The Daily Bulletin Archive

Please join the Civic and Community Engagement Office for the webinar "Measuring Mutual Benefit and Reciprocity in Community Engagement and Public Service Activities" on Thursday, November 19, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. The event is presented by Campus Compact as part of its National Webinar Series and is free to members of the Buffalo State College community. Speakers are Emily Janke, Kristin Medlin, and Kristin Norris.

Mutual benefit and reciprocity are arguably the defining characteristics and principles of the Carnegie Foundation's definition for community engagement partnerships. In this session, we examine how these two characteristics and principles are often conflated as synonyms by researchers, administrators, and practitioners (Dostilio, et. al, 2012; Janke, 2018), and offer definitions and measures that demonstrate their distinctiveness. We will share an emerging research program that is aimed at creating greater conceptual clarity and operationalization of these two terms in how we measure and track community engagement activities and partnerships. We explicate the terms (mutual benefit and reciprocity), describe measures developed to track these aspects of partnerships, and share initial findings of and reflections on more than 800 partnerships tracked using Collaboratory.

Participants will engage in dialogue around the emerging results to further the development of a construct for measuring reciprocity and mutual benefit, with the hope that it will allow researchers to better establish parameters for inclusion or exclusion of partnerships in studies, allowing larger samples of “apples to apples” comparisons, and help scholar-administrators establish baselines and goals for engagement, as differentiated from service.

Guiding research questions:

• If reciprocity and mutual benefit are two distinguishing features of CE, then how can we measure each one individually?
• What types of roles and moments of community participation demonstrate reciprocity?
• What outputs and outcomes demonstrate mutual benefit for community and academic partners?
• In what ways do community engagement partnerships differ from public service partnerships with regard to reciprocity and mutual benefit?

Please register online for this webinar and for as many other presentations in the National Webinar Series as you would like.