Why do relationships matter in community-engaged leadership?
If students seek to impact systems of inequity, we must coach them on how to be inclusive and participate in coalitions, while encouraging humility.
Relationships matter. Our students and community partners constantly remind us of this important fact. But building relationships is not a plug-and-play exercise that can be scaled through app culture. There is a person, full of emotions, hopes, dreams, and fears, with whom we are in relationship. I have participated in many leadership programs that focus on training individuals to accomplish tasks or facilitate processes. In the Office of Engagement Initiatives’ community-engaged leadership model, relationships are not simply a means to these ends, but rather are a mindset at the heart of building healthy communities.
At Cornell, leadership educators often cite four levels of leadership mastery: personal, interpersonal, group, and system. This concept is taught to undergraduates in our leadership minor, to graduate students, and, as I learned recently, to staff through the Harold D. Craft Leadership Program. In addition to supporting students to build stronger relationships with themselves and other individuals, we also must prepare students to enter into relationships at the group and systems levels. Only in this way can we support them to address the social messes of our world that often drive the need for the provision of material assistance.
Within community engagement circles, Tania D. Mitchell’s seminal article “Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning” cites the centrality of entering into authentic relationships, and within OEI’s leadership program we seek to build on that in three important ways:
Inclusion Mitchell punctuates how a student’s ability to build and maintain relationships is connected to campus goals of inclusion when she writes, “Relationships based on connection recognize and work with difference.” We encourage students, including our Engaged Ambassadors, to apply this principle to individual interactions as well as to how their groups relate to each other, and how our institution relates to other, off-campus institutions.
As a pedagogy, community engagement can support historically marginalized students to persist and succeed. Groups of students who together serve off-campus communities gain practice in being effective interpersonally, in multi-racial and multi-class settings. And strikingly, students who take action at the liminal campus-community boundary, regardless of their social identities, build skills in relating to a different kind of difference: varied ways of knowing.
Students who take action at the liminal campus-community boundary, regardless of their social identities, build skills in relating to a different kind of difference: varied ways of knowing.
Community members, immersed in their communities, have a different perspective on the problems plaguing their neighborhoods, and the solutions to these problems. Program partner Margo Hittleman with the Natural Leaders Initiative offers this provocative image that we use to challenge our students to consider which forms of knowledge they value when entering into relationships.
Humility The pathway to high-performing teams and collective action is through humility. Most Cornell students admit to practicing the still-dominant influence model of leadership, where power over instead of power with still reigns. Students come by this belief naturally, as most (from the United States anyway) are socialized before coming to college to believe that leaders have a right to dominate.
Mitchell, through P.H. Collins, reminds us of the importance of taking a critical approach to relationship building across all four levels of mastery by acknowledging all stakeholders in the partnership have knowledge and context. She reminds us, “Most relationships across difference are squarely rooted in relations of domination and subordination.” Our relationship mindset encourages students to critically reflect on how, as emerging leaders, they also are in process, and are learning and growing as they complete projects, lead meetings, and cultivate leadership within their groups.
History shows that there is inherent power imbalance between universities and their surrounding communities, with our often best-intended research projects or one-time service days having a detrimental impact when planned for, rather than with, community members who have been addressing longstanding inequities for decades. Too often this imbalance is reproduced by the newest university partners (faculty or students), who too often — through lack of humility — do not understand the partnership building work that has been done before them. This is especially true of students who have a limited time to contribute to their surrounding communities.
As research from Google demonstrates, high performing teams are those wherein all people feel safe to contribute. Given power imbalances within campus groups (by social identity) and between campus and community (by preferred ways of knowing), we aim to support students in creating trusting relationships, so that safe spaces can evolve into courageous spaces for their groups and projects. This also means coaching students to acknowledge power relations between groups and institutions with the same humble mindset.
This also means coaching students to acknowledge power relations between groups and institutions with the same humble mindset.
Coalitions As students craft a personal model of change and postgraduate engagement plan through the capstone of our community-engaged leadership program, we ask them to consider connecting across ways of making change and issues of public concern. Previous experience building relationships across social differences, and taking action in off-campus communities prepares students to critically reflect on how community organizing, philanthropy, and research (and other forms of action cited in the Social Change Wheel) can likewise be mutually beneficial when applied to a single issue of public concern.
Real world coalitions also are built across issues such as climate change, mass incarceration, and food insecurity. If students see their purpose in impacting the roots of systems of inequity, and not just the fruits or symptoms, we must coach them on how to develop inter-group relationships.
We do this in our capstone dialogue, facilitated by our Engaged Ambassadors over seven weeks. In this peer-led space we encourage students to connect across organizational missions. Likewise, our Group Certificate in Engaged Leadership impresses upon students the effectiveness of building relationships across groups in order to have institutional or perhaps systemic impact.
Whether students seek to exercise community-engaged leadership at the interpersonal, group, or systems level, they need practice at building authentic relationships across differences and with humility. As leadership educators and community engagement practitioners we must acknowledge our own default settings — which are often set to addressing individual behavior — if we are to serve our students in a manner in which they wish to be served.
