The Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships: building a framework for collaborative inquiry

Drexel University's Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships is a newly established urban extension center designed to foster creative and collaborative relationships between Drexel University's students and faculty and... [ view full abstract ]

Drexel University's Dornsife Center for Neighborhood Partnerships is a newly established urban extension center designed to foster creative and collaborative relationships between Drexel University's students and faculty and residents of the two neighboring communities of Mantua and Powelton Village. The Dornsife Center offers an infrastructure - space, promotion, local networking - for researchers at the university to connect with neighborhood residents in a number of ways, including as research partners.

Part of the Dornsife Center's mission is to share the university's knowledge resources with surrounding communities, and to create more coherent platform from which faculty can conduct participatory and community-facing research projects. Where academic integration is concerned we are creating organizational structures to support radically participatory work that engages residents of these two diverse neighborhoods that have been long estranged due to barriers of race and class. Projects like the multidisciplinary CORE Lab and the Community Lawyering Clinic are meant to invite the university's neighbors as thought partners, not just focus group subjects, in the process of research and inquiry.

This talk gives an overview of the Dornsife Center's work, successes, and challenges.