The Challenges of Putting Community First

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to share tensions experienced by the Center for Community-Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) at the University of Colorado Boulder during its attempts to facilitate social justice–oriented community change. These tensions speak to larger questions about the goals of community-campus engagement (CCE) programs, especially regarding the nature of power, interests, and definitions of community and impact. This paper documents CU Engage’s learning process through three illustrative stages: an exploratory community-based project, a qualitative self-study, and a collaboratively generated conceptual framework for public impact. Through this process, CU Engage has begun to develop an approach that applies, extends, and complicates existing frameworks of collective impact and community first. Tensions that arose highlight three imperatives: (1) integration of participatory processes into CCE programs to supplement organizational partnerships with direct community input, (2) attention to power and structural constraints in community-centered work, and (3) creation of conceptual tools that guide collaborative work.

Introduction

The Center for Community-Based Learning and Engagement (CU Engage) was launched at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014. Prior to this, the university had a number of well-established service-learning programs located in different units across campus; the creation of CU Engage organized them into one administrative and academic unit. The motivating vision was that CU Engage could become more than the sum of its parts; in collaboration with community partners, major impacts could be produced by leveraging existing programs and the broader resources of the university. CU Engage worked toward fulfilling this vision through a deliberate process that involved three separate stages, each utilizing different methodological approaches. First, the center mapped stakeholders, conducted ethnographic research, and held dialogic cafecitos with residents in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project with the goal of understanding the local landscape and potential partner organizations. Second, CU Engage conducted a formal self-study using semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of existing university programs and affiliated community organizations to assess perceptions of the impacts of partnerships. Third, through iterative and reflexive processes involving staff members, CU Engage developed new practices and created strategies that could increase the effectiveness of its partnerships. The authors of this article combined and synthesized the findings in consultation with relevant community-campus engagement (CCE) literatures and models, drawing heavily from community first (Andrée, 2016; CFICE, 2018), collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011), and community-based participatory research (Wallerstein & Duran, 2017).

The purpose of this article is to share tensions faced by CU Engage during its inception and throughout its attempts to facilitate social justice–oriented community change. These tensions speak to larger questions about the goals of CCE programs, especially regarding the nature of power, interests, and definitions of community and impact. In what ways do assumptions about the community exclude certain populations and actors? When working with staff employed by community organizations, how does a CCE program make sense of their claims to represent communities? What are the benefits and limitations of relying on dyadic partnerships versus collaborative networks? This article presents a conceptual map to guide conversations about impact among and across diverse stakeholders in CCE initiatives. Two salient conceptual perspectives, community first and collective impact, are elaborated before turning to CU Engage’s process.

Literature Review

CU Engage’s Journey

CU Engage is a university center that houses 11 semi-autonomous CCE programs, all of which are committed to participatory community-based principles (Strand et al., 2003). Since the founding of the center in 2014, the individual CCE programs have accomplished many important projects with community partners, but these impacts tended to be singular and isolated. Moreover, structural differences allowed some of CU Engage’s CCE programs to employ community-based practices with more consistency than others. On the whole, CU Engage has struggled to achieve broad and lasting impact in the community.

The programs within CU Engage encompass three types of CCE: community-based learning, community-based research, and direct organizing. First, the bulk of the center’s work is oriented toward community-based learning, which is employed by eight programs. All of these programs aspire to have mutual and reciprocal relationships with community partners, although each program is structurally different (Hildreth, 2018; Kirshner, Pacheco, Sifuentes, & Hildreth, 2017). Five of these programs use undergraduate courses as the primary avenue for organizing community involvement: INVST Community Studies, Leadership Studies Minor, Public Achievement, Puksta Scholars, and a faculty fellowship for a community-based learning program. Three programs—CU Dialogues, Aquetza, and the SWAP Student Worker Alliance Program—use nontraditional mechanisms within the university (e.g., summer programs, work-study) to educate and empower members of the community (Lopez & Romero, 2017). Second, community-based research is supported by CU Engage through two programs: a graduate fellowship program and the Education Research Hub, which facilitate collaborative research with activist groups on local, national, and international levels. Third, CU Engage has one program, the Just Transition Collaborative, which aims to influence local environmental policies by organizing marginalized community members whose perspectives are typically excluded from such processes.

Because many of these programs previously existed independently, CU Engage recently embarked on an effort to increase its impact by fostering collaboration and organizational coherence among its programs and community partners to target community-defined challenges. This process was broad and multifaceted; it included three distinct stages of reflective initiatives. Each surfaced tensions that required extending community first and collective impact frameworks and practices in new directions.

First, in the spring of 2016, CU Engage began a CBPR project to establish relationships with individuals in the community, understand prevailing issues in their lived experiences, and explore the ways they have historically been positioned in the local institutional landscape. This involved interviews and focus groups with 30 Latinx parents as well as a grounded ethnography in school spaces. The project lasted for a year and a half and found that community organizations and community members had very different conceptions of impact; community members felt that many community organizations did not represent or support their needs. CCE frameworks often assume the efficacy of community organizations, but these findings highlight the need to integrate participatory practices into CCE programming to assess the organizational landscape and supplement partnerships when problematic dynamics are evident.

Second, CU Engage conducted a formal self-study in response to some staff members’ impressions that its CCE programs could have greater community-driven impact. Chris Wegemer conducted 29 semi-structured interviews with CU Engage staff, students, and community partners in the fall of 2018. This study found that community partners were not central to the decision-making of CU Engage’s CCE programs. More important, it revealed how touting a community-centered approach can mask power dynamics in ways that hinder the formation of equitable relationships. The findings emphasized the complexities of navigating the constraints and interests of CCE stakeholders and what it means for a university center to put community first (Wegemer, 2018).

Third, CU Engage began to develop new strategies to collaborate with community partners toward the goal of increasing positive impact in the fall of 2018 and winter of 2019. Specifically, CU Engage recognized that dyadic partnerships had limited ability to support broad community change, and a collective approach was necessary. New conceptual tools were created out of practical necessity through an iterative co-design process involving the CU Engage staff. Raising questions about the meaning of impact was employed as a strategy to operationalize existing conceptual frameworks (such as collective impact), adapt them to particular contexts, and bridge the gap between theory and practice. As a result, CU Engage developed a model of impact and a dialogic process to span boundaries and establish an equity-oriented foundation for a network of partnerships.

These stages illustrate CU Engage’s ongoing process of navigating conceptual frameworks associated with community engagement. While CU Engage specializes in CBPR, CU Engage draws from a broad range of conceptual approaches in its constant efforts to improve impact. This can entail applying processes and features from other models to the center’s programming or using different conceptual lenses for critical reflection and planning. In these senses, CU Engage has encountered the community first and collective impact/collaborating for justice and equity models. CU Engage sees both strengths and weaknesses in these frameworks; the ideas presented this article illustrate some critiques. Lastly, another motivation underlying CU Engage’s exploration of conceptual frameworks is to advance knowledge and develop new strategies that will broadly improve community engagement practices. CU Engage advocates for conceptual perspectives that are most capable of facilitating equitable and lasting social change.

The complexity of CU Engage’s work cannot be captured by a single publication. CU Engage represents 11 CCE initiatives that involve a large number of staff and community partners; there are many compatible and complementary perspectives that could characterize different facets of CU Engage’s approach. The authors have played leadership roles in the initiatives described above, and in this sense, this article represents both our own work within CU Engage and CU Engage’s collective efforts. Our insights were generated during weekly meetings of the authors over a period of six months in the fall of 2018. Consistent with reflexive approaches of CFICE (Goemans, Levkoe, Andrée, Changfoot, & Christopherson-Cote, 2018), our self-analyses challenged existing relationships and processes within our own institution and critically considered our own positionality as researchers and program staff. Below, we present our reflections on each of CU Engage’s three developmental stages in turn, followed by a brief discussion of potential conceptual interpretations of CU Engage’s different roles.

Understanding Local Context Through Participatory Processes

CU Engage’s work with Latinx parents around issues of educational equity and access began with an exploratory study in the spring of 2016. As a newly formed center, CU Engage wanted to build community-based collaborations but saw understanding the community as a prerequisite to establishing new partnerships and projects. The Community Foundation of Boulder published a report that highlighted the “achievement gaps” and inequities in education, health, and economics across the county (McMillan & Stutzman, 2015). The report showed that Latinx and low-income students had lower standardized test scores, high school graduation rates, and college persistence rates than their White, more affluent peers. Concerned about such substantial educational inequities in a well-resourced county, the exploratory project was initially driven by the question, How are Latinx families experiencing schools and institutions? A central focus was investigating the ways in which the “achievement gaps” were being framed and who was being positioned as responsible for academic underperformance. Building on CU Engage’s existing connections with parents, Jennifer Pacheco began the process of building relationships. These relationships led to larger groups of parents with whom Pacheco conducted informal interviews and conversations to better understand the issues they faced, in their own words (Kirshner et al., 2017). In 2016 and 2017, Pacheco attended local town hall meetings, school events, and parent programming facilitated by nonprofit organizations.

It quickly became clear that many of the local efforts to engage parents followed a similar deficit-oriented paradigm. Organizations frequently operated on the assumption that Latinx parents needed to acquire certain skills to be better parents and that this would, in turn, lead to their children’s academic success. For example, one nonprofit offered workshops to teach Latinx parents how to talk to their children about drugs, how to employ mindfulness in their parenting, and why reading to young children is important. While these were not inherently problematic, they illustrated how the organization identified parent behavior as a source of their children’s academic struggles rather than looking at how the educational system was failing historically marginalized youth.

In another case, a local organization sought to support parents’ involvement in education. Instead of encouraging or supporting direct participation in a school’s existing PTA, they created a parallel group for Spanish-speaking parents. They did not appear to be aware of how having two parent groups, separated by language and ethnicity, could marginalize the Spanish-speaking parents. (For example, we heard a person in the organization describe the Spanish-speaking parent group as “cute.”) Both of these examples show how local organizations gave less attention to changing existing structures and differentially treated Latinx parents in ways that held them responsible for the challenges that their children faced in inequitable educational environments.

To investigate how inequity was being reproduced in parents’ everyday life, Jennifer Pacheco and Manuela Sifuentes organized a series of six cafecitos, or group dialogues, as well as individual interviews with approximately 30 parents in the fall of 2016 to the spring of 2018. Issues such as lack of access to advanced courses, discriminatory academic tracking, insufficient translation services, racialized school spaces, and unwelcoming environments surfaced as common themes. It became evident that in the local “community” engagement discourse, much of the community was being left out.

The exploratory participatory parent project made CU Engage more attuned to the problematic dynamics of the local nonprofit environment. With a fresh perspective, we recognized the prevalence of deficit-based narratives and patterns of racist practices that undermined long-term progress (Castle, 2018). Some of the local nonprofit organizations that provided services to the Latinx community did not seem to represent the community members or understand their interests. In some extreme cases, reports of abuse or mistreatment were repeatedly dismissed. Many local nonprofits are run by upper-class White individuals who lack shared lived experiences with the communities they work for and claim to speak for. Despite the presence of well-resourced nonprofits, this local organizational culture has perpetuated power imbalances that undermine progress.

Reorienting Towards Community Partners

The participatory project with parents provided vital information that informed CU Engage’s work with communities. To explore how the findings could increase community engagement, CU Engage decided to take a step back to examine the current impacts of its programs, look for ways these impacts could be enhanced, and explore possibilities for structural changes to CU Engage that might foster greater collaboration (both between community partners and CCE programs and between various CCE programs within CU Engage). Each CCE program regularly conducted ongoing evaluations of partnerships, but this was often done in such a way that took the terms of the partnership for granted, focusing only on what was going well, what could be better, and how to document the impacts. The CU Engage self-study was spearheaded by the lead author, a visiting scholar from the University of California, Irvine. His outside perspective provided the opportunity to ask deeper questions about CU Engage’s relationships with community partners and to critically examine long-standing partnerships in new ways.

Consistent with CU Engage’s participatory philosophy, the self-study involved broad engagement with various stakeholders. The input of CU Engage staff, participants in CU Engage programs, graduate students, and community partners was collected through semi-formal interviews in the fall of 2018. In total, 29 interviews were conducted by the lead author, five of which were conducted with community partners. A combination of content and narrative analyses was used to explore a range of topics; the findings were documented in an internal report and used as the basis for professional development with CU Engage staff (Wegemer, 2018).

The vast majority of CU Engage staff and affiliates described students as the primary focus of CU Engage programming. This perception of CU Engage as student centered rather than community centered was validated by interviews with community partners. All of the community partners praised CU Engage and held CU Engage staff in very high regard. However, two of the five community partners were agnostic about whether their collaboration had an impact on their organization or the community. The remaining three described collaborations as having the potential to have an impact on the community, implying this potential was not realized. All community partners expressed an interest in exploring more ways to collaborate with the university. They suggested that community members could play more central roles in framing underlying problems and designing projects with CU Engage programs.

Although the sample size was too small to make definitive conclusions, the results provided evidence that community-centered joint work has not been the dominant form of community engagement within CU Engage. The community partners interviewed were selected by CU Engage staff; these organizations represented the most robust partnerships. It is reasonable to assume that other community partners would report being less integrated into CU Engage programming.

Centering Impact as a Strategy to Facilitate Collective Work

Conclusions and Implications

CU Engage encountered three tensions while exploring strategies to increase its impact: (1) disconnect between community members and the organizations that purportedly represent them, (2) programmatic constraints and power asymmetries between community partners and university initiatives, and (3) limited ability of dyadic partnerships to achieve broad and lasting social change. The elaboration of these conceptual struggles do not undermine but complicate the notion of “community-centered” work; toward its own goals, CU Engage uses this term aspirationally with tempered realism. Successfully operationalizing CCE principles has been defined not by whether the structure of CU Engage matches an objective model but by whether CU Engage sustains a critically reflective effort to improve community engagement and positively impact issues raised by the community.

Navigating these tensions has led CU Engage to assume different roles that invoke separate models community-based participatory research, community first, and collective impact/collaborating for justice and equity. This illustrates how CU Engage uses the lenses of different conceptual frameworks to critically reflect on its practices. First, CU Engage has played the part of an organizer of participatory action projects; in our particular context, direct engagement with community members is a necessary supplement to organizational partnerships. Strand et al. (2003) describe several models of community-based research, along with the advantages and weaknesses of conducting work at the organizational and grassroots levels. As an organizer of participatory action research, CU Engage adapts functions from university-led community building approaches (Rubin, 1998) and comprehensive community initiatives (Chaskin, 2001).

Second, CU Engage has acted as a broker of community-campus relationships. Of the many responsibilities implicated in this role, we have emphasized the brokerage of power as essential for establishing equity in partnerships and identifying actors’ positionality. Power dynamics have been recognized as a key feature in establishing effective relationships (Schwartz, Weaver, Pei, & Miller, 2016), and investigating power asymmetries clarifies the challenges of facilitating community-driven work in “community-university-based brokering initiatives” (Levkoe & Stack-Cutler, 2018). The role of a broker establishes CU Engage as the central boundary spanner (Weerts & Sandmann, 2010), and in this sense, CU Engage is responsible for being attentive to power differentials across boundaries (e.g., being aware of contexts being bridged, the positionality of each person, and how relationships are negotiated). This manifests in all areas of CU Engage’s work, including direct engagement and convening a collective network. Even as CU Engage aspires to achieve the goals of the community first framework, it is mindful of these structural relations.

Third, CU Engage has operated as a “backbone organization” within the university (Kania & Kramer, 2011; Turner, Merchant, Kania, & Martin, 2012) and a “convener” for community organizations (Wolff et al., 2017). CU Engage is beginning to fulfill these roles in an attempt to move beyond dyadic partnerships and build a networked approach toward social change. Several academic institutions have endorsed collective impact and university centers have been considered backbone organizations by some scholars and practitioners (Gillam & Counts, 2018; Schwartz et al., 2018), although the collective impact framework was not designed with attention to higher education and has been contrasted with community engagement initiatives (Smith, Pelco, & Rooke, 2017). The structure of a university center allows CU Engage to avoid some of the challenges of establishing systems for a coalition (Klempin, 2016a, 2016b), although CU Engage must still adjust its processes toward common outcomes. Recent developments in the collective impact literature are more aligned with CU Engage’s approach than the original formulation; the backbone organization has been positioned as a facilitator of a community movement (Weaver & Cabaj, 2018) and a catalyst for change-making (DuBow, Hug, Serafini, & Litzler, 2018) rather than as a top-down administrator. These perspectives have been complemented by the collaborating for justice and equity framework, a community-based alternative to collective impact (Wolff et al., 2017). CU Engage has experimented with foregrounding a social justice model of impact as a boundary object capable of doing some of the heavy lifting required to reconcile differences between actors in order to establish an equity-oriented network.

The central tensions that arise from this work are interconnected, as are the strategies and roles that CU Engage has employed to try to address them. Focusing on the interplay of these roles and their integration into a coherent model is the subject of future work that may deepen our understanding (and application) of existing conceptual frameworks. In some ways, this article is a response to Wolff et al.’s (2017) “call to action”; the community engagement field has made progress, but more work is necessary to establish a model of networked collaboration capable of integrating participatory practices, attending to power dynamics, and supporting collective approaches to achieving equitable social change. CU Engage does not offer solutions but exploratory strategies (and remains skeptical of generalizable solutions across diverse CCE contexts). The practical demands of our mission require the development of conceptual frameworks that support CU Engage’s work. In a broader sense, this article represents an engagement with the larger collective of CCE professionals who seek to positively impact the idea of community engagement. We present our experiences in the hope that they will usefully inform the progress of other CCE programs.

Author Note

The authors thank Ben Kirshner, Faculty Director of CU Engage, for his support of the projects presented here as well as conceptual guidance and feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Christopher M. Wegemer, University of California, Irvine, 217 Verano Place, Irvine, CA 92617. [email protected]

References

• Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 132–169.
• Andrée, P. (2016, March 11). Report: SSHRC midterm review report. Unpublished internal SSHC report. Retrieved from https://carleton.ca/communityfirst/2016/report-sshrc-midterm-review-report/
• Andrée, P., Chapman, D., Hawkins, L., Kneen, C., Martin, W., Muehlberger, C., ... & Stroink, M. (2014). Building effective relationships for community-engaged scholarship in Canadian food studies. Canadian Food Studies/La Revue Canadienne Des études Sur L'alimentation, 1(1), 27–53.
• Apple, M. W. (2012). Education and power. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Astin, A. W., & Astin, H. S. (2000). Leadership reconsidered: Engaging higher education in social change. Battle Creek, MI: W. K. Kellogg Foundation.
• Baldridge, B. J. (2014). Relocating the deficit: Reimagining Black youth in neoliberal times. American Educational Research Journal, 51(3), 440–472.
• Beckman, M., Penney, N., & Cockburn, B. (2011). Maximizing the impact of community-based research. Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 15(2), 83–103.
• Bortolin, K. (2011). Serving ourselves: How the discourse on community engagement privileges the university over the community. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 18(1), 49–58.
• Boyer, E. L. (1996). The scholarship of engagement. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 49(7), 18-33.
• Boyte, H. C., & Hollander, E. (1999). Wingspread declaration on renewing the civic mission of the American research university. Providence, RI: Campus Compact.
• Bringle, R. G., & Clayton, P. H. (2012). Civic education through service learning: What, how, and why? In L. McIlrath, A. Lyons, & R. Munck (Eds.), Higher education and civic engagement: Comparative perspectives (pp. 101–124). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Brukardt, M. J., Holland, B., Percy, S. L., & Zimpher, N. (2004). Calling the question: Is higher education ready to commit to community engagement? Milwaukee, WI: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
• Burton, D. O., & Barnes, B. C. B. (2017a). Paid in full. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Retrieved from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/paying_in_full
• Burton, D. O., & Barnes, B. C. B. (2017b). Shifting philanthropy from charity to justice. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Retrieved from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/shifting_philanthropy_from_charity_to_justice
• Butcher, J., Bezzina, M., & Moran, W. (2011). Transformational partnerships: A new agenda for higher education. Innovative Higher Education, 36(1), 29–40.
• Castle, S. (2018, July 28). Boulder prides itself on being welcoming to all: But its citizens of color tell a different story. Daily Camera. Retrieved from http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_32037773/boulder-prides-itself-being-welcoming-all-but-its-citizens-of-color-tell-a-different-story/
• CFICE. (2018). Ensuring community comes first: Actions for CCE practitioners. Retrieved from https://carleton.ca/communityfirst/?p=6768
• Chaskin, R. J. (2001). Building community capacity: A definitional framework and case studies from a comprehensive community initiative. Urban Affairs Review, 36(3), 291–323.
• Christens, B. D., & Inzeo, P. T. (2015). Widening the view: Situating collective impact among frameworks for community-led change. Community Development, 46(4), 420–435.
• DuBow, W., Hug, S., Serafini, B., & Litzler, E. (2018). Expanding our understanding of backbone organizations in collective impact initiatives. Community Development, 49(3), 256–273.
• Eikenberry, A. M. (2009). Refusing the market: A democratic discourse for voluntary and nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 38(4), 582–596.
• Gillam, R., & Counts, J. (2018). The intangibles: What it takes for a backbone organization to succeed. In N. Walzer & L. Weaver (Eds.), Using collective impact to bring community change (pp. 56–77). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Goemans, M., Levkoe, C. Z., Andrée, P., Changfoot, N., & Christopherson-Cote, C. (2018). Learning to “walk the talk”: Reflexive evaluation in community-first engaged research. Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 4(2), 61–84.
• Gutiérrez, K. D., Engeström, Y., & Sannino, A. (2016). Expanding educational research and interventionist methodologies. Cognition and Instruction, 34(3), 275–284.
• Greenberg, M., London, R. A., & McKay, S. C. (2019). Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research: Expanding Undergraduate Teaching and Learning through Public Sociology. Teaching Sociology, 0092055X19875794.
• Hand, V., Penuel, W. R., & Gutiérrez, K. D. (2012). (Re)framing educational possibility: Attending to power and equity in shaping access to and within learning opportunities. Human Development, 55(5–6), 250–268.
• Harkavy, I. (2006). The role of universities in advancing citizenship and social justice in the 21st century. Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, 1(1), 5–37.
• Hart, A., Northmore, S., & Gerhardt, C. (2009). Briefing paper: Auditing, benchmarking and evaluating public engagement. Bristol, UK: National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement.
• Hartley, M., Saltmarsh, J., & Clayton, P. (2010). Is the civic engagement movement changing higher education? British Journal of Educational Studies, 58(4), 391–406.
• Harwood, R. C. (2014). Putting community in collective impact. Retrieved from https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/resources/putting-community-collective-impact
• Hildreth, R. W. (2018). Learning leadership through community engagement: Exploring a new undergraduate major. Journal of College and Character, 19(4), 316–322.
• Israel, B. A., Schulz, A. J., Parker, E. A., & Becker, A. B. (1998). Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 19(1), 173–202.
• Jenkins, G. W. (2011). Who's afraid of philanthrocapitalism? Case Western Reserve Law Review, 61(3), 753.
• Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2011). Collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 36–41.
• Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2015). The equity imperative in collective impact. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 36–41.
• Kania, J., & Kramer, M. (2016). Advancing the practice of collective impact [blog post]. Retrieved from https://collectiveimpactforum.org/blogs/51306/advancing-practice-collective-impact
• Kellogg Commission. (2002). Renewing the covenant: Learning, discovery, and engagement in a new age and different world. Washington, DC: National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
• Kirshner, B., Pacheco, J., Sifuentes, M. S., & Hildreth, R. (2017). Rethinking “the community” in university–community partnerships: Case studies from CU Engage. In B. Bevan & W. R. Penuel (Eds.), Connecting research and practice for educational improvement: Ethical and equitable approaches (pp. 85–99). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Klempin, S. C. (2016a). Establishing the backbone: An underexplored facet of collective impact efforts. Retrieved from https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/publications/establishing-backbone-collective-impact.html
• Klempin, S. C. (2016b). Postsecondary partnerships in collective impact. Retrieved from https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8BK1CHN
• Lawler, K., Landers, G., Minyard, K., Fuller, K., & Branscomb, J. (2018). Using Systems Tools to Advance Collective Impact. In N. Walzer & L. Weaver (Eds.), Using collective impact to bring community change (pp. 78–96). London, UK: Routledge.
• Le, V. (2015). Why communities of color are getting frustrated with collective impact [blog post]. Retrieved from http://collectiveimpactforum.org/blogs/77371/why-communities-color-are-getting-frustrated-collective-impact
• LeChasseur, K. (2016). Re-examining power and privilege in collective impact. Community Development, 47(2), 225–240.
• Levkoe, C. Z., & Stack-Cutler, H. (2018). Brokering community-campus partnerships: An analytical framework. Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement, 11(1), 18–36. Retrieved from https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/ijcre/article/view/5527
• Lopez, E., & Romero, J. (2017). Integrating civic engagement and ethnic studies in campus outreach: The case of “Aquetza.” Journal of College and Character, 18(4), 296–305.
• Maier, F., Meyer, M., & Steinbereithner, M. (2016). Nonprofit organizations becoming business-like: A systematic review. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 45(1), 64–86.
• McAfee, M., Glover Blackwell, A., & Bell, J. (2015). Equity: The soul of collective impact. Oakland, CA: PolicyLink. Retrieved from https://www.policylink.org/resources-tools/soul-collective-impact
• McMillan, M., & Stutzman, E. (2015). Boulder county’s trends: The community foundation’s report on key indicators. Boulder, CO: Community Foundation Boulder County.
• Milnar, S. M. (2014). Community engagement and participation in collective impact initiatives (Master’s thesis). Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI.
• Mitchell, T. D. (2008). Traditional vs. critical service-learning: Engaging the literature to differentiate two models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 14(2), 50–65.
• Mooney, L. A., & Edwards, B. (2001). Experiential learning in sociology: Service learning and other community-based learning initiatives. Teaching Sociology, 29(2), 181–194.
• Penuel, W. R., Allen, A.-R., Coburn, C. E., & Farrell, C. (2015). Conceptualizing research–practice partnerships as joint work at boundaries. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 20(1–2), 182–197.
• Raderstrong, J., & Boyea-Robinson, T. (2016). The why and how of working with communities through collective impact. Community Development, 47(2), 181–193.
• Rubin, V. (1998). The roles of universities in community-building initiatives. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17(4), 302–311.
• Saltmarsh, J., & Hartley, M. (Eds.). (2011). "To serve a larger purpose": Engagement for democracy and the transformation of higher education. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• Schuetze, H. G. (2012). Universities and their communities—Engagement and service as primary mission. In L. McIlrath, A. Lyons, & R. Munck (Eds.), Higher education and civic engagement: Comparative perspectives (pp. 61–77). New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Schwartz, K., Weaver, L., Pei, N., & Kozak, A. (2018). Using collective impact to move the needle on poverty reduction. In N. Walzer & L. Weaver (Eds.), Using collective impact to bring community change (pp. 116–136). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Schwartz, K., Weaver, L., Pei, N., & Miller, A. K. (2016). Community-campus partnerships, collective impact, and poverty reduction. Community Development, 47(2), 167–180.
• Smith, J., Pelco, L., & Rooke, A. (2017). The emerging role of universities in collective impact initiatives for community benefit. Metropolitan Universities, 28(4), 9–31.
• Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.
• Stoecker, R. (2016). Liberating service learning and the rest of higher education civic engagement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• Stoecker, R., Beckman, M., & Min, B. H. (2010). Evaluating the community impact of higher education civic engagement. In H. E. Fitzgerald, C. Burack, & S. D. Seifer (Eds.), Handbook of engaged scholarship: Contemporary landscapes, future directions (Vol. 2, pp. 177–196). East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.
• Strand, K. J., Marullo, S., Cutforth, N., Stoecker, R., & Donohue, P. (2003). Community-based research and higher education: Principles and practices. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Turner, S., Merchant, K., Kania, J., & Martin, E. (2012). Understanding the value of backbone organizations in collective impact: Part 2. Stanford Social Innovation Review. Retrieved from https://ssir.org/articles/entry/understanding_the_value_of_backbone_organizations_in_collective_impact_2
• Wallerstein, N., & Duran, B. (2017). The theoretical, historical and practice roots of CBPR. In N. Wallerstein, B. Duran, J. G. Oetzel, & M. Minkler (Eds.), Community-based participatory research for health: Advancing social and health equity (pp. 17–29). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
• Ward, K., & Wolf-Wendel, L. (2000). Community-centered service learning: Moving from doing for to doing with. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(5), 767–780.
• Weaver, L., & Cabaj, M. (2018). Collective impact 3.0: Extending the collective impact vision for community change. In N. Walzer & L. Weaver (Eds.), Using collective impact to bring community change (pp. 97–115). New York, NY: Routledge.
• Weerts, D. J., & Sandmann, L. R. (2010). Community engagement and boundary-spanning roles at research universities. The Journal of Higher Education, 81(6), 632–657.
• Wegemer, C. M. (2018). Public impact review. Unpublished internal CU Engage report.
• Williams, J., & Marxer, S. (2014). Bringing an equity lens to collective impact. Retrieved from https://www.collectiveimpactforum.org/sites/default/files/EquityandCollectiveImpact_UrbanStrategiesCouncil.pdf
• Wolff, T. (2016). Ten places where collective impact gets it wrong. Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice, 7(1), 1–13. Retrieved from https://bit.ly/30SfVFO
• Wolff, T., Minkler, M., Wolfe, S. M., Berkowitz, B., Bowen, L., Dunn Butterfoss, F., ... & Lee, K. S. (2017). Collaborating for equity and justice: Moving beyond collective impact. Nonprofit Quarterly, 9, 42–53.
• Young, D. R., & Salamon, L. M. (2002). Commercialization, social ventures, and for-profit competition. In L. M. Salamon (Ed.), The state of nonprofit america (pp. 423–446). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Authors

CHRISTOPHER M. WEGEMER is a PhD Candidate at in the School of Education at the University of California, Irvine. His research centers on research-practice partnerships, youth civic engagement, and social networks. He co-authored the present article during his tenure as a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder.

TAFADZWA TIVARINGE is a doctoral researcher based in CU Engage. His work in the center involves designing, implementing, and testing evaluation instruments used to assess the effectiveness of CU Engage programs.

ROUDY W. HILDRETH is Executive Director of CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research and faculty affiliate in the Educational Foundations, Policy & Practice program at the School of Education, University of Colorado Boulder. He is also Chair of CU's new undergraduate major in Leadership and Community Engagement. His research focuses on community-based pedagogy, democratic theory, the political philosophy of John Dewey, and youth civic engagement.

JENNIFER PACHECO is a doctoral student in the Learning Sciences and Human Development Program at the University of Colorado Boulder and is a Graduate Research Assistant at CU Engage. She aims to use both community-based participatory research and design-based methods to address complex systemic challenges. Jennifer received her BA in Human Biology with a concentration in Urban Education from Stanford University and her MA in Educational Psychology from the University of Colorado Denver.

MANUELA STEWART SIFUENTES is Director of Community Engagement at CU Engage: Center for Community-Based Learning and Research, where she cultivates and sustains relationships between on-campus and off-campus community members to carry out collaborative projects that advance the public good. Her work across the academic, government, and nonprofit sectors has focused on projects that co-create equitable and socially just solutions with immigrant, migrant, border, and other marginalized communities.