Building Effective Community-University Partnerships: Are Universities Truly Ready?

Community service learning and community-based research necessitate the development of strong community-university partnerships. In this paper, students, faculty, and a community partner critically reflect upon the process of establishing a long-term community-university partnership through the integration of a community service learning component into a doctoral program in Community Psychology, thereby offering graduate students the opportunity to engage in long-term community-based research. This reflection reveals the importance of assessing university readiness at the pre-partnership stage, and of ensuring that academics and their institutions are not only willing, but also able, to engage in effective community research partnerships. The authors propose a practical framework for considering university readiness in the form of a series of questions that allows faculty, programs, or institutions considering partnership with a community group to reflect upon their own collaboration readiness. [authors]