Collaborations with Community partnerships

Active Partnerships—we build long-term relationships and work in collaboration with communities and local organisations. 

In addition to the needs assessment, active collaboration with community agencies is a cornerstone to effective advocacy. Says Schmidt (1999), Schools themselves are a major agency in the community, but schools alone cannot offer all the human services necessary to help a town, city, or county educate its citizens, provide health care, and offer basic services to improve the human condition (p. 185). Turning to community resources is an option when schools are unable to address the myriad concerns of students and their families. Effective collaboration is a two-way process. On the one hand, it is critical that the school convey its focus to the surrounding community. On the other, it is important for the school to reach out to community agencies and learn about their services to create effective partnerships. 

Chemical education researchers are often the only such specialist in a chemistry department. This situation often leads to possibilities of collaborating in the research projects of other faculty who need an expert in chemical or science education research as part of their team. Chapter 3 (7) describes how a chemical education researcher can build collaborations to support his or her own research. This chapter discusses the many ways in which being the chemical education expert in a department or on a campus can provide additional opportunities to work with colleagues in science and engineering who carry out traditional research, with school of education colleagues, with K-12 systems, or in community partnerships. Regardless of the size of the collegiate institution, its location, or its specialization, there are opportunities to participate in collaborative projects that can impact science and education research. 

Collaborative design projects are those conducted in collaboration with other universities, government, or industry. Projects may be a response to a collaborator s needs, or a partnership in which team members are all working on various segments of the same system. This mode is communication intensive and requires real-time data, voice, and video communication. 

Feature 13. Forge reliable and collaborative partnerships with the communities served, managers of critical interdependent infrastructure, response organizations, and local utilities. 

There s obviously a difference between simply sending out a compound via MTA and a true collaboration between a company and an academic group involving financial sponsorship, frequent communication of data and ideas, and the divvying up of work. These kinds of partnerships won t be discussed here, but can sometimes begin with an MTA. 

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