Capacity in Community Organizations: Challenging the Helpfulness of the UW

Why do this project?

As a world-renowned research institution, the University of Wisconsin- Madison likes to think we have all of the answers. It turns out that when it comes to service learning and partnerships, we are not the experts on community needs and wanted to hear the voices of those who are: the community partners. Students enrolled in the Community Based Research and Evaluation class partnered up with the Morgridge Center for Public Service to conduct a research project in order to improve community-based learning and campus partnerships. This research included various methods of data collection such as online surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews. After all of the data was collected, we closely looked at each focus group and interview transcription to find recurring ideas surrounding capacity within community organizations. This part of the research begins to highlight the views of community partners in relation to the University helping or hindering their organization’s capacity.

What is capacity & why does it matter?

To understand the significance of capacity within our community partner organizations, we first need to define capacity in the context of this project. We have defined capacity as “the extent to which different stakeholders have the ability to put in time and effort in order to improve the functioning of an organization”. The purpose of capacity building is to engage all parts of the organization — staff, volunteers, and systems — to work to their fullest. In one interview, a community partner explained that sometimes their need for volunteers and the actual turn out for volunteers doesn’t match up. This leaves them short-staffed, meaning that the constituents of the organization aren’t being served adequately at all times. This is just one example where capacity is negatively impacted by student involvement.

What has been done before?

Our research on capacity is rooted in a framework of previous capacity building experiences from organizations across the country. It is clear that organization’s partnerships with the University of Wisconsin are similar to many other partnerships. According to previous research, a “higher level indicator of program success may be that the intervention renders the community or the partner organization more competent” (Hawe, Noort, King, & Jordens, 1997). This statement relates to UW-Madison in that numerous community partners have had positive results with student partners enabling them to grow their capacity. Second, community partners stated that an aspect which hinders partnerships is the lack of a central resource that houses basic information. Previous research goes into detail on how communities need to utilize capacity building resources to reach their goals, specifically stating that there should be “a free flow of information between participants” (Laverack, 2003). By placing our research in a framework of other research studies, we can confirm that many aspects of UW-Madison partnerships fall in line with issues addressed broadly in research.

What we found

1. Community partner organizations utilize students in a variety of contexts from hosting service learning classes to paid positions to volunteers. Many organizations use students in more than one way.

2. Partners identified a desire for some type of resource that houses information. Sometimes this information is needed when an organization is already involved with students, but more often community partners are looking for inroads when they have a new need or idea.

• “…if there are portals to building relationships with UW it would be great because I don’t really have a sense of what portals are there in terms of community partnerships…like I wouldn’t even know where I would start”
• “…there’s too many options otherwise. So you have to narrow it down which can be difficult, like who do you actually contact and who’s the person you have to contact, what classes should you look at, things like that. Um what organizations do you need to find, there’s so many organizations on campus”

3. When organizations are understaffed or overwhelmed, they sometimes task students with clerical work or physical labor tasks. This type of help is very meaningful to the organizations.

• “It’s the taking a little off of our plate by having people who can come and do tasks that make our staff better able to focus on higher level functioning activities… [student help] contributes to our capacity in terms of what we do because it’s just a little bit of something that we don’t have to pay someone to do”.

4. Students’ impact on creating lasting change within an organization is limited according to their availability and/or commitment.

• “It would be amazing, though, if we could get, you know, students or interns who would work over a period of a couple of years rather than just a 25 hour semester. It’s hard to do a meaningful project with anybody in 25 hours”.

5. Many partners said that they enjoy student help and are grateful for it, some even saying that they rely on students be able to do their work.

• “…in terms of our capacity through volunteers and interns, more than double to tripled what we were about to do which is so awesome”
• “UW Students are such a large part of our volunteer base, and they are a big part of the reason we are able to reach out to the community and offer empowerment”
• “We literally could not do what we do if anybody were to just leave like halfway through the semester or something”

6. When the partnerships are successful, students help organizations beyond just building day-to-day capacity. Sometimes positive relationships lead to multi-year volunteers or even staff later on.

What’s next?

This research has helped us shed light on the effectiveness of service learning and community partnerships in relation to an organization’s capacity. We were limited in the number of organizations interviewed so further research with more organizations is needed. Through the interviews we did gather, community partners seemed appreciative of UW students helping to support and build their program capacity. Community partners also seemed to want a main communication system within UW to make it easier to connect with professors and students on campus. It seemed more beneficial for the organization when time was spent on training students on site, however, with limited staffing it can be difficult to sometimes fully utilize the students to their full capacity because time to train them is scarce.

Now that the community has shared these ideas, it will be easier for the Morgridge Center to work toward ensuring that these partnerships become more beneficial. The community partners are the driving force behind service learning because only they truly understand what the community needs. It remains essential that the UW listens to our community partners.