Published by Dissertation Dish
Title: An Exploration of Two Community Advisory Boards Within Community Engagement Centers at Institutions of Higher Education
When: Monday, October 23, 2023 from 12-1:30 PM PST / 3-4:30 PM EST
Hosted by Dr. Elizabeth Cannon: Director of Community-Engaged Learning at Vassar College and the Co-PI of the Mellon-funded Community-Engaged Intensives in the Humanities Grant
Abstract: Community engagement has become an important part of the higher education landscape and, as a result, developing mutually-beneficial community-university partnerships has become a common interest for practitioners and researchers. However, building these partnerships, often distinguished by reciprocity, shared goals, and effective communication (Bringle, Games, & Malloy, 1999; Harkavy & Benson, 1998; Pompa, 2002) is a complex endeavor. The partnerships between communities and universities often involve challenges such as paternalism, unequal power, clashes in values, and often-wrought histories (Strier, 2014). As a way to support building partnerships based on mutuality, and to address some of the challenges present in the complexity of community-university partnerships, community engagement centers on college campuses have created Community Advisory Councils (CACs). While CACs have recently become a structure within the practitioner-realm of the community engagement field, the higher education research that investigates CACs is still in its infancy. Thus, through a multi-site qualitative case-study, I aim to fill the gap by comparing, contrasting, and analyzing themes about the formation, role, and responsibilities of two Community Advisory Councils housed within community engagement centers at two different institutions. I examine the successes and challenges of the CACs in building strong equitable partnerships based on reciprocity and centering community voice. In this research study, I utilize Bringle, Clayton & Price’s (2009) spectrum as a conceptual framework to assess partnerships based on three qualities: closeness, equity, and integrity (Bringle et. al, 2009). This multi-site case study both fills a large gap within the higher education and community engagement literature and helps to examine the critical components necessary to building meaningful partnerships through a Community Advisory Council.