A group of more than 100 community agency staff and community activists, University faculty, researchers, staff and students gathered March 28 at U-M’s Detroit Center to examine University-community collaborations.
The Crossing Boundaries conference addressed three questions: What makes successful University-community collaborations? What is the impact of taking gender into account while addressing problems associated with race, poverty and urban development? And, how can universities, community organizations and foundations best work together to promote change in southeast Michigan?
The conference was presented by the Center for the Education of Women (CEW) with sponsorship by Arts of Citizenship, the Ginsberg Center for Community and Service Learning, and National Center for Institutional Diversity. The gathering emphasized the importance of developing successful joint projects with outcomes that serve all interested parties and focused on collaboration with community partners in Detroit and other Michigan neighborhoods.
Keynote speaker Linda Burnham, the 2008 Twink Frey Visiting Social Activist at the CEW and former director of the Women of Color Resource Center, reviewed the interests and needs of each partner in community-research collaborations, and outlined strategies for success. Panelists who followed Burnham described their successes in using the strategies, which include a clear assessment of the needs of both the community and the researcher, incorporation of the community’s voice into the research design, shared trust and effective communication, and commitment to share research results with the community in non-technical language.
The second keynote speaker was Connie Evans, founding president of the Women’s Self-Employment Project and the 2006 Twink Frey Visiting Activist, who has worked for two decades on developing economic strategies for low-income black women. Evans focused on how women of color are disproportionately bearing the burden of the current loan crisis both as economic drivers in their communities and as the largest group of mortgage holders in the subprime market. Evans’ comments were later reflected in discussions regarding research projects in Flint and Detroit.
