From the Annual Report: The COVID-19 pandemic has presented new challenges to the community-engaged work of U-M student groups and faculty, as well as teachers and school administrators. Many U-M partners supported by Ginsberg have had to adjust alongside the schools with whom they collaborate amidst shifting health and safety guidelines, hybrid schedules and rising and falling levels of COVID risk.
This changing environment as well as the astute observations of Nancy Shore, Strategic Partnership and Volunteer Coordinator at Ann Arbor Public Schools (AAPS), has led to a more coordinated effort on U-M’s campus. Shore says that when she first began working to facilitate relationships between the university and AAPS schools, many existing partnerships “happened in isolation,” with limited sharing of resources and expertise. This inspired her to create a bridge between the university and its school-based community partners, with the help of the Ginsberg Center and the Center for Educational Outreach (CEO).
“I first worked with the Ginsberg Center to create an annual meeting of all of the U-M faculty and staff that oversaw service-learning and work-study programs with AAPS,” says Shore. “This meeting brought together professors and staff who were doing similar work but had never had a chance to share their experiences with others at the university. This meeting and the chance to collaborate across schools and programs has been extremely helpful.”
In addition to this annual meeting, a K-12 Community of Practice (CoP) has developed to improve the relationships between education-focused students groups on campus and local partners within the AAPS system.
Knowing that AAPS had links to several student groups on campus, Shore knew that finding a better way to connect with them was a priority. She took the advice of Sara Saylor, Ginsberg’s Assistant Director of Community Engagement, to connect further with CEO, which had already been cultivating similar partnerships between the Detroit Public Schools Community District and U-M student groups. This desire to replicate a similar form of collaboration between U-M and AAPS eventually led to a kickoff event bringing together U-M’s many student groups, allowing them to connect with their AAPS-based community partners in real time, explains Dyrel Johnson, Student Affairs Program Manager at CEO.
“This event allowed both CEO and Ginsberg to address student groups at once, ensuring that every organization had access to the same information and resources,” Johnson says. “This opportunity represented a win for CEO and Ginsberg. The student organizations realized the benefit of having a space for them to convene and share information, and wanted to continue to engage in opportunities to learn alongside other student organizations.”
Johnson continues to work alongside Ginsberg’s Student Outreach and Engagement Manager Brendan Gallagher to grow the student-facing portion of the CoP, utilizing their organizations’ research and expertise when consulting with student groups that wish to improve their partnerships with local schools. In the year ahead, the student CoP aims to generate campus-wide awareness, recruit new student groups and grow the community of students dedicated to supporting K-12 schools.