Toward Common Unity: From Silent to More Equitable Partnerships

Abstract

The Campus Compact Indicators of Engagement offer a unique opportunity to examine mechanisms that create transformational, "authentic, sustained partnerships" with our immediate communities. This important service-learning goal has the potential to change both the institution and the community (Enos and Morton 2003). Analyzing these partnerships often exposes inherently unequal power relationships between universities and lower socio-economic communities located nearby. Using these partnerships as a unit of analysis provides us with tools to moderate that power imbalance (Cruz and Giles 2000).