Benefits for Community Partners

By participating in the Service Learning program at City College, community partners can:

• gain access to services of university students
• increase the diversity of their volunteer base
• identify unmet organizational needs and meet those needs through the development of a service project.
• develop relationships with the City College campus and leverage additional campus resources to strengthen organizational capacity.

Resources for Community Partners

Creating and sustaining mutually-beneficial campus/community partnerships is key to any successful service-learning program.  To facilitate this, The Colin Powell Center provides the following support to our community partners

• Assistance with Project Design: Powell Center staff can help to shape and define project goals and expectations so that both community partners and students benefit equally from the service-learning experience. We often broker communication between organizational staff and faculty and handle necessary paperwork and procedures for tracking and evaluating student work in the community.
  
• Orientation for Service Learners:  On-site or in-class orientations can serve to educate students about a community partner's programs, mission, history, staff policies etc.; and provides an opportunity for students to ask questions about specific service projects.  Powell Center staff is also available to facilitate pre-service orientations as well as de-briefing and evaluation sessions upon completion of service assignments.
  
• Contact with your Agency: Powell Center staff maintains frequent contact with community partners to answer questions about service-learning, to offer suggestions about project design, and to serve as a liaison between your organization and City College students and faculty.
• Feedback and Evaluation: We also provide formal evaluation tools for community partners to use for reporting on student performance and on challenges and successes experienced during the course of a service-learning project.
• Handbooks:  The Service-Learning Handbook for Community Partners provides in-depth information about service-learning at City College, a further explanation of the service-learning relationship and suggestions about preparing for and working with service-learning students. Click on Community Partner Handbook to download a PDF version of this document.