Community Partnership Opportunities

Partnerships contribute to community resiliency and healthy communities. The Center for Community-Engagement (CCE) strives to be a catalyst for establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial community-campus partnerships, dialogs, forums and referrals.

As a Community Affiliate, you’ll experience:

• Shared power and decision-making
• Move beyond boundaries created by difference
• Candid communication, transparency and good will
• Be regarded as an equitable partner and co-educator
• Continuous and shared learning

3 WAYS TO PARTNER WITH US

1. RECRUIT VOLUNTEERS

Effectively recruit SRU student volunteers for your initiatives with Give Pulse, SRU’s community engagement platform. Organizations seeking to engage SRU students, faculty, and staff in volunteer opportunities may post events as well as define various shifts, volunteer responsibilities, and/or single events or reoccurring volunteering opportunities.

2. ACE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT CO-EDUCATORS

ACE courses are designed around organizational specific goals throughout 12-26 weeks, or, across both fall and spring semesters. The Center for Community Engagement prioritizes integrating community engagement with academic course content. As a result, SRU students develop career skills and enhance their learning through community engagement. For example, some partnerships have resulted in marketing plans; community stories writing; research and data collection; engineering and/or construction management projects; website and social media sites; online fraud prevention; survey design, implementation and data driven recommendations based on sanitized community health data. 

Co-designed by community parters and faculty, Academic Community Engagement (ACE) is supported by the Center for Community Engagement’s assessment tools. SRU students benefit from learning about an organization’s mission, vision and course learning outcomes, reinforcing course assignments, reflections, and research.

Organizations seeking opportunities to partner with the SRU faculty or courses should contact the Center for Community Engagement at 724.738.4316.

3. SERVE AS A HAVERLACK CIVIC SCHOLAR HOST SITE

Invest in the future of civic leadership through a four-year developmental partnership. As a Community Co-Educator, your organization will host a dedicated Haverlack Civic Scholar for 7–10 hours weekly during the academic year.

• The Partnership Structure: You collaborate with your Scholar each semester to design a Community Learning Agreement (CLA) that aligns your operational needs with their evolving skill-building goals, increasing leadership roles and community relationship building.
• The Developmental Continuum: Through your organization's unique mentorship and expertise, Scholars sequentially grow from direct service into high-level, long-term capacity-building roles.

For more information on community partnerships, please contact the Center for Community Engagement at 724.738.4316.