This year, thanks to a $20,000 grant from the PNC Foundation, Ginsberg was able to fund six PNC Fellowships to partner with community organizations in Ypsilanti and Detroit.
The PNC Summer Fellows worked within the Ginsberg Center’s Community Technical Assistance Collaborative, a community-university partnership that serves community-identified needs involving data and evaluation. The students worked with six different organizations: Detroit Promise, Starr Commonwealth, the Scleroderma Foundation, Groundcover News, Developing K.I.D.S., and the Human Trafficking Commission.
“Over the last several years, PNC Foundation support has been important in growing our Community-University partnership work, and in building the CTAC program”, said Dave Waterhouse, Associate Director of the Ginsberg Center. “This investment continues our partnership with the PNC Foundation, expanding capacity to offer substantial support to community partners during the summer months, when we typically have fewer students engaged.”
“The PNC funding was crucial in helping us cover numerous costs, including student staffing and community partner project costs” says Brianna Christy, Ginsberg’s Technical Assistance, Evaluation, and Assessment Manager. “It increased our capacity, allowing the Fellows to engage for 20 hours a week, which provided the students a level of immersion that deepened their work and those partnerships.”
For Detroit Promise, which creates a pathway for Detroit students to earn a tuition-free college degree, PNC Fellows worked with the organization to develop a mission and vision statement, design and produce an annual report. They also developed a survey to add to Detroit Promise’s data collection processes, researched new databases, and met with their student ambassadors to conduct interviews.
“Our entire experience with CTAC exceeded our expectations. The whole team was very professional and understanding of our needs and issues,” says Detroit Promise’s director, Jade Scott. “The Fellows truly went above and beyond to support us with these projects. They also helped identify ways we can improve in the future by helping us with solutions to current pain points of the program.”
“The PNC Foundation partnership helps us maximize impact on two of our key stakeholder groups: community partners and U-M students,” Christy says. “For the students who had just graduated or were about to graduate, the Fellowship gives them some tangible experience they can take with them into real-world spaces.”