University staff, students and community members gathered for lively conversation and a box lunch at the Granoff Family Hillel Center yesterday to discuss improvements to community partnerships at Tufts.
The symposium, sponsored by the University College of Citizenship and Public Service, was accompanied by the release of a new edition of "Partnering With Communities: A Guide to Getting Involved with Tufts' Partner Communities," a resource guide issued by the Lincoln Filene Center (LFC) to help facilitate involvement between Tufts and its host communities.
"Our commitments to academic excellence and building community are inextricably linked," said Sociology Professor and University College Fellow Susan Ostrander. "Relations with our community partners are essential to our academic mission.
"We seek to create and transmit knowledge," Ostrander said. "But it must be relevant to our most pressing public concerns."
"We really want to stop and see what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and how we can do better," University President Lawrence Bacow said in his opening address to the full room of people assembled.
Currently, the LFC sponsors linkages between Tufts community members and Tufts' "host communities" of Boston, Medford, Somerville, Grafton and Chinatown. These linkages have taken diverse forms: For example, Tufts student interns help provide organizations with much-needed energy and manpower, and professors conduct research that supports community organizations.
Danny LeBlanc provided an example of one historically successful partnership: the Somerville Community Corporation, which he said helps "establish affordable rental housing in the City of Somerville."
Another success story has been the Tufts involvement in the Josiah Quincy School, whose headmaster, Bak Fun Kwong, also spoke.
"We're no longer just a selective community; we're an inclusive community. We need a balance between individual community and global community," Kwong said.
Tufts interns served as tutors to the students and also hosted them for a night on the Tufts campus, planting the seeds for college education.
Following the panel, attendees asked questions of the
speakers and grappled with how best to overcome obstacles of coordination between constraints of the organizations and the University.
It can be a challenge to make sure that students' research interests align with the organization's needs, LeBlanc said.
"We must be realistic about what the organization needs," he said. "Sometimes we have to say no."
Continuity can also become an obstacle: While organizations' needs persist over the long term, students often only have a semester or two to devote to a project.
Le Blanc had one solution for this problem for community leaders. "Get used to it," he said. He added, however, that many students had been able to continue their work, or pass it on to fellow students.
