Place-Based Community Partnerships

School-community partnerships bring a variety of benefits to the practice of place-based education (as well as other approaches to education). In PBE, school-community partnerships lead to:

• More meaningful community impacts:  Place-based education includes hands-on projects to benefit the community. Community partners help school groups identify opportunities to engage in authentic community issues, where student contributions can make a meaningful difference. Partners bring practical knowledge and expertise to bear on the work students do to improve their communities and help students find and choose projects that will result in valued community outcomes and benefits.
• Better education:  Because partners know their issues, they can lend expertise to students about a specific community issue that a teacher doesn’t have (or would spend hours trying to develop).

For example, if students are working on a water-quality issue in the community, the partners may bring knowledge about the local river system; human impacts on local water quality; man-made infrastructure like culverts, dams and shoreline development affecting the river; governmental regulations that govern polluters and clean-up processes; recent studies and actions by environmental groups; and more. Additionally, partners model the careers that relate to the issues students are studying and engaging in, and can explain and model what professionalism and effectiveness looks like in this context.

• A better environment for thriving schools: Organizations in the community may or may not have officers and leaders with students in local schools, and may have only limited understanding of the value provided by schools and the challenges local schools are facing.  Meaningful school-community partnerships help to build understanding in schools about community needs – and in community organizations about school needs. Mutual respect and cooperation are assets for any school district. Unleashing the power of students can help businesses, nonprofits and governments meet their goals as well.

There’s no single right size or structure for a school-community partnership. Some are intensive while others are limited in scope and purpose. Some are project-bound while others are long term. About the only thing that is always true of a good school-community partnership is that each organization within the partnership feels it has benefited.

Some of the roles a partner can play in PBE include:

• Content or field experts help teachers and students understand content as it translates to real-world situations.
• Opportunity makers/door-openers can help teachers and students access a community work site or join an important community discussion.
• Leadership developers or coaches help students build their skills for working in teams and advocating for themselves and their projects.
• Judges or assessors help students evaluate their work products against real-world standards.
• Funders offer financial support.
• Promoters and “leveragers” help teachers and students communicate their achievements and maximize impact.
• Career liaisons provide an inside view of a career path related to a PBE effort.
• Stakeholders help teams understand the varied perspectives on a community resource or proposed change that may exist within the community.
• Resource providers offer relevant tools and materials.
• Volunteers expand capacity to get fieldwork done.

NOTE: some partnerships are more intensive than others, and for some partnerships not all steps may be needed. Developing a long-term, mutually interdependent, mutually beneficial school-community partnership takes time and careful attention to all needs and interests. More limited partnerships don’t require – and may in fact suffer from – too much formality.

Most people, when they hear about school-community partnerships, think they sound like a great idea. However, individual people working within schools and community organizations are often fearful about taking the first steps. Both sides can feel awkward about reaching out to new people whose work situations are foreign to them (or in the case of school, far in their past).

The steps may vary a bit depending on whether it is a teacher or other school official, or a representative of a community organization, who is taking the first steps to explore a partnership. However, the basic steps are these: