Public Service Clinics Topics

Community Schools Collaboration (CSC) #2

Agency/Program Overview

Community Schools Collaboration (CSC) is a private, nonprofit organization whose mission is to develop full service community schools that are centers of thriving communities that provide essential services, resources, and opportunities. Through both direct and leveraged services, the community school provides educational, health, and enrichment experiences to students and families in three diverse, high poverty service areas: Tukwila, White Center, and SeaTac. CSC is engaged in a three-year comprehensive evaluation to strengthen the organization’s infrastructure and assess the impact of the services they provide toward the goal of helping all students graduate from high school ready for higher education and/or the workforce.
 

Specific Research Question

To help CSC strengthen its partnerships and ability to collaborate with other organizations we need a more developed conceptualization of the essential components of strong partnerships. The research question CSC needs to answer is:

How can we ensure that our partnerships are increasing CSC’s capacity to fulfill its mission?

To help us answer this question CSC wants to develop a tool that can help the organization assess the strength of Community Schools’ partnerships and guide its negotiations with other organizations in developing and strengthening partnerships to achieve mutual goals.

Additional Project Background

This project is challenging because ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership’ are concepts that are overused and underdeveloped. In addition, the size and types of organizations CSC partners with are diverse, ranging from school districts, colleges and universities, city and county government offices, other non-profits, faith-based organizations, and refugee and immigrant groups. Understanding the parameters of these relationships may require substantial detective work. In some cases it may require designing innovative strategies for collecting data from ethnic organizations that have different cultural values or from parents, many of whom have limited education and do not speak English.

Key Steps

The student will work closely with Dr. Judy Swanson, the project evaluator, to define a manageable scope for the student’s project. She will also provide access to documents and existing data. This research project will produce a conceptual paper that defines effective partnerships and a tool that can be used to used to assess strengths of existing and emerging partnerships.

Additional Research Resources

If you have questions about this topic or would like more information, please contact Deborah Salas, Executive Director.