Community Engagement and Community Partners: Where's the Justice?

Community Engagement and Community Partners: Where is the Justice?

Abstract

Background:  The late 1990s saw a refocusing on higher education’s civic engagement mission. The impact resulted a mutually beneficial intersectionality among community engagement and engagement scholarship.  Thereby, creating a collaboration amid academic institutions and community for addressing social and civic conditions. Inherent in engagement scholarship are partnerships and sustainability. To promote stable, lasting and sustainable partnerships and outcomes, it is vital that community partners are heard, valued and fully included by academic institutions. Although the questions regarding the marginalization of community partners in engagement scholarship have been raised, there has been no significant investigation into exactly how community partners are utilized, especially regarding the more “scholarly” activities such as writing, formal reporting, and conference dissemination of outcomes. This study contributes to this understudied area by evaluating the roles of community and academic engagement. The social action nature of social work, its commitment to social justice, and efforts for social betterment shared with engagement scholarship gives it prominence. The purpose of this paper is to address the importance of promoting stable, lasting and sustainable community and academic partnerships and outcomes vis-à-vis communication of valued and inclusive participation.

Methods:  One hundred and three manuscripts published in The Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship (JCES) one of two journals sponsored by the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, were examined to determine how community partners were utilized in engagement scholarship projects. Manuscripts published between 2008 through 2015, were reviewed. Two reviewers examined the manuscripts independently by reading the articles and categorizing the ways in which community partners participated in the projects from inception to dissemination and sustainability efforts. The reviewers used categories developed from authentic community engagement principles related to full and equal participation throughout the entire engagement scholarship process of all. Inter rater reliability was 93 percent.  Areas of non-agreement were categorized through discussion and consensus.

Findings:  The results revealed that community partners are limited in the types of participation they reported. The most often reported role was being a recipient of services (87%) or resource (78%), with the least participation being in decision making regarding resources (26%) and dissemination through presentation of results in scholarly manuscripts (12%) with twenty-one (20%) of the 103 manuscripts published including community partners. Other roles reported on were minimal in nature, with insignificant attention to sustainability.

Conclusion:  The results are of direct relevance to social work scholars. Findings reveal that while community partners are said to be important, essential, and often touted as equal to others in engagement scholarship, their actual roles in engagement projects reported upon in JCES do not support this. To improve community and academic engagement, it is important for those engaged in community engagement to acknowledge and address contributing factors of social injustice and efforts for social advancement shared with community engagement. It is plausible that acknowledgement and engagement of shared experiences will engender a positive academic and community collaborative relationship, and facilitate engagement in shared goals of community engaged scholarship and research.