Withdrawn: Allyship: Creating and Sustaining University-Community Partnerships to Benefit Communities and Accomplish Social Work's Anti-Oppressive, Social Justice Goals

Rising economic inequality, cruel health disparities worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and problems such as domestic terrorism, mass incarceration, and homicidal acts of police against African Americans bring to light life-threatening problems marginalized communities experience. To fulfill social work's mission, schools of social work need to be on the front lines supporting emancipatory efforts in communities, which in turn requires solid University-community partnerships grounded in reflexive praxis. Establishing and sustaining those partnerships is not simple, especially in communities that differ significantly from predominantly white, privileged University spaces. This workshop offers insights about best practices from a productive 15 year University-community partnership, the Empowering Counseling Program (ECP) of Loyola University Chicago School of Social Work (https://empowercounselprog.wixsite.com/ecp-luc). Thanks to substantial external funding, the ECP has served over 1000 youth and educated over 60 BSW, MSW, and PhD students. Using participatory methods to co-design, with youth, free after school, summer, and counseling services for low-income urban youth of color in community settings, the ECP carries out curricula and social work practice models that youth find to be meaningful and impactful for their efforts to pursue positive life trajectories. The conceptual foundations for the workshop are ECP models co-developed with community members, which are strengths-based, trauma-focused, culturally relevant, support communities' self-determination, promote advocacy for community members' human rights, and develop constructive resistance against social injustices such as discrimination. Presenters are faculty, doctoral students, and alumni, with videos by participating youth. The workshop format will be brief introductions of ECP responses to the issues below, with ample time for discussion and sharing insights among participants. The workshop will also provide to participants materials co-authored with youth that include published studies, bibliography, multimedia ECP products, and intervention models. The workshop will address: 1. Responding to community members' concerns that they have experienced harm from universities who studied their members but did not keep promises or provide benefits to communities in exchange for the prestige and benefits Universities accrued. 2. Initiating a participatory partnership through a strengths-based needs assessment process and continually updating the needs assessment as the partnership continues, especially engaging youth as positive change agents and co-researchers to advocate for their communities. 3. Trouble-shooting problems that can fracture partnerships, such as: allocating funds from grants obtained so as to reduce conflictual competitions, managing prestige and other benefits Universities can potentially disproportionately benefit from, member-checking findings, etc. 4. Research methods that are both participatory and satisfy scientific aims, including structuring randomized control group designs, involving youth as co-researchers through every research phase, diversifying media for data collection, and developing data collection protocols and analytic procedures that youth regard as ecologically valid. 5. Developing scientific and public knowledge that is faithful to communities' cultures. 6. Educating BSW, MSW and Ph.D. students to be intellectual activists who can carry out participatory, human rights-based community partnerships, services, and research, including allyship, ensuring safety, preventing vicarious trauma, developing cultural humility, and addressing implicit racial, class, and gender biases.iases.