Chapter 3: Sustaining Transformative Community-Campus Partnerships through Interpersonal Accountability, Honoring Community Agency, and Shared Imagining

In the field of higher education community engagement, colleges, and universities partner with the nonprofit and public sectors to facilitate students’ civic, scholarly, and professional competency development through participation in activities that advance the work of the partner organizations in addressing social and environmental issues. The overarching goals of community engagement partnerships, as espoused by most institutions and the scholarship in the field, are to contribute positively to communities (locally and globally) by leveraging student and faculty labor in service to the public good, while also preparing students for lifelong habits of civic engagement (Bringle et al., 2006, Kuh, 2008). At best, these communitycampus partnerships are meant to represent the deeply rooted public purpose of higher education, and its capacity as a catalyst for positive social change (Bowen, 2014; Kahne & Westheimer, 1996; Marullo & Edwards, 2000). However, they often reflect the endemic culture of elitism, settler colonialism, and neoliberalism of higher education by framing partnerships as business transactions and communities as laboratories, or sites for epistemic extraction (Grande, 2018; Hall, 2018; Tuck, 2009). In many cases, the inherent power dynamics and charity orientation of higher education’s community partnerships perpetuate and exacerbate the very problems we claim to address.