Charting the Trajectory of a Flexible Community-University Collaboration in an Applied Learning Ecosystem

Abstract

Current fiscal cuts provide numerous challenges for community organizations in their mission to provide evidence-based services. Universities are focusing on career-related experiences, largely experiential learning opportunities, to support enhanced student outcomes. Community engagement is often touted as a goal for universities and community collaboration is increasingly viewed as favourable in research. Thus, a community-university partnership which focuses on evaluation would serve to meet the needs of both groups currently experiencing challenges in service delivery and training, respectively. This article presents a case study of a community-university partnership between Renascent and Ryerson University that has evolved over time to meet the needs of both partners. We discuss the applied learning ecosystem, which extends from the supervisory context to the history of the academic institutional partner. We also discuss the flexibility in collaboration, noting the change over time to meet the evolving needs of both the university and the community partner. We aspire to contribute to the literature documenting the range of community-engaged partnerships by providing experiences and reflections to support others in this area.

Keywords

• community-university collaboration
• evaluation
• service learning
• addictions