Assistant Dean for Civic Engagement Willamette University Willamette University Salem, Oregon, United States
Abstract: "No, we won't work with churches." This was the sentiment that was repeated time and time again by students in response to expanding community partnerships within a civic engagement program. At the same time, faith-based community organizations were expressing confusion as to why it was so hard to recruit university students as volunteers, interns, and eventual employees. This lightning session seeks to share what at times has felt like a “between a rock and a hard place” experience for one institution. Practitioners will share the questions and dilemmas faced by students' perceptions of faith groups and how that impacts community engaged partnerships and projects. We will discuss how one civic engagement program navigated value differences and how informed consent became a central tenant to the ethical dimensions of student/community partnerships. Practitioners will share pedagogical strategies employed to better understand and explore student and community partner perspectives across differences with a unified goal of meeting a community's most pressing needs.
Narrative: Faith-based organizations (FBO’s) have a long history and tradition of providing resources and support for marginalized groups of people experiencing needs such as food security, housing, and addiction recovery programs. While arguably many organizations have served an integral role in meeting community members' needs without ‘strings attached’, others have required recipients of services to conform to specific faith structures and practices in order to receive specific services or resources (Van Cleave & Cartwright, 2017).
Now, consider the context of a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest, with a predominantly progressive student body situated in a conservative-leaning region. On the surface, there appears to be significant dissonance with students’ and the region’s collective social and political values. Also consider that many of the social service organizations in said region either currently have or at one time had a [Christian] faith affiliation. The seemingly disparate perspectives of the students’ and the region raises some important considerations for practitioners who seek to build civic engagement partnerships between the institution and organizations. In many examples, students have subtly or even overtly opposed such collaborations.
It is at the intersection of identity and values that practitioners hope to better understand students’ perceptions of faith-based social service organizations and what anecdotally seems like reluctance or opposition. By better understanding students’ perceptions, practitioners may be better able to design interventions for increased dialogue, perspective-taking, and cooperation despite disparate perspectives. But where do we as practitioners and scholars begin?
This proposed lightning session seeks to share what at times has felt like a “between a rock and a hard place” experience. We hope to share the questions and dilemmas faced by exploring students' perceptions of faith groups and how that impacts community engaged partnerships and projects. Ultimately, we are exploring the viability of a research project designed to better understand overarching themes as it relates to students’ collective intercultural competence (Bennett, 1993). For example, are students’ perceptions of faith-based social service organizations polarizing, where they are judging differences as a binary ‘good or bad’ as opposed to a deeper understanding allowing for collaboration and relationship? We will share pilot pedagogical strategies that we have employed to better understand students’ and community partners’ perspectives as it relates to building bridges across differences and working together to meet the needs of our most vulnerable community members.
As civic engagement practitioners, we seek to empower our students to advocate for marginalized and vulnerable community members. Ultimately this may be in a region where their viewpoints are the majority or the minority. Regardless, the environment in which we are situated provides opportunities for navigating differences in pursuit of a common goal.
