MoMent

Where generative partnerships
exist…interdependency,
innovation, multiple
perspectives, and a commitment
to a long-range investment
in the public good define the
partnership’s core values; higher
education no longer sees itself as
going out into the community,
but as part of the community,
whether that community is
local, national, or global.
Advancing Collaborative, Generative Civic Partnerships
and Alliances
As this chapter illustrates, there are foundations already laid upon which to
build the next generation of civic work that seeks to make civic learning and
democratic engagement an expected outcome for every student. Some of these
foundations have been established in inventive, intentional curricular designs
within general education, the major, and other areas of specialized or technical
study. Other efforts have taken root in campus life. Still others are embedded
in civic pedagogies like intergroup and deliberative dialogue, service learning,
and collective civic problem solving, enacted both within and beyond the
classroom. To close this chapter on practice, we turn finally to one more
notable foundation partially laid: collaborative, generative civic partnerships
and alliances.
Many campuses have a long list of civic partners, which suggests the
nascent form of what could evolve in the coming decade. The most common
types of partnerships found among the list in the Faces/Phases of Citizenship
(see fig. 7, p. 60) fall into two categories: (1) charitable ones, characterized
by civic altruism, and (2) reciprocal ones, characterized by civic engagement.
An even more ambitious category of civic partnerships and alliances is a
third kind: (3) a generative partnership, characterized by mutual efforts to
define and build civic prosperity. Some practitioners use language like social
entrepreneurship, democratic civic engagement, public engagement, or public
work to describe this new edge of practice.
One of the best known champions of social entrepreneurship is the
nonprofit Ashoka, which defines itself as a network of “innovators for the
public” known for “investing in solutions for our world’s toughest problems”
(http://ashoka.org; see also Appendix D). Ashoka traditionally has allied
entrepreneurial individuals with community groups and businesses; in 2008,
its Ahoka U program added colleges and universities into the mix, linking
higher education and the citizen sector. Their goal is to promote social
entrepreneurship programs and projects on campuses and link students to the
wider world where they are challenged “to solve social problems at the rootcause
and systemic level using innovative, sustainable, scalable, and measurable
approaches” (http://ashokau.org).
Whatever the language adopted, where generative partnerships exist,
the impact on communities can be transformative, on public scholarship farreaching,
and on student learning empowering. Interdependency, innovation,
multiple perspectives, and a commitment to a long-range investment in the
public good define the partnership’s core values; higher education no longer
sees itself as going out into the community, but as part of the community,
whether that community is local, national, or global.
These partnerships create new public space for democratic engagement.
The academy and the community are required to eschew their traditional
boundaries in order to forge a new alliance with each other. The new space
becomes, in effect, a public square for democratic co-creation. But the cocreation
is enacted in participatory, inclusive, complicated ways that reflect
democracy at its best and most challenging. Multiplicity of voices and
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