The power of place: Stanford's engagement in Redwood City and North Fair Oaks
The Gardner Center's Amy Gerstein shares strategies for successful community partnerships during a gathering of Stanford Community Engagement Hubs.
From Highway 101, you can't miss the prominent Stanford Health Care sign near the Woodside Road exit and close by the Stanford Redwood City Campus — less visible are the many ways that Stanford scholars and staff engage with community health clinics, schools, food distribution, memory care residences, and more.
The university is an integral part of this North Fair Oaks neighborhood — an unincorporated area that sits between Redwood City and Menlo Park — as well as Redwood City. During a recent gathering of Stanford centers, institutes, and offices that work in and with these communities — collectively known as Community Engagement Hubs within the university — the energy for collaboration was palpable.
The session was convened by Stanford’s Office of Community Engagement to generate internal awareness about the breadth of Stanford's engagement in the area and, more importantly, to consider opportunities for greater impact as we partner with neighborhood organizations.
A panel about possibilities
The day featured a panel discussion about the powerful possibilities of deploying a "place-based approach" — a coordinated, collaborative, and long-term effort to build thriving communities in a defined geographic area.
That concept resonated with panelist Amy Gerstein, executive director of the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities. The center has long been an active participant in Redwood City Together, a multi-sector collaborative that includes city and county agencies, school districts, healthcare providers, and more.
"Our goal and role has been to listen and identify common issues and needs in the Redwood City community, and then use our expertise as researchers to contribute to solutions," she said.
Tackling chronic absence
In just one example of how this model can work, Gerstein shared how the collaborative came together to tackle truancy among Redwood City students. Gardner Center researchers pulled together disconnected data sets and found that what had been perceived as deliberate "truancy" was actually an issue of common absences.
The researchers were then able to identify predictive factors, like chronic absenteeism in Kindergarten, and link them to worrisome academic outcomes that surfaced much later. It was this new understanding that enabled and prompted collaborative members to take decisive action.
The schools and local police embarked on communications campaigns, local healthcare providers changed policies about excuse notes, and the elementary school district hired an attendance coordinator to call families and help get kids to school — a move that made such a difference the position paid for itself.
Building healthy communities
Others on the panel shared how they've seen a place-based approach pay big dividends. Ndidi Unaka with Stanford Medicine Children’s Health shared her prior experience working with Cincinnati Children's Hospital, located in a city with extremely high rates of childhood asthma.
The hospital set an ambitious goal to reduce asthma-related hospitalizations by half in a single year, and it was able to achieve it through a holistic approach that addressed many contributing factors in the community, including substandard housing. "It was hard yet meaningful work," she observed.
Nazleen Bharmal, who recently joined Stanford Health Care, shared the ways in which the Cleveland Clinic tackled major health disparities in the Fairfax neighborhood where the main hospital is located. As one way to reduce barriers to care, the clinic leased an unused building and created a community gym with embedded primary care and lifestyle specialties.
The clinic also "adopted" city blocks one by one, conducting health screenings of every single resident and their housing environment, bringing in vendors to do safety improvements when needed. Finally, when clinic leadership heard from residents that the neighborhood was a food desert, they found a way to bring in a grocery store with affordable housing above it.
Leaning into strengths
These kinds of benefits only happen when we're really "in it with the community in ways that are always relational and not transactional," says Unaka.
That requires trust, active listening, and a commitment to the long-term, elaborated Gerstein — as well as an honest recognition of what we bring to the table and the complementary strengths, knowledge, and capabilities of our community partners.
This kind of parity was something that John Gardner himself emphasized when he was a Stanford lecturer and cofounded the Gardner Center 25 years ago, she said.
"Gardner insisted on breaking down barriers between the university and its neighbors. He called on all of us to 'pierce the eucalyptus curtain' and embrace the opportunity to learn from our community colleagues."
