Ginsberg Center’s Community Engagement @ Michigan Series 2024-2025

Interested in doing community-engaged research, teaching, or projects with a local community partner here in Washtenaw County? With a network of over 300+ community partners across Washtenaw County and Southeast Michigan, the Edward Ginsberg Center works to connect local communities with U-M courses, researchers, internships and other community-engaged initiatives. In this session, Ginsberg Center staff will share information about current conditions in Washtenaw County and how these conditions shape what local community partners are looking for from U-M. We’ll discuss current trends in community partner priorities and share examples of U-M research, courses, and projects that have been designed to respond to those priorities. Whether you’re new to Michigan or looking for a new community partner, join us for this important orientation to community engagement in Washtenaw County!

Open to faculty, admin/staff, post-docs and graduate students.

Community-engaged courses invite undergraduate and graduate students at Michigan to work with and in local communities through course assignments, clinical experiences, research projects, service hours, partnership development and other forms of engagement. Making these community-engaged learning activities accessible to students requires instructors to commit to considerable reflection, planning, and communication with students and community partners. In this session, participants will learn about common barriers to student access associated with community-engaged courses, identify accessibility practices for course design and disability accommodations, and discuss how to apply these practices to their own community-engaged courses and programs. This sessions is designed for participants with instructional responsibilities and is open to faculty, admin/staff, post-docs, and graduate student instructors (GSIs). 

Developing equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships with community members and organizations requires taking a critical look at how power operates in university-community partnerships. This interactive workshop will introduce participants to key principles of equity-focused community engagement and discuss how relationships of power shape university-community partnerships for research and student learning. We’ll consider how power operates in such areas as: the structure and terms of partnership agreements, participation dynamics in university-community projects, and funding/compensation. Participants will generate strategies for re-shaping inequitable power dynamics, share insights with colleagues, and identify ways to apply key principles to their own community-engaged work. 

• This session is designed especially for participants who are involved in (or interested in) community-engaged research, teaching & learning, project/program administration, and/or campus initiatives at Michigan.
• Open to faculty, staff, admin, and post-docs. Graduate students who are interested in attending can email ginsberginfo@umich.edu for more information. This session is not open to undergraduate students.
  

Sponsored by Ginsberg Center, OVPR PE+RI, Engaged Learning Office - UMSI, Detroit URC, LSA Research Office, and Office of the Associate Dean for Research, Michigan Engineering 

Community partners make incredible contributions to research and student learning at U-M through their involvement in research projects, course assignments, clinical experiences, advisory boards, student internships, guest speaking, and more. While compensation for community partners is a foundation of ethical community-engagement practice, the complex administrative and financial systems of R1 universities are not designed to easily facilitate such compensation.

Join us for an extraordinary panel of community engagement professionals from TRUCEN to share findings from their national survey of R1 universities on the challenges associated with compensating community partners who contribute to community engagement initiatives. In this session, members of the TRUCEN Sustained Conversation Group on Cultivating Community Voice will discuss principles and philosophy for compensating partners that advocates can use in conversations with your colleagues in procurement, finance, HR, fundraising, and senior leadership. Our goal will be for attendees to consider how these principles and practices intersect with the University of Michigan’s institutional context, and begin to identify next steps to simplify processes, and reduce delays, for compensating your community partners. The workshop will preview content being developed for a toolkit which will provide community engagement professionals and faculty members with 1) talking points to make a case for compensating community partners and 2) examples of promising processes and practices used by campuses across the country. 

Open to faculty, staff/admin, post-docs & graduate students. This session is not open to undergraduate students.

Featuring:

• Douglas Barrera - Associate Director for Faculty and Community Engagement, UCLA Center for Community Engagement, UCLA
• Mindi Levin - Founder and Director of SOURCE, the community engagement and service-learning center of Johns Hopkins University Schools of Public Health, Nursing, and Medicine.
• Michelle Snitgen - Assistant Director, Academic Programs, Center for Community Engaged Learning, Michigan State University
  
• Chan Williams - Assistant Director for Academics and Operations, MDP Program & Paul D. Coverdell Fellowship Program Coordinator, Emory University