The Roundtable Model: Encouraging University-Community Collaborations to Address Poverty-Related Social Problems

Background and Purpose: Testing practice ideas against scholarly knowledge and vice versa tempers both but such exchange of knowledge is lamentably rare. This paper examines a programming model, Policy Roundtables, that promotes exchange and creates greater capacity for collaboration between academic researchers and local policy practitioners.  As motivation for the Roundtables, we briefly review the scholarly literature on the research-practice interface. We then outline the major components of the model itself. We present data from both formative and summative evaluations of recent Roundtables and conclude with a discussion about how this type of activity relates to other types of research-practice interchanges and policy change more broadly.

Methods: Our mixed-method approach includes interviews, survey data, and a document review. Fifteen interview requests were sent and nine interviews were conducted with regular participants in the Roundtables, defined as those who had attended at least two of the three roundtables in their interest area (criminal justice, housing, or asset-building) in the last year. Six of these interviews were with faculty partners and three interviews were conducted with community partners. Interviews solicited participant narratives and responses to Likert scaled questions. All interviews were conducted by phone and transcribed. An online survey collected responses from 35 people who attended at least one Roundtable over the last two years (82 were invited, a response rate of 43%). The survey solicited sector affiliation and asked participants to rate different elements of the Roundtables on a Likert scale. 

Findings: When asked to define the purpose of the Roundtable and its activities, the words “community, connections, bridge, building knowledge, sharing knowledge, population-level impact, convening, social capital, and solutions” came up most frequently. There was a focus by participants on the Roundtables’ ability to create needed connections between practitioners and academics and an acknowledgment that this isn’t a space that occurs naturally or often. Our research shows that this programming model cultivates relationship; nurtures collaborations and supporting extensions; and builds collaborative capacity. The Roundtables model contributes most clearly to social capital and human capital, but does so in a way that is consistent with enhancing organizational resources. 

Conclusion and Implications: Findings highlight how robust exchange between those who make and carry out social policy and those who study social conditions within the academy serves scholars, policymakers and the public. Practitioners – both policymakers and program administrators – can draw on social science research to understand the problems and social conditions they seek to address; to design and critically forecast the outcomes of possible policy or programmatic solutions; and to understand the impacts of public action. Frontline and policy leaders can encourage new lines of scholarly inquiry by alerting social science researchers to changing social conditions; emerging ideas in the practice and political realms; and practical or philosophical constraints that arise as new efforts are carried out.