Flexibility and Adaptability
The keys to a great community-engaged learning experience
By Christina Ochoa ’23
Working with community partners as college students often creates unique arrangements that, when done right, can leverage the strength of both parties to maximize their ability to create innovative solutions.
The main thing this requires is flexibility.
When I first joined the Cornell University Parole Initiative (CUPI), I found myself navigating new waters. In the past, I had worked as a volunteer for community partners and had been in student groups focused on advocacy, but this was my first time merging the two together. The aim of the partnership was simple: to introduce our parent organization’s efforts to aid incarcerated individuals in their parole application process to Cornell. Running ourselves as a student organization within this larger organization had us taking a larger role as volunteers, seeking additional funding sources and having additional training and guidance for our members within the CUPI structure. During the partnership, we learned many lessons that are relevant to any student organization that seeks to develop its own relationship with community partners.
As students, we are often spoiled with the luxury of a rigid schedule. Our classes function on a timeline that rarely differs from what is on the syllabi. We are used to meetings being hyper-formalized and organized; everything from office hours to discussion sections have named times and purposes. Rarely, as students, are we forced to be creative in searching for solutions to our problems. Instead, we sometimes fall for the attractive idea that our professors and course staff can fully guide us through everything that our courses have to offer.
In the real world, and especially when working on social justice projects, there are many more unknowns. As members of CUPI, we have had to confront rapidly-changing policies and procedures as a result of COVID, alongside the general disorganization and last-minute deadlines that are common when working with government institutions. Furthermore, community partners are limited by real-world constraints that come with running any non-governmental organization. People central to the functioning of the organization go on leave, funding gets restricted, and while everyone may care deeply about the cause, there simply isn’t enough staff to take on as many cases as we all would like.
In some ways, working with college students can be a useful resource to organizations. In our case, our location in upstate New York allowed us to do more in-person visits with our applicants located in Cayuga Correctional Facility than most of the volunteers based out of New York City would have been able to. Additionally, having our student leaders and advisors available for any questions or complications reduced the strain that would normally have been placed on our community partners throughout our on-boarding and training process.
As a student organization, the partnership allowed us to contribute to a cause we cared about more than we ever could have within the bounds of our campus by leveraging the legal privileges afforded to us by working alongside licensed lawyers and having access to mentorship from staff that had years of experience working on the project. Since our inception as a student group, we have grown to include over 30 volunteers and three previously-incarcerated individuals successfully achieving parole release.
However, establishing good communication and reasonable expectations between a student group and a fully functioning community partner was sometimes a challenge. While we may be able to tap into a large group of passionate students, we require a lot of training due to our relative inexperience and the fact that our retention is limited (with some exceptions) to students’ short college careers.
Furthermore, the bulk of our work requires us to be in New York State, presenting problems for many students who regularly go home on breaks across the country and even go on semesters abroad. We often work with the same applicants over the course of several semesters; and, as college students, it can be difficult to pledge commitment beyond six months. While we ask students to be conscious of their upcoming commitments before joining, as an organization we find ourselves needing to be flexible with our student volunteers as well, sometimes adjusting the volunteer teams to compensate for a student no longer being available to continue working with us.
Even when things seem impossible, as students we can find support all around us. Knowing how and when to tap into these resources, and being confident in our expertise can sometimes be the key to being an asset to our community partners.
As we begin to start work with our community partners, additional difficulties and challenges can arise.
One of the most important parts of our parole packet is a letter of advocacy which we write for our applicant. In order to ensure it arrives at the facility with enough time before the parole hearing, we are required to send the letter three weeks before the hearing date.
During the months leading up to our applicant’s hearing, our community partner was going through a transition period as they added new staff and changed offices. As a result of the transitions, time-sensitive mail got delayed and scheduling check-ins got more complicated. Most importantly to this story, our main contact was scheduled to be out of the office until after we needed to submit our letter of support. While the expectation is that our letters receive three rounds of edits, as a result of shifted priorities we hadn’t yet received any.
How could we go on without the expertise of our partners? How could we finish this critical step? We discovered through this process the other side of the partnership: our leadership within CUPI was able to step in and give useful feedback based on several years of experience. While we traditionally would have relied on our community partner, the strength of this partnership and the room our community partners had given us to grow and learn independently led us to become a more self-sustaining group that is able to take on many of these challenges ourselves.
Together with our leadership at Cornell, we were able to get our letter of support into a much better condition. Thankfully our community partner also came back from leave early and was able to give us a final round of edits before we sent out our letter in a much better condition than any of us imagined it would be in.
Throughout this process, we learned a lot about what flexibility calls for. While the obvious comes to mind first: being open with deadlines, being willing to prioritize unexpected tasks, and always having a plan B, I have learned through my work with CUPI that true flexibility is based on resilience.
Even when things seem impossible, as students we can find support all around us. Knowing how and when to tap into these resources, and being confident in our expertise can sometimes be the key to being an asset to our community partners. Tackling problems with creativity and making things work even when solutions or methods may not be ideal is the true strength of flexibility, and one of the most important pieces of having a productive partnership where both parties are able to flourish and work together to make a positive impact on the community.
Christina Ochoa ’23 is a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, majoring in Development Sociology and minoring in Creative Writing, Inequality Studies, and Law and Society. She serves as the 2022–23 Cornell Newman Civic Fellow for her work with the Cornell University Parole Initiative, where she currently serves as the New Member Educator. Christina can often be found at Lynah Rink, where she is a member of Cornell University Figure Skating Club and is one of the captains of the Cornell Synchronized Skating Club.
