The promise of partnership work

People often ask, what does it mean to work in partnership with communities? 

I often think about what John Gardner used to say, which is that communities thrive when youth are thriving, and youth thrive when communities are thriving. 

So we really need to think about communities as a whole ecosystem — but very often the way we walk the world is through siloed institutions. We go to school, we go to afterschool programs, we engage in social services, we have healthcare needs. We know, for example, that the folks who provide support to students after school have similar goals to the people who provide support during school. And yet, we rarely seek to understand how these different programs with similar goals support youth outcomes. What if we could link across these different institutions to create a connected picture and help all those who are in communities achieve common goals? 

Finding opportunities to learn across institutions is a really important aspect of what we do at the Gardner Center, and it's why we partner with all manner of community organizations, from city, county, and state agencies; to school districts; nonprofits; and foundations. We listen carefully to the kinds of challenges that people are facing, and we look for ways that research can illuminate the nature of those challenges — and some possible solutions. 

This approach is particularly helpful in times of crisis, like the one we faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

No one institution

In Redwood City, the Gardner Center has been a part of a longstanding community collaborative, Redwood City Together, that includes its two school districts, the city, the county, the local hospital, a local healthcare district, and philanthropic organizations. We share common goals about a thriving Redwood City and have been working to address common challenges and knit connections between and among these otherwise siloed institutions.

When the pandemic started in the spring of 2020, leaders from the collaborative understood that the community was struggling, but they didn't know exactly how. We also knew that if we understood those challenges better, we would be in a much better position to address them. This was true for the school districts, for one of the local hospitals, the city, and the county. 

So the Gardner Center created and administered a needs assessment survey to gather data from the community. We made a special effort to oversample in places where we thought the community was most vulnerable — so in Redwood City and North Fair Oaks, that meant we went to grocery distribution sites and meal distribution sites. It meant we showed up in all kinds of places where community members seek support so we could have a more nuanced view of what challenges people were facing. We also administered the survey in English and Spanish.

We were able to identify key areas in which people were struggling initially — with access to healthcare, housing, and food — and then we repeated the process two more times during the next 18 months. That level of specificity really helped the institutions know how they should allocate resources and provide support, as well as understand how needs were changing over time. It also showed us how responsive the community could be when using data to address emerging issues, like job-related challenges that didn't necessarily show up right at the beginning. 

This is an incredible example of how rigorous research can provide support at a practical level and at a policy level, influencing resource allocation and support services. It is also the kind of effort that no one institution could mount on their own. 

An inclusive and expansive effort

A set of key principles guides the work of the Gardner Center as we partner with communities.  These principles derive from our founder John W. Gardner’s philosophy about developing youth and supporting communities to solve their own problems. 

Rather than approaching communities with our own agenda, we listen, we observe, and we ask questions. We support their efforts to improve youth outcomes by helping them identify the concerns most in need of solutions — and then distill those into researchable questions with the potential to yield improvement in policies or programs for youth and families.   

We are based in the Graduate School of Education, and those are our roots. We are educators. We also employ a positive youth development lens and situate our work in the whole community, because we've learned that partnering with a community is a much more inclusive and expansive effort.  

Our most rewarding work happens in community partnerships. It’s in communities where we develop meaningful connections and watch our colleagues leap forward using key insights from research generated by their own data.    

I'm deeply proud of the Gardner Center's work. We have grown and evolved as times have changed, and our long-standing relationships with community partners is a testament to our shared belief in youth and our collective goals to help them and their communities mutually thrive.

Photo: Amy Gerstein pictured with Superintendent John Baker from the Redwood City School District, which has been a Gardner Center partner since the center's founding 25 years ago.