Cultivating mutually beneficial university & nonprofit partnerships

Complex social and economic issues in the community like poverty, homelessness, and immigration cannot be addressed by one organization, entity, or sector. Collaborations between higher education institutions and nonprofits can leverage diverse strengths, assets, and capacities to create resilient systems of support that help communities prepare for, recover from, and build back after shocks.

Arizona State University (ASU) and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul (SVdP) entered into a Memorandum of Understanding in the fall of 2017 in response to a need to strengthen their on-going and innovative, collaborative relationship. The ASU & SVdP partnership has intersections of connecting activities, including service, experiential learning, student support and retention, community-informed research, resource sharing, staff development, knowledge exchange, and philanthropy. Throughout the course of the partnership, Erica Hodges has been embedded in St. Vincent de Paul and Arizona State University to gain a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges, capacity, and interest to strengthen and grow the partnership.

During her fellowship, Hodges analyzed available data to determine the trends, gaps, and common elements in university and nonprofit partnerships. She found that university and nonprofit partnerships that persist express reciprocity where goals, values, and desired outcomes align. Additionally, volunteerism is one component that is consistent across the university and nonprofit partnerships. Finally, she noted that they need staff capacity across leadership and coordination levels to endure these kinds of partnerships. Hodges then used these insights to create a university and nonprofit partnership framework and applied it to the Phoenix Welcome Center, a relief center for asylum seekers, to determine if this framework could create community resilience.

This project has broader implications for understanding how the effective university and nonprofit partnerships meet their own needs and those of the community. All too often, assumptions and minimal feedback prove to limit the potential resilience of some partnerships. University staff acting as community liaisons may not consider including their partners in the planning process or effectively solicit feedback at the end of a process, which means the opportunity to include an important stakeholder is lost. Additionally, determining the value of a partnership is important, and there is limited research on practical means of measuring partnerships or evidence of universities effectively measuring their partnerships. Hodges hopes this project supports further investigation of ways to measure university and community partnerships and spotlights the mutually beneficial aspects of these types of partnerships.