The role of community partners in Service-Learning experience

Community partners are more than supervisors; you help to educate Service-Learning students. Service-Learning students not only want to help meet important community needs, but this experience is also a basis for understanding their college course. Students are receiving academic credit for learning through their service efforts. Your help is essential in encouraging student to think about what the experience means to them. You set the organizational context and provide and important view of the overall societal issues and impact. Students come to you not only for supervision, but also to learn from your skills and expertise. As a co-educator you can assist students in making connections between their service activities and their course learning objectives.

Designing Quality Service-Learning Opportunities

Incorporating Service-Learning requires thoughtful pre-planning and thorough follow-up. Successful learning and effective contributions depend upon a well-integrated package of planning, training, communication, reflection, and evaluation.

Organizational and Community Needs

When designing opportunities for Service-Learning students, the most important step is looking at your organizational needs and capacity. Think about how students might help meet your identified organizational needs and consider what resources are needed to move forward. Consider how Service-Learning students can help you work towards your organization’s mission. Think about who else within in the organization should know about Service-Learning. Consider working with the Executive Director and associated Boards to broaden and depend the support for Service-Learning.

Questions to consider include:

• What are your organization’s current and potential project and necessary resources?
• Are there tasks that you and your staff are now doing that could be divided up and supported by on or several students?
• Is there a project that you’ve always wanted to do but never had the time to organize?
• What do you see as the potential benefits to your organization from students engaging in service activities?
• How will students benefit from working with your organization?
• How will you know that having Service-Learning student was worthwhile?

Design clear positions that are informative and appealing to students

Keep in mind that positions that carry some degree of responsibility and involve client contact are ideal. Additionally, positions that are interesting, challenging, and rewarding often lead to positive results.

A clear and effective position provides the service learner within:

• A degree of investment and responsibility within the organization
• The authority to think and act creatively
• Clearly articulated goals and objectives
• A method to evaluate what will be achieved