Strategic Plan

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ADVANCING COMMUNITY SERVICE AND LEARNING
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Ginsberg Center Strategic Plan May 2006 (updated May 2008)

Since 1996, the University of Michigan's Edward Ginsberg Center for Community Service and Learning has encouraged students, faculty, university staff, and community members to participate in community service and learning. The Ginsberg Center supports community service and learning throughout the University through fellowships and grants, technical assistance, partnership with many other units, and educational workshops. The Ginsberg Center has three "connecting" programs that reach across campus and into communities to strengthen community service and learning efforts. These are faculty initiatives, student initiatives, and community initiatives. Ginsberg is home to five community service-learning programs: the America Reads Tutoring Corps, Michigan AmeriCorps Partnership, Project Community, SERVE, and Arts of Citizenship. Ginsberg nurtures programs that involve community service and learning, and these programs may leave Ginsberg to become part of other University units after redefinition or restructuring. Ginsberg currently nurtures Semester in Detroit in partnership with the Residential College. Ginsberg also houses the OCSL Press that publishes the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and monographs on community service and learning. Ginsberg was named in honor of alumnus Edward Ginsberg whose life exemplified the values of community involvement and active citizenship that the Ginsberg Center seeks to foster.

The purpose of the 2005-2010 strategic plan is to reexamine mission and goals, articulate priorities, and suggest ways to address the priorities.

Summary of Ginsberg Center Programs and Services

Faculty Initiatives build faculty capacity for research and teaching to strengthen service learning and involve and develop communities by partnering with departments, programs, and groups of faculty in providing consultations and technical assistance, roundtables, workshops, distinguished lectures, and grants. Publications of the latest research on community service and learning, findings on best practices, and handbooks to aid faculty in developing courses incorporating community service are a central component of faculty initiatives. Ginsberg's Office of Community Service Learning (OCSL) Press publishes the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning and books on service learning that advance civic engagement in higher education settings throughout the nation.

Student Initiatives provide outreach and leadership training to UM student organizations and individual students who are involved in service and social justice. The student initiatives program also coordinates the Ginsberg Fellows, Ginsberg Student Initiative Grants, and the Ginsberg Center Student Advisory Board.

Community Initiatives offer assistance to community organizations in working with student volunteers and provide a forum for community partners in the orientation of students for community service. Community initiatives staff work with faculty and students to help them in finding and working with community partners.

America Reads Tutoring Corps. Students in America Reads work with children and their families to ensure that children will read well and independently by the end of third grade. Students help to excite children about reading, improve literacy skills, provide greater access to books and opportunities for reading with an adult, and support literacy development at home.

Michigan AmeriCorps Partnership. The Michigan AmeriCorps Partnership places UM graduate and undergraduate students in Detroit-based nonprofit organizations. Students work on projects such as program facilitation, business plan development, grant research and writing, and community organization.

Project Community. In partnership with the Department of Sociology, Project Community enrolls undergraduates in a sociology course to combine formal academic learning and reflection with meaningful community service. Students work in criminal justice, health, education, organizing for social justice, and community development.

SERVE. SERVE offers student-run programs that provide students with opportunities to address serious social issues through community service and social action. The programs involve in Alternative Spring Break, Alternative Weekends, VIEW (Volunteers Involved Every Week), Issues, NASST (North American Summer Service Team), and Pangea World Service Team (a summer international service experience).

Arts of Citizenship. Arts of Citizenship is a collaboration of about 100 faculty, staff, graduate students, and community partners that fosters the role of the academic arts, humanities, and design in civic and community life. It nurtures intellectual and creative work and pedagogy that grow out of public democratic engagement; it builds capacity of the University of Michigan faculty to engage in public scholarship in the arts, humanities, and design.

Semester in Detroit.In partnership with the Residential College, Ginsberg Center is implementing the Semester in Detroit academic program through which students live, work, and take courses in Detroit.

The Ginsberg Center Mission, Goals, Vision, and Core Beliefs

The planning process reaffirmed the Ginsberg Center's mission and goals. The mission states:

Our mission is to engage students, faculty, and community partners in learning together through community service and civic participation in a diverse democratic society.

The Ginsberg Center's goals are to:

• Build student capacity for learning and leadership through community service, civic participation, and educational efforts.
• Build faculty capacity for research and teaching that strengthens student learning and involves and develops communities.
• Build the capacity of communities through partnerships with the University to improve the quality of life and enhance student learning.
• Increase the institutional capacity of the University of Michigan for student civic and multicultural learning.
• Build the capacity of the Ginsberg Center as an institutional vehicle for student civic, multicultural, and leadership learning.

The Ginsberg Center can have a transforming effect. Those who participated in the strategic planning process envisioned the following:

Students. Students are familiar with the Ginsberg Center and its service-learning opportunities. Participation in a Ginsberg Center or other University of Michigan community engagement program, course, or initiative transforms students. They become more aware of and commit to lifelong civic and social responsibility as well as an equitable, just, and sustainable world. Service and learning activities empower students who graduate with the leadership, knowledge, skills, values, and tools to make socially conscious decisions and actions.

Faculty. Faculty across disciplines and professions value service-learning and an engaged university, and commit to preparing students for active participation in the community, nation, and world. They build service-learning into their courses and research projects, value and engage in community-based scholarship, and contribute to the service-learning/civic engagement field. The Ginsberg Center supports faculty with these efforts.

University of Michigan.Service-learning and the preparation of the next generation of civic and socially-responsible leaders are central to the University mission. Because of this, prospective students, faculty, and staff choose to study or work at the University of Michigan. The University supports service-learning/civic engagement financially. Every University department, school, and college is involved with service-learning and civic engagement. The University encourages and values faculty doing public scholarship, and rewards them for this work in review, promotion, and tenure decisions.

Community partners. Community partnerships with the University of Michigan are based on mutual respect, reciprocity, and equality. These partnerships draw on partner assets and improve community life and lives through service and advocacy. Community partners see University students, faculty, and staff as integral participants in the work they do and the change(s) they seek.

The service-learning movement. Ginsberg Center staff make significant contributions to service-learning/civic engagement as national leaders in the field and learn from other college and university service-learning centers around the country and world.

Alumni. The Ginsberg Center involves its alumni in the work of Ginsberg through a thriving network. Alumni are alert to systems of oppression, confront root causes of social ills, and are involved in creating a more just society and world. They are well known for such efforts.

The planning process examined and reaffirmed Ginsberg's core values:

Learning and consciousness raising. We believe an integral part of higher education is the learning that occurs through service and community involvement, resulting in the critical understanding of social issues and development of a deeper commitment to justice.

Social justice. Our work reflects the vision of a more just society. We seek to address the root causes of social inequality by challenging the personal beliefs and social systems that create it.

Ethic of service. We believe that each of us has the ability and power to affect, positively and negatively, our global society. Therefore, we seek to promote an ethic of life-long service and social responsibility. Through education, reflection, and community partnerships, we empower individuals and groups to identify and respond to oppression and inequality, to bring about fundamental change in social systems, and to commit to a life-long investment in service and social responsibility.

Personal and professional development. We believe in challenging individuals to explore and develop their values and identity by providing meaningful opportunities for personal, professional, and intellectual growth. These opportunities for growth include community involvement, issue education, critical reflection, and leadership development.

Community engagement. We believe that our community service must engage community members as equal partners. We involve the voices and perspectives of community partners in our work at Ginsberg: in training students, setting goals, planning events, and developing programs. We value the expertise of our partners and stakeholders, and base roles and responsibilities on each partner's capacities and resources. We share accountability, risks, and costs of our partnerships.

Authentic and diverse coalitions. We believe that social justice can occur by identifying our commonalities, building upon our strengths, and engaging our differences. Our efforts to build authentic partnerships and coalitions across social, ethnic, and geographic boundaries and roles are sincere and based on engagement, honest and open dialogue, mutual respect, and shared vision and goals. We seek to foster collaborative decision-making and a collective vision, resulting in solidarity within and between groups of students, staff, faculty, and community members.

Integrity of the Ginsberg Center. We believe that our commitment to service and social justice mandates that we live our core values and act with respect, honesty, trust, and fairness. As a unified Ginsberg with a common vision, we strive to communicate authentically, make decisions collaboratively, and share knowledge and resources. These actions are essential to maintaining the integrity of the Ginsberg Center, living by our core values, and furthering our collective vision of social justice and equality.

The Ginsberg Center's Context

The planning process considered the strengths and weaknesses in the Ginsberg Center, the opportunities and threats for Ginsberg's work in the University outside Ginsberg, and the opportunities and threats in the environment outside the University.

Strengths in the Ginsberg Center:

• Staff are competent, committed, and experienced; and they share a social justice orientation.
• Programs are diverse—i.e., one-day immersions or longer commitments, for-credit activities, co-curricular programs, internships that offer stipends—and therefore offer opportunities that can be attractive to many kinds of people.
• Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning is a national, peer-reviewed journal that helps the Ginsberg Center take national leadership in the community-service learning movement in higher education.
• The Ginsberg Center is focused on the central University activities of teaching and research in furthering the role of service learning and civic engagement on campus. At the same time, the faculty director and the associate directors aim to provide continuity and commitment to assure programs' quality.
• The Ginsberg Center values students and promotes student leadership through programs and the student advisory board.
• Staff and students are diverse in many ways, including personality and work styles.
• The Ginsberg Center's work focuses on social justice and social change.
• The Ginsberg Center integrates education into all programs involving community service.
• The Ginsberg Center evaluates its programs in order to assure they have desired effects and to identify ways to improve them.
• The Ginsberg Center's endowment provides flexibility and resources to offer strong programs that address the goals.
• The support from the Division of Student Affairs development officer opens opportunities for finding additional resources for innovating with new initiatives and expanding strong existing programs.
• The Ginsberg Center's programs provide meaningful assistance to community organizations.
• The Ginsberg Center has strong relationships with numerous community organizations because of a history of students' making strong contributions to the organizations' work.
• The Ginsberg Center provides a supportive work environment for staff.
• The Ginsberg Center's active advisory boards—national, student, and faculty—bring helpful perspectives for strengthening Ginsberg's work.
• The Ginsberg Center offers support to faculty for engaging students in service learning.
• The Ginsberg Center's special events—Learning from the Community and the Dewey Lecture, for instance—help extend Ginsberg Center activities to many faculty and students across campus.
• The Ginsberg Center's evaluation initiatives help identify programs' strengths and areas for improvement.

Weaknesses in the Ginsberg Center:

• The Ginsberg Center's mission suggests the need for strong integration with many programs and departments across campus, but the tendency is to focus on the work of the programs located in Ginsberg.
• Ginsberg's programs have become more integrated, but staff can still see their responsibility as their program alone rather than the Ginsberg Center's work as a whole.
• The community initiatives area has not yet been able to have an effect on how the Ginsberg Center reinforces community benefit or on how University-community partnerships lead to community benefit.
• The Ginsberg Center can be isolated from faculty although many students are involved in its activities.
• About 1900 students participate in at least one of the Ginsberg programs each year, but this is less than 5 percent of all students on campus.
• Community leaders often say they cannot figure out how to access student volunteers or how to find out about University programs involving community service.
• Too many faculty say they do not know what the Ginsberg Center does or how to access its services.
• The important focus on student learning can sometimes dominate the focus on contributing to solving community problems, thus inadvertently risking exploitation of community partners.
• Some Ginsberg Center programs are heavily dependent on grants and gifts for support, thus making their continuation uncertain.
• The faculty initiatives area lacks a strategic plan and has not achieved enough in the last few years due in large part to lack of sufficient staff.
• Ginsberg's growth and its lack of a full-time director and business manager mean leadership can be weak and most staff must do some business manager work, although without background for this.

Opportunities Within the University:

The planning process identified several opportunities facing the Ginsberg Center in connection with developments in the rest of the University:

• Several units on campus are integrating community service into curriculum—thus making learning through community service more central to what the University does.
• President Coleman early identified "engagement" as one of her four major agenda items.
• The Provost is supportive of service-learning.
• The new criterion for re-accreditation of the University, "engagement and service," points to the importance of community service and learning in addition to many other forms of engagement.
• Ginsberg's administrative location with direct reporting to Vice Presidents for Student Affairs and Government Relations offers connection with numerous other programs that work with UM students.
• Ginsberg's location in the Division of Student Affairs has meant Ginsberg has strong enthusiasm and support for its work from DSA leadership and benefits from the vision of that leadership.
• The new Center for Educational Outreach and Academic Success is a new partner in encouraging community partnerships, especially with activities involving K-12 youth.
• The dean and some faculty in LSA have increased interest in ways that service-learning can engage students' energies and lead to strong learning.
• The growth in student interest in sustainability with justice means that Ginsberg has opportunities to support new kinds of initiatives.
• The student-led organization that has produced Semester in Detroit reflects high student interest in Detroit and can lead to more community service and learning in the city.
• The concentration of UM faculty, staff, and student community-engaged work in certain areas means that Ginsberg can aid in finding ways that UM and community leaders can advance community agendas more effectively.
• In the wake of Proposition 2, Ginsberg can take a major role in reinforcing diversity by connecting with prospective UM students through current UM students' work and through bringing UM students into contact with people very different from themselves in a setting that enhances learning.
• The Ginsberg Center could strengthen ties with the School of Education through student internships and support for training in service learning through the School's primary and secondary education programs.
• The Ginsberg Center's work addresses many issues that are central to the National Center for Institutional Diversity, and the two organizations might benefit from greater collaboration.
• Ginsberg's mission enables it to take leadership in sustaining and strengthening programs involving service learning across campus.
• Many opportunities exist to partner with other programs to enrich the opportunities for faculty and students to engage in community service and learning.
• Ginsberg could capitalize on its relationship to Government Relations in order to make a greater contribution to communities and to make those contributions better known.
• The affiliation with the Division of Student Affairs offers opportunities to engage with offices and with student organizations that have not traditionally participated in community service.
• More than 15,000 students engage in service through organizations and programs each year. Many of these efforts could be linked more strongly to learning to enhance students' development through their college years.
• The growth of the service-learning movement means that Ginsberg has countless opportunities for work across the campus.

Opportunities Outside the University:

• The commitment to integrating community service and learning in higher education has become a national movement. This means that Ginsberg has increasing numbers of peers with whom to share innovative ideas.
• Numerous opportunities exist for funding for activities that involve students and faculty in making a difference in communities
• As information about Ginsberg work grows, community interest in having a connection with the UM can also grow.
• The coming retirement of large numbers of leaders of nonprofit organizations will provide opportunities for jobs for younger generations; many students engaged in service-learning may be interested in this kind of work.
• As the baby boom generation retires, many may be interested in working with Ginsberg and students to strengthen voluntarism and learning through service.

Threats Within the University:

• The relationship with the Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs is informal, which suggests that Ginsberg's work is not necessarily seen as central to the academic mission of the University.
• Many students and faculty have never heard of the Ginsberg Center; many who have heard of Ginsberg do not know what it does.
• Interpretation of tenure regulations often means only vetted print publication counts for tenure, not other ways of building bodies of knowledge—such as vetted, refereed, prize-winning cultural work (for instance, museum installations). This makes faculty wary of engaged scholarship.
• Few faculty outside the professional schools come to the University with an interest in public scholarship or teaching using service-learning. The environment at the University does not encourage a turn toward engaged scholarship or teaching with service-learning.
• Many faculty lack the know-how to undertake teaching that involves service learning or engaged scholarship.
• The enormous volume of opportunities to work across campus to enhance community service and learning means that Ginsberg staff have to be strategic in choices about what they do and are constantly torn between breadth and depth in their commitments.
• Ginsberg needs to beware of "mission creep" as new opportunities that are not central to the mission look attractive and interesting.

Threats Outside the University:

• The state's budget problems are continuing; this will mean further budget cuts for higher education. Because the Ginsberg Center has no source of revenue through tuition or fees, it is vulnerable to budget cuts, along with other Division of Student Affairs units.
• Changes in federal priorities could mean the end of the AmeriCorps program with little advance warning.
• The move in some states to tax the capital in endowments can threaten UM's financial situation.

Strategic Priorities

The participants in the planning process identified several strategic priorities on which Ginsberg should focus over the next few years to build on strengths, address weaknesses, take advantage of opportunities, and protect from threats. Addressing these strategic priorities will help to achieve Ginsberg's goals and advance its mission.

I. Strengthen Ginsberg's connection to faculty and to the University's central mission of teaching and research.
Faculty spend most of their time teaching students and carrying out research; their work is the principal way that the University achieves its mission. Students spend much of their time at the University in taking courses and studying. In order to encourage community service and learning among many more students and make it integral to what the University does, Ginsberg will work on strengthening relationships with faculty. Some ways Ginsberg can do this include:

• Develop a strategic plan for faculty initiatives so that the direction can become more focused and have more impact.
• Identify "best practices" for engaging faculty in major research universities in teaching and research that incorporates community-service learning and decide on ways to implement some of these.
• Continue to use the Dewey lecture to demonstrate the rich contributions to research and knowledge-building that engagement in community service can encourage.
• Work with CRLT to expand support to faculty and groups of faculty to revise curriculum to integrate community service and learning into courses in ways that make long-term changes in pedagogy and curricular content.
• Make the support offered to faculty easier to find and easier to use. More information could be readily available via the website.
• Build on the points faculty made at the LSA curriculum session in early 2008 to provide new kinds of assistance to faculty.
• Assess the feasibility of, and implement if feasible, a faculty fellows program for new associate professors. The fellowship could offer course release with participation in a faculty group emphasizing service-learning and engaged scholarship.
• Find ways that build the capacity of Ph.D. students to become an engaged faculty of the future.
• Find ways to reinforce and strengthen strong programs at UM that involve community service and learning. This effort might include transition planning as leaders of some programs retire.
• Start an "incubator" program that provides extensive support to a faculty member working to transform teaching to use service-learning, then gradually sends the faculty member off to work independently of Ginsberg support.
• Continue to reinforce the strong initiatives that the Ginsberg Center has had for encouraging faculty to engage students in community service and learning through teaching and research: the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, publications to show faculty how to teach and do research that involve community service, workshops to help faculty revise courses, consultations with departments and colleges that are considering revision of curriculum to incorporate more community service.

II. Strengthen the Ginsberg Center's connections with and contributions to community organizations.
Students, faculty, and staff engage with many community organizations, but we do not necessarily think as much about strengthening the benefits to community partners as we do about enhancing student learning and faculty research. We can increase the benefits to community partners of the University's community service and civic engagement.

• Strengthen the community advisory board as an important source of input for strengthening the Ginsberg Center's contribution to community needs.
• Strengthen systems that connect community organizations to student volunteers and increase communication with community organizations.
• Provide more guidance to community organizations about how to get the most from student interns and volunteers.
• Strengthen connections with Ginsberg Center alumni through collaboration on community service activities.
• Strengthen orientation and training for faculty and students about how to engage with community partners for mutual benefit.
• Strengthen evaluation of community impacts of Ginsberg programs to provide more guidance about how Ginsberg Center activities could have more effects on community initiatives.
• Use the Stuart A. Miller Fund to work on ways to enhance the community benefit from UM-community partnerships while faculty and students also achieve their goals.

III. Strengthen the Ginsberg Center's connection to other organizations and offices on campus in order to reinforce community service and learning.
Staff and faculty work with large numbers of students through many offices and programs across the campus. Many of these organizations could be more engaged in community service and civic participation or could strengthen the integrative learning that occurs through their service.

• Strengthen the relationship between the Ginsberg Center and the Office of the Vice President for Government Relations. Ginsberg can make a greater contribution to the Vice President's outreach mission, and Ginsberg's work in the community may have more impact if Ginsberg uses the networks of the office more effectively.
• Continue to foster relationships with the Provost's Office, the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, and other units on campus in order to identify opportunities to encourage community service and learning that are integrated into the work of these units. The Ginsberg Center's faculty director should build partnerships that enable the Ginsberg Center to contribute to and strengthen the University's emphasis on citizenship and community service.
• Deepen relationships with student organizations to strengthen community service and learning.
• Ginsberg programs should be more connected to the e-portfolio project as a way to enable students to connect their co-curricular and course work and to advance their own development in the process.

IV. Reinforce and sustain the Ginsberg Center's progress and strong, established programs.
While Ginsberg takes a strategic approach to opportunities to achieve its mission, we want to continue to strengthen the work we have done well.

Promote student leadership.

The participants in the planning process felt that the support of student leaders has been a Ginsberg Center strength, and this should be sustained. In addition, Ginsberg should strengthen its workshops and trainings for students by building on the strengths of the approaches across its programs.

Continue to build capacity within the Ginsberg Center.

Ginsberg programs have made considerable progress in becoming part of an integrated organization. This progress should continue.

1. Develop stronger training for staff about student learning processes and about teaching about societal issues.
2. Develop ways to assure that all staff are familiar with literature on service-learning and use best practices in implementing service-learning approaches.
3. Develop and expand the Ginsberg Center's training for students by finding cross-program training opportunities and learning from each other's strengths.
4. Work together to strengthen attention to community benefit from our programs and to implement best practices in working with community partners.
5. Continue to work on making Ginsberg programs welcoming of diverse students.
6. Find ways to reduce the financial barriers to students' participation in Ginsberg programs.

In addition, the Ginsberg Center should work on two major issues that can help in achieving all the major strategic priorities above:

• Continue to work on the visibility of the Ginsberg Center so that faculty, students, and community members have an easier time accessing the opportunities the Ginsberg Center offers.
• Increase the funding for Ginsberg Center initiatives so that Ginsberg can achieve more of its potential.

Conclusion

The Ginsberg Center has become an important resource on campus for students and faculty involved in community service and learning. At the same time, Ginsberg can do much more to "engage students, faculty, and community partners in learning together through community service and civic participation in a diverse democratic society." The strategic priorities identified in this plan will help the Ginsberg Center achieve this mission and more fully realize its potential.

Planning Committee Members

Mary Beth Damm, Ginsberg Center, Associate Director
Kara Denyer, Ginsberg Center, Program Coordinator, Detroit Initiative
Margaret Dewar, Professor, Urban & Regional Planning
Steve Grafton, President, U-M Alumni Association
Lorraine Gutierrez, Ginsberg Center, Faculty Director
Gabrielle Holmes, Student representative
Judith Jackson, Community representative, Detroit Youth Foundations
Kathy Winterholter, Community representative, Safe House Center
Sarah Miller, Ginsberg Center, Program Advisor, SERVE
Randall Ross, Community representative, Guidance Center
William Schultz, Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Janet Weiss, Associate Provost for Academic Affairs
Susan Wilson, Director, Office of Student Activities and Leadership
Peter Woiwode, Student representative
Evans Young, Assistant Dean, Literature, Arts, and Sciences
Michael Spencer, Facilitator and Associate Professor, Social Work

Updating in May 2008 occurred through a Ginsberg staff retreat and National Board discussions.