University of Pennsylvania's Center for Community Partnerships as an Organizational Innovation for Advancing Action Research, (The)

The article describes the Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania as an organizational innovation designed to mobilize the range of university resources to solve the strategic problem of creating democratic, local cosmopolitan communities. We identify the Center's approach to this problem as helping to develop university-assisted community schools, schools transformed to function as centers and catalysts for community revitalization with ongoing support from an institution of higher education. We argue that communal action research, in which scholarly attention is focused upon the university's local geographic area in a continuous comprehensive partnership with the community studies, is a particularly promising approach for revitalizing communities, advancing knowledge, and integrating the university's missions of research, teaching, and service.