses.
The goal for making a stronger start is connected to many of our shared goals, particularly for connecting engagement to personal passions, engaging with a sense of responsibility and accountability, and building trust.
The Appreciative Inquiry Process
The Appreciative Inquiry method was used to facilitate our process. This is a strengths-based approach to organizational change.
- Clarifying the best of what is. First, in pairs, participants shared a "peak moment" when they were engaged in a campus community partnership and shared details on what made this particular moment so rewarding. Pairs then joined to former small groups, sharing the themes that emerged in their stories and identifying elements that are key for a good partnership for all stakeholders. Each group identified particular themes that contributed to the value of these moments and highlighted commonalities between these experiences.
- Imagining what could be. From there, groups imagined the most ideal campus-community partnership, drawing on the elements identified by all stakeholders’ stories.
- Determining what should be. Finally, breaking into new groups, participants reflected on what was discussed throughout the event to highlight several key goals to continue to foster deeper and more wholistic partnerships.
- Creating what will be. In the end, the whole room worked to narrow down these goals into main themes in order to focus on one concrete goal to work on collectively in the coming year.
