Chapter 15:

 External Partnerships and Community Service

.

HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

.
Since 1992, the university has made great strides in developing external partnerships through its many centers and institutes, grant programs, College of Extended Learning, university advancement efforts, and presidential initiatives.

.
A new vice president for university advancement was hired in October 1996 to bring many of the university's advancement units under one roof including: Public Affairs, Publications, Development, Government Relations, Special Events, and Alumni Affairs. Since 1997, Alumni Affairs, Government Relations, Special Events, and Development all have hired new directors. More detail concerning Advancement and this area’s accomplishments is found Part Three.

.
The San Francisco Urban Institute [www.sfsu.edu/~urbins/] was founded in 1992 by a coalition of civic and university leaders. The institute brings the intellectual resources of the university into collaborative projects which address San Francisco’s most critical issues: economic development, workforce preparation, urban environmental restoration, inner-city education, and health, business, and community development. Some of SFUI’s recent projects include:

.
• A $3.4 million urban grant from the U.S. Department of Education to establish a partnership with CSU Los Angeles to address the problems of cities and urban citizens and to work with state policy makers to disseminate best practices and replicate successful programs throughout California.

.
• The creation of the Valencia Family Health Services clinic which leveraged an initial $150,000 federal grant into more than $3.5 million in support from private foundations, corporations, city departments, and other federal agencies.

.
• Expansion of SFSU’s Step to College program into some of the region’s lowest performing high schools to assist at risk youth (and first-generation college students) in graduating from high school and succeeding in college.

.
• The Bay Area Community Outreach Partnership Centers program, established in collaboration with UC Berkeley and Stanford University, to provide outreach and research to address housing, community development, and economic development issues. It supports SFSU faculty, staff, and student projects in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley to meet critical community needs.

.
• The Center for Inner-City Ethnography (CICE), a multi-disciplinary research and pedagogical forum dedicated to addressing urgent urban problems through qualitative analysis. The center brings together faculty and students engaged in participant-observation studies of local communities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and in selected other cities across the globe. The center strives to further an understanding of how changing regional and global economies interact with local communities and new social movements.

.
• San Francisco Together, a new project aimed at bringing together civic, community, business, labor, and other leaders within San Francisco, to develop and sustain an on-going dialogue concerning development of the city's budget and charter, long-range economic development strategies, and other issues of civic importance. San Francisco Together sponsors joint planning and analytic projects where there are particularly difficult constituency and private interest issues.

.
• The Center for Public Environmental Oversight (CPEO), promoting and facilitating public participation in the oversight of environmental activities, including but not limited to the remediation of federal facilities, private "Superfund" sites, and Brownfields. It was formed in 1993 as CAREER/PRO (California Economic Recovery and Environmental Restoration Project) by the San Francisco Urban Institute, in response to the large number of military base closures in the San Francisco Bay Area.

.
SFSU’s Downtown Center, opened in February 1993, houses major programs of the College of Extended Learning (CEL) and a significant portion of the College of Business MBA program. CEL created the nation’s largest Multimedia Studies Program (MSP) in 1992, with a unique industry advisory group extensively involved in designing the curriculum, sharing new technologies, and donating equipment. The college partnered with the International Interactive Communications Society to develop a cutting-edge multimedia curriculum and to identify industry leaders in the "hottest" areas for workforce development to serve as adjunct practitioner faculty. Through its Technology Partners Program, the MSP creates technology and knowledge-sharing partnerships with leading manufacturers of new media technologies. Advanced and imaginative students (not traditional college age) often move directly from the classroom to an internship to employment or work for hire in the hundreds of companies in San Francisco's "multimedia gulch."

.
The Office of Community Service Learning was established in 1995 to provide a focal point for university-wide service learning activities. The office coordinates and supports efforts to increase opportunities for students and faculty to participate in community service learning. A curriculum development award program provided released time to faculty to develop or modify courses to include a service learning component. During a three-year period, funds from this program supported 75 faculty throughout the university to create a wide array of CSL opportunities. The program now offers more than 100 courses in 41 departments in all 8 colleges.

.
In Winter 1997, the California State University system launched a new statewide advocacy effort to be housed at all campuses called the Ambassadors for Higher Education program. This external advocacy program involves community leaders, public officials, alumni, university students, faculty, and staff and engages them in public policy issues of interest to San Francisco State, the CSU system, and higher education as a whole.

.
The Marian Wright Edelman Institute for Children, Youth, and Families was founded at San Francisco State in 1997 to promote quality services, equity, and access to children, youth, and families through direct service opportunities; to participate in community partnerships and public policy decisions; and to offer an undergraduate Bachelor of Arts in Child and Adolescent Development. The institute offers direct services to children and their families through the following programs: Jumpstart, Safe Start, the Child Studies Center, and Head Start for the City of San Francisco.

.
In 1997, SFSU became the host campus for and hired a new executive director of California Campus Compact, a non-profit organization affiliated with the national organization of Campus Compact. Campus Compact is a coalition of college and university presidents committed to helping students develop the values and skills of citizenship through participation in public and community service. Member campuses function as a coalition to actively engage presidents, faculty, staff, and students and to promote a renewed vision for higher education—one that supports not only the civic development of students but also the campus as an active and engaged member of its community. Campus Compact is also actively involved in state and federal legislation promoting public and community service and forms critical partnerships with business, community, and government leaders.

.
The Cesar E. Chavez Institute for Public Policy was established to help create a base for academic research on critical issues facing Raza communities in California, with a particular geographic emphasis on the San Francisco Bay Area. The institute assists students, faculty, and community organizations by providing funds for research that applies to social, economic, political, cultural, and educational projects with a direct bearing on Chicanos and Latinos.

.
SFSU has been involved in a nation-wide initiative to create a model America Reads Challenge Program. America Reads is President Clinton's challenge to universities to train college students to provide tutoring in reading to maximize each child's ability to read at grade level by third grade. In 1997, President Corrigan was appointed chair of the National Steering Committee for the America Reads Challenge. As part of this effort, President Corrigan committed all of San Francisco State's increase in work-study allotment for student service in the America Reads initiative. This funding offered opportunities to undergraduate work-study-eligible students to work as reading tutors in work-study paid assignments for America Reads. SFSU's America Reads project was established as a collaborative effort between the greater San Francisco school communities and SFSU, involving principals, teachers, school district reading specialists, the San Francisco Volunteers organization, and faculty from the university. SFSU student response has been strong, with the program more than quadrupling since its inception.

.
Since 1992, several external advisory boards have been added to SFSU’s already-extensive list of organizations designed to better connect the university to the community. New community advisory groups have been established to provide support and assistance to the College of Business, Department of Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts, College of Science and Engineering, Romberg Tiburon Center, San Francisco Urban Institute, Edelman Institute, and College of Extended Learning.

.
Since 1992, SFSU has also entered into a number of public-private partnerships with business and industry, to further the educational mission of the university and more closely connect the campus with the surrounding community. Among some of these linkages: The SEGA Foundation helped to set up a computer lab for our NSF-funded Math and Science Teacher Education Project, available to both science and education students. As part of the Oracle Academic Initiative, we are teaching our students to become Oracle database administrators, while Oracle provides curricula, software, and training for our faculty. Microsoft is the corporate sponsor of a joint Colleges of Business and Science/Engineering "Management and Information Technology Forum." SFSUnet, the Office of Community Service Learning’s campus-community Internet project, receives hardware and software from Sun, Cisco, and Oracle. NEC has equipped Knuth Hall and several classrooms with state of the art multimedia capabilities and has donated a custom-designed multimedia conference center.

.
SFSU has also partnered with the business community to conduct town meetings, workshops, and conferences such as: a lecture series entitled "Higher Education and Community Solutions for the Digital Divide;" a conference in conjunction with high-tech businesses, K–12, and community colleges on the role of engineers in society and on improving access to engineering training; and a symposium called "Mass Luminosity," with technology experts and employers, on the future of information technology.

.

Strategic Plan Recommendations

.
References to community partnerships and community service appear not just in the strategic plan section devoted to that topic, but throughout the SFSU strategic plan, in sections dealing with curriculum, teaching, internationalization, and diversity. The pervasiveness of these themes reflects a campus-wide consensus that these are central values to be embodied in many kinds of initiatives—from the classroom, to major collaborative projects, to the President’s Office.

.
The strategic plan recommendations dealing with external relationships and community service can be summarized as follows:

.
• SFSU should continue and expand external partnerships with employer, business, governmental, scientific, and ethnic communities;
• Service learning and other opportunities to join theory with practice should be promoted and supported, with the goal of providing all students with the opportunity to engage in a service learning activity before graduation;
• Community service should be promoted for all employees throughout the university from the highest administrative levels;
• In close collaboration with academic departments, the College of Extended Learning should expand opportunities for continuing education as its part in developing community partnerships;
• In assessing current programs and developing new ones, the university should involve employers through advisory committees and other mechanisms; and
• The university should work more closely with alumni and expand alumni networks abroad.

.

The University in fall 1998

.
Since 1992, the university has continued its involvement in a wide variety of successful partnerships with the external community. These range from internship programs for our students, to operating a collaborative community health center, to jointly administering the John Muir public elementary school. SFSU houses some 100 centers, institutes, and other special projects that link it to the Bay Area community and beyond. Many individual colleges and departments have had existing relationships with employers; but prior to 1998, there was no central repository of all these programs and projects. Faculty were often working at the same site unaware of each other’s work. In 1998, several administrative departments began to conduct independent surveys of external partnerships.

.
President Corrigan approved the university strategic plan in August 1998. Once the strategic plan was approved, several activities commenced to implement the recommendations outlined above. These activities are itemized below and discussed in more detail in the following section of this chapter.

.
• The Community Involvement Center (CIC) was integrated into the Office of Community Service Learning (OCSL) in 1998, so that CIC's efforts could focus on the community service learning courses of the university. OCSL-CIC created the Community Connections DataBase–CCDB [http://thecity.sfsu.edu/~ ocsl/data.html], an on-line database of placement opportunities for CSL students throughout the Bay Area. Students use CCDB to locate placements; community agencies use it to post their information; and faculty use it to authorize agencies appropriate to their courses.

.
• In 1998-99, OCSL developed an on-line survey of faculty service activities and community service opportunities that automatically placed responses into a database which recorded the role of the faculty member, the agency(ies) worked with, the geographic location, and the dates of service. This database has 782 separate faculty entries in it and is maintained by the Office of Community Service Learning.

.
• Faculty recognition and rewards are key to enhancing service learning and a faculty member's own service activities. Accordingly, 1998-99 was designated the year of the Celebration of Faculty Service. In the prior two years, the university held special activities to recognize faculty for their accomplishments in the areas of teaching and scholarship. A task force on the Celebration of Faculty Service was formed in Fall 1998 and held a special celebration ceremony in Spring 1999.

.
• To facilitate public access to the university and its programs, SFSU appointed a web review team to work on redesigning much of the SFSU web site and establish policies concerning web usage. A new web site of SFSU faculty experts was also created by Public Affairs for press inquiries [www.sfsu.edu/~ pubaff/experts/expert.htm].

.
• President Corrigan established the Governmental Relations Council to facilitate intra-campus communications and coordinate efforts to contact elected officials, as well as to develop new external partnerships.

.
• The Marian Wright Edelman Institute hired a new director in Fall 1998 and established partnerships with numerous community-based organizations in the development of a Head Start grant for the City of San Francisco and of a local early childhood education tutoring program called Jumpstart.

.
• The external marketing firm of Lipman-Hearne was hired to assist Public Affairs in conducting an alumni survey as part of the development of a university marketing plan. (See a further discussion later in this chapter.)

.

.

Activities 1998-2000

.
Promoting new outreach and dynamic collaborations
with employers, businesses, and public officials

.
Given the university’s commitment to connections with the community throughout its history, and the continuing desire to improve and expand our relationships, a compilation of all external partnerships was identified as needed in order to establish a baseline database of external activities. This information-gathering provided a much fuller picture of university-community projects (many grant-funded), service learning activities, faculty service to the community, and broad institutional civic engagement initiatives than the university had ever before had. Chief elements of this comprehensive data-gathering effort are described below.

.
Surveys of K–12 Partnerships and Community Projects

.
The provost and the coordinator for K–12 outreach, in cooperation with University Advancement, conducted surveys of colleges and academic departments through the college deans and department chairs. The surveys asked for names of organizations, community groups, civic agencies, and advisory boards that work closely with the units. These surveys also categorized the nature of the partnership; i.e., business, equipment donation, tech transfer, advisory relationship, placement site for student interns or volunteers, grant project site or partner. Information was also compiled on existing internship and service learning efforts that involve or could involve alumni. The survey resulted in a new database of more than 400 community projects conducted across departments. The database is maintained by University Advancement, whose intention is to find resources to regularly maintain and update it and to begin publishing yearly reports of community endeavors stemming from these projects. In regard to K–12 partnerships, a report on all existing partnerships was compiled in 1998 and updated in December 1999.

.
Survey of Colleges’ and Departments' Community Service
and Service Learning Activities

.
In Fall 1999, the Office of Community Service Learning completed its web-based survey of faculty community service activities and community service learning opportunities and now has a working database of over 750 entries. As part of the community service learning initiative at SFSU, the Office of Community Service Learning has also begun development of an electronic database designed to facilitate the community service placement process campus-wide. The goal is the growth of a campus-wide community service learning placement database to be shared by all the participating departments, faculty, students, and community agencies. The database provides basic information to aid faculty in choosing appropriate placements for their students and to aid students in establishing a placement agreement. All faculty and community service programs at SFSU have been invited to submit their placements for inclusion in this database. Placements will be added on an ongoing basis as faculty submit suggestions and agencies request inclusion. OCSL will work with interested participants to transfer placements from their existing databases. Agencies will be invited to submit the appropriate information and will have to sign a consent form indicating their willingness to have their placements listed on the web.

.
Outreach to Employers to Establish New Partnerships

.
In 1998, the College of Extended Learning began an aggressive effort to reach out to employers, in order to design education programs to meet their needs and deliver on-site training to their employees. As of July 2000, CEL had developed partnerships with numerous companies and governmental organizations to provide these services—to such entities as Hewlett Packard, Aspen Media, N.T. Computing, City and County of San Francisco, and the U.S. General Services Administration. In addition, CEL offered academic and professional development credit for 148 different courses in 1999-2000 for such nonprofits and public agencies as the Asian Art Museum, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, San Francisco Exploratorium, SF Early Music Society, SF Unified School District, California Academy of Sciences, Humanities West, the Performing Arts Library and Museum, and the San Mateo County Office of Education, which were then "certified" with appropriate SFSU academic department approval. To continue this effort to connect the university with San Francisco area employers, CEL is launching a project to establish a new downtown campus. Such an urban campus would house both CEL courses and several professional degree and certificate programs.

.
Formal Review of SFSU Web Site

.
An increasingly important connection between SFSU and its community is the World Wide Web. San Francisco State has long had a substantial presence on the web, receiving more than 100,000 hits a day as early as 1996. However, until 1997, there was no mechanism for university review of these sites or for proposals to better use the web to help improve communication with SFSU’s external communities. An Ad Hoc Web Review Team was appointed in April 1997 by the president to recommend strategies the university should take to guide the current use and evolution of SFSU's web site. A new web policy was initiated, bringing the expertise of Computing Services and Publications together to work collaboratively on the organizational structure and design of the first and second-level web pages.

.
Midway through the team’s work, the university strategic plan was adopted. The plan’s community focus encouraged the group to view the web site through community eyes, considering external constituents’ needs as well as those of students, staff, and faculty. The reorganization and redesign of the main site was undertaken in a way that would present information in a user-friendly way to outside visitors as well as the campus community. A list of A-Z pages and a site map were created to improve navigation of the site.

.
The Ad Hoc Web Review Team finished its work in 1998, recommending that a Web Steering Committee be established as its successor. The steering committee’s charge would be to provide guidance on future development of the university’s web and to make a periodic review of university sites.

.
Close collaboration on the web between Computing Services and Publications has continued. The university centennial in 1999 provided an opportunity to create an extensive history of the university and a year-long calendar of centennial events on the web. The interactive centennial web site, "Celebrating 100 Years of Opportunity," received an award of distinction from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for its content, innovation, and design.

.
The university’s web site is constantly being reviewed and upgraded. The web remains a challenge for SFSU, as it does for universities throughout the country, as new information is constantly being created and added. Development of new web sites and maintenance of existing ones are serious resource issues with which SFSU must contend.

.
Community Service and Civic Engagement

.
San Francisco State aims to strengthen its civic mission so that the identification as an engaged campus becomes its signature. The university has a long history of community involvement through its faculty, students, curriculum, institutes, and centers (1). Our plans for the future, embraced in the strategic plan, Envisioning Our Second Century, emphasize our mission of developing a "community-oriented education that affirms the linkage between learning and service." Previous chapters of the self-study (Curriculum; Teaching and Learning) focused attention on the history of our CSL endeavors. Below we will focus on the recent move of community service activities to civic engagement campus-wide.

.
Leadership in Engaging the CSU in Community Service

.
In July 1999, Governor Gray Davis called on California's three public higher education systems to work toward a community service requirement for students and to strengthen an ethic of service for graduates. Because of SFSU's leadership in community service and community service learning, President Corrigan was named by the CSU chancellor to chair an advisory group on community service. In Winter 1999, the advisory group developed a report and recommendations for expanding community service, service learning, and community engagement.

.
On March 14, 2000 the CSU Trustees considered and passed a resolution that reflected the recommendations of the advisory group and actions by the California State Student Association and various faculty senates [including ours; see www.sfsu.edu/~senate/RF99-166.htm] regarding community service. Specifically, the resolution requires each CSU president to ensure that all students have opportunities to participate in community service placements or service learning activities tied into on-campus course work. President Corrigan will continue to chair the advisory group, which will be instrumental in guiding community service resources and policy for the system.

.
(1) See "A History of the Community Service Learning Initiative at SFSU as stated in ‘A Strategic Plan to Implement a Community Service Learning Initiative at San Francisco State University 1996-1999’" at http://thecity.sfsu.edu/~ocsl/history.htm.

.
SFSU Ad Hoc Committee on Civic Engagement

.
The charge to the CSU Advisory Group on Community Service had been "to strengthen CSU initiatives related to community service and to encourage engagement of university members with their surrounding locales." To this end, each campus was asked to re-examine its public mission and practices to further its commitment to be engaged, through teaching and action, with its communities.

.
At SFSU, President Corrigan convened an Ad Hoc Committee on Civic Engagement consisting of deans, faculty, staff, and others to address this challenge. As a starting point in these discussions, the committee reviewed the Presidents' Fourth of July Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education [www. compact.org/resources/plc-main.html] endorsed by several hundred university and college presidents throughout the nation, among whom President Corrigan was a key leader.

.
Although SFSU has made a great deal of progress in engaging students in community service learning (as earlier noted, it currently offers more than 100 separate service learning classes through 41 departments), the campus also recognized that community service and service learning alone are insufficient to encourage students "to embrace the duties of active citizenship and civic participation," in the words of the Declaration. Through the Ad Hoc Committee on Civic Engagement, the university committed to do more: to strengthen the civic focus of our service learning program; to bolster the curriculum to enhance civic learning; to hire faculty who support our civic mission; and to recognize and support faculty for their direct work in the community.

.
The committee began working on two related tracks in Winter 1999, and the following sections summarize those tracks. The first task was to develop a brief assessment of some of the current good practices and activities that contribute to the civic mission of the university. The second was to structure a set of proposed new efforts that, particularly in combination, could strengthen and highlight the SFSU signature as preparing civically engaged students and being itself a civically engaged campus.

.
Assessment of Campus Activities

.
In assessing the current state of campus activities that promote civic responsibility, the committee sought to identify exemplary programs and projects that exhibit the best practices of ways in which SFSU is engaged. The assessment addressed how the main constituencies of the campus viewed their role in establishing SFSU as a model of civic engagement including:

.
• Presidential Leadership—examined how President Corrigan has provided leadership in articulating and implementing a civic mission for the university.
• Students—examined how well our curriculum helps students develop civic competencies and civic habits.
• Faculty—examined how the campus provides opportunities for faculty to create, participate in, and take responsibility for a vibrant public culture on campus.
• Administrators and Staff—examined how well our administrators create and improve structures that sustain civic engagement and public contributions, how our administrators find their own ways to be publicly engaged, and how staff are recognized for their work in the community.

.
The assessment found that:

.
• President Corrigan, through his national leadership in America Reads and Campus Compact, along with his local initiative in bringing leaders and programs in community service to the campus, has provided clear direction to the civic engagement movement on campus.

.
• SFSU, through its College of Ethnic Studies, U.S. government courses, Office of Community Service Learning, Community Involvement Center, and a variety of curricular and co-curricular activities, provides a wide array of opportunities for students to engage in meaningful and effective community service. Data from the Student Pulse surveys revealed that, in 1998, 25.5% of the respondents reported in engaging in community service or community betterment activities once a month or more. In 2000 this percentage had increased to 41.6%. Additionally, the 1998 Student Pulse survey and the 1999 SNAPS survey provided student perspectives on their experiences with community service learning. One fifth of the students responding to the 1998 Student Pulse survey had taken a course involving community service learning. The 1999 SNAPS Survey explored respondents’ perceptions of the learning that occurred in a community service learning course. Respondents reported learning more in a service learning course than a traditional class in all three areas included as survey response options: developing civic awareness and responsibility (73.4%), having opportunities to explore career options (67.1%), and mastery of the subject matter (58.2%).

.
• The university has a long tradition of supporting faculty-applied research focused on its urban community. Through its many institutes, such as the Cesar E. Chavez Institute for Public Policy, the San Francisco Urban Institute, the Public Research Institute, the Marian Wright Edelman Institute, and the Critical Global Homelessness Studies program, the university offers faculty support for addressing the critical issues that face an urban community.

.
• Through its statement of purpose, its mission, and its compensation policies, the university specifically identifies civic responsibility and provides forms of recognition and reward for success. In current university compensation policies—both those regarding merit increases for faculty and those involving performance-based salary increases for staff—contribution or service to the community is prominently mentioned as an area to be considered in determining annual raises [see www.sfsu.edu/~ senate/F99-208.htm and www.sfsu.edu/~hrwww/online_services/forms/pbsi.htm].

.
New Initiatives to Promote the SFSU Civic Signature

.
As a consequence of the assessment, several initiatives were proposed as major steps that could have transformational impacts on the campus culture in strengthening its civic mission. Work is under way in each of these areas.

.
The "Village" Residence as a Model of Democratic Community
that Integrates with the Larger Community Around It

.
In 2001, the university is opening its first major housing program in a decade—the Village at Centennial Square. Housing and Residential Services staff, the Village’s managers, and interested faculty are engaged in conversations about ways of linking Village residents to our on-going programs in the city. Of particular interest is the on-line and resident tutoring program in which we participate at fifteen San Francisco sites. Village residents could become on-line tutors and mentors for youth in public housing or young people we work with in community-based organizations. As the Village becomes its own community, it could consider formal affiliations with various projects in the city, moving towards the goal that residency at the Village brings an expectation of service.

.
Engaged Campus Disability Initiative

.
SFSU currently provides an array of opportunities for students with disabilities to exercise civic responsibility. These include voter registration assistance at the Disability Resource Center, internship placements for Department of Rehabilitation clients through the Workability Program, and various kinds of curricular and extra-curricular instruction in skills pertinent to civic empowerment. To increase the civic engagement of these students, such opportunities will be expanded and supplemented. The Disability Resource Center will develop a program to encourage more students to register and to vote. Students also will be encouraged to participate in the many community service learning activities the university fosters. Efforts will be made to extend the Workability Program beyond Department of Rehabilitation clients. Internships that place these students with political, civic, and commercial leaders, and thereby educate them about how disability policy is developed, will be established. The Office of ADA Compliance and the All-University Committee on Students, Faculty, and Staff with Disabilities will review other means of increasing the civic participation of students with disabilities. The Cesar Chavez Student Center will promote public programming that facilitates this goal.

.
Teach and Serve

.
The goal of Teach and Serve is to help SFSU move toward achieving the outcomes of an engaged campus while deepening and expanding the missions of teaching and research. The Teach and Serve program involves faculty in full-time service in a community agency or organization for at least one semester. Faculty will apply for the appointment through a special sabbatical process. Service envisioned in Teach and Serve is based on faculty members' professional expertise, organized so that it contributes to the mission of higher education and benefits the community.

.
Interdisciplinary Civic Engagement Projects

.
In its first three years, the Office of Community Service Learning hosted a mini-grant program that requested proposals from SFSU faculty for the creation of new courses in CSL. The program was quite successful in creating new courses and modifying existing courses to include a CSL component. A new mini-grant competition for the creation of projects that will enhance campus engagement in the community has recently been announced. It will provide funding for eleven or more awards of up to $4,500 per year for the next four years. The internal RFP process will provide released time and support dollars for faculty involved. The projects will work closely with the SF Urban Institute in its community-building role.

.
Strengthening the Civic Learning in our Community Service Learning Offerings

.
Community service learning courses all contribute to learning in the disciplines they cover, and many of those courses also enhance civic learning as well. In this context, we mean by civic learning the interactive combination of knowledge, skills, and values that together help prepare students for responsible citizenship. Community-service learning courses can be particularly conducive to this type of learning. This is most obviously true in courses in the social sciences and ethnic studies, but excellent examples can be cited in every field. One illustration is the course on U.S. Government and Constitutional Ideals taught by Professor Brigitte Davila. Students reflect on their academic study while working in the San Francisco Latino community. The course readings and class discussions, on the one hand, and the field placements, on the other, help students consider such issues as voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, and civil rights. OCSL will prepare a listing of those faculty members teaching service learning courses who are particularly interested in strengthening this dimension of their courses and share with them materials and techniques that will help them do so.

.
INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE and IMPROVED COMMUNICATIONS

.
Inter-institutional Collaboration

.
During the past three years, SFSU and the CSU system as a whole have been developing new connections to and partnerships with community colleges and other higher education institutions throughout California.

.
Beginning in Spring 1999, SFSU offered selected general fund classes on neighboring community college campuses. To date, courses have been offered both at Skyline College and at City College of San Francisco. SFSU students register at SFSU and take the courses at the community colleges as part of their regular course load. Community college students register in a parallel section, set up through the College of Extended Learning, at a significantly reduced rate. This arrangement allows SFSU courses to be available at convenient off-campus locations and accessible to both SFSU and community college students.

.
In Fall 1999, SFSU began discussions with Cañada College to offer upper division course work taught by SFSU faculty at the college and to engage in other collaborative ventures. A letter of intent was signed in Winter 2000; and a bill is before the California Legislature to appropriate funds to implement the new partnership.

.
In Spring 2000, the chancellors of the CSU system and California Community College system signed a MOU to improve the transfer of community college students to the CSU. As part of this agreement, the community colleges have pledged to increase the numbers of fully qualified upper division transfer students by 5% per year, with the CSU pledging to enroll all fully qualified community college students seeking admission.

.
In Spring 1999, San Francisco State took a leadership role with the University of California, Berkeley in establishing a Bay Area Educational Consortium, the first such collaboration in the region. In addition to SFSU and Berkeley, members include CSU Hayward, UCSF, St. Mary's College, Golden Gate University, and Bay Area community colleges and school districts. The consortium's purpose is to improve K–12 urban education through collaborative action which includes (a) political lobbying and public relations activities designed to influence education-related legislation, (b) joint efforts to secure funds related to improving public education, and (c) efforts to recruit quality teachers, especially teachers of color.

.
SFSU has also recently entered into a partnership with another San Francisco educational "institution"—the Delancey Street Foundation. While not an educational institution in traditional terms, Delancey Street is considered the nation’s leading self-help residential education center for former substance abusers and ex-convicts. The university has joined forces with Delancey to offer a full baccalaureate degree program on-site at the foundation’s headquarters. The program includes all of general education and a structured major in urban studies and is being offered to a cohort group of fifteen individuals, all of whom are being provided with financial aid. This partnership extends the presence of the university to a population traditionally marginalized and lacking access to higher education.

.
Creation of New Positions for K–12 Outreach and Community Relations

.
Given the rapidly growing involvement of the university in K–12 community projects and the emergence of several new public education initiatives from the CSU Chancellor’s Office, the university determined that there was a real need to better coordinate all the efforts in this area. A new position for K–12 educational outreach was recommended to concentrate on building relationships with the San Francisco Unified School District and provide effective coordination of existing campus K–12 outreach activities and the initiation of additional related activities.

.
The position was created in August 1999, as part of the campus response to a proliferation of K–12 public education-related external initiatives, opportunities, and directives recognizing the central importance of strengthening public K–12 education. The primary responsibilities of this position include:

.
• Facilitating the creation of clusters of K-12 related faculty interest groups;
• Creating opportunities for the creative exchange of innovative ideas and promoting and assisting in the writing of grant proposals related to K-12 education;
• Communicating regularly regarding external initiatives and mandates with CSU teacher education leaders, groups in Sacramento, and local educational leaders.

.
In regard to community outreach, SFSU has had no formal community relations officer to regularly represent the university in the community and provide regular outreach and communications with external organizations. Neighborhood associations, civic groups, and community-based organizations have not traditionally been part of the university's communication network on a consistent basis.

.
In October 2000, the position of senior community relations officer was created in the Office of Governmental Relations to provide this critical outreach to the university’s immediate neighbors and surrounding communities. The primary responsibilities of this position include:

.
• Developing a new community relations strategy for the university;
• Representing the university in civic organization and city agency meetings, community-based issue forums, and neighborhood association discussions;
• Representing SFSU to the CSU chancellor’s Office of Community Relations;
• Developing new opportunities for SFSU programs, projects, and partnership in the community;
• Designing and managing the community projects database tracking SFSU programs based in the community;
• Managing the SFSU Ambassadors for Higher Education advocacy program.

.
Formation of an External Relations Working Group

.
In the process of implementing the recommendations in the university strategic plan, an external relations working group was formed. This working group facilitated improved communications among campus units and coordinated the implementation of many of the recommended strategies outlined in this chapter. Additional meetings are planned for academic year 2000-2001 to continue information-sharing about the university's activities in the community and how relevant centers and institutes could better coordinate their efforts.

.
Communicating with our Community: Establishment of a University Magazine

.
In order to effectively communicate with external partners, including governmental officials, community leaders, alumni, donors, potential students, and university friends, the university realized that it was vital to have a magazine that was widely distributed to the community at least twice a year. The Office of Publications recommended starting a publication that would contain news and features about university people (faculty, staff, students, and alumni), as well as programs, accomplishments, and events demonstrating the value and impact of SFSU on the community, region, state, and nation.

.
In Fall 1997, as part of SFSU's centennial year efforts, Public Affairs commissioned a national research firm to gather information on alumni and donor attitudes and perceptions toward SFSU. Their findings demonstrated that our constituents are not getting enough information about the university. The firm, Lipman-Hearne, placed a university magazine at the top of its list of recommendations for the university to pursue in improving communications with our external community. The first issue of SFSU Magazine was published for the university's centennial in Fall 1999. Funding was secured for ongoing publication of the magazine in Spring 2000, and the second issue was published in Fall 2000.

.
Increasing Alumni Involvement with and Support for the University

.
The campus community called for increasing the membership in the Alumni Association during the strategic planning process. There was general agreement that the university needed to devote significant resources to better communicate with our alumni (in 1998, the university was mailing to only 4% of the alumni database because of limited resources); keep them connected with the campus; and increase their potential for future partnerships and philanthropy.

.
For years, the Alumni Association used the university database to reach its constituents and solicited memberships at $35 per year. The membership program had very little success, with only 4-5% of alumni participating (about average for an urban CSU campus without an active intercollegiate major sports program). Membership also had very high turnover rates and was very costly to administer. The $135,000 generated each year from membership revenue almost exactly covered the cost of administering the program. It was clear that the university was not reaching one of its most valuable constituencies.

.
Several new efforts were undertaken by the Alumni Association and the Office of University Advancement to improve the relationship between the university and the Alumni Association and increase the involvement of alumni in university activities. The alumni director developed a list of "notable alumni" in Spring 1999 and continues to work with Public Affairs and the Office of Development to update this list and reach out to alumni leaders in the community that the university may have overlooked. Similarly, a list of alumni located in major businesses, governmental agencies, and public offices was developed in Spring 2000 and will continue to be updated and entered into the new Advancement database. These alumni are contacted and invited to alumni and university-related events throughout the year.

.
In February 2000, the Alumni Association began exploring the use of telemarketing to augment direct mail to reach alumni non-members and invite them to sign up. The Alumni Association will have four pages in the university magazine reaching 140,000 alumni and others twice a year. This affords the association a badly needed vehicle to announce campus and community events of potential interest to alumni and provides that elusive "connection" so vital to continued alumni involvement.

.
The Alumni Association entered into preliminary negotiations with an internet service provider (zUniversity) to explore the possibility of creating a new SFSU alumni portal that would provide e-mail accounts and internet access to all graduates. This new partnership could more effectively connect alumni to the university and each other and potentially generate income for the Alumni Association and the university. Additionally, the Office of Academic Affairs is now contacting all alumni five years after graduation to survey them regarding their views of the university and its programs.

.
The Alumni Association is working with Public Affairs, the Office of Community Service Learning, and Student Affairs to begin publicizing opportunities for alumni involvement in establishing student internships, service-learning experiences, and student recruiting and mentoring endeavors in Alumni Association and Student Affairs materials, in external university publications, and in an electronic bi-weekly newsletter on the alumni home page [www.sfsu.edu/~advance/alumni.html].

.
Expanding the Alumni Network Abroad

.
The university has significant numbers of international alumni and has been struggling to find new ways to develop and expand relationships with them. One of the difficulties in expanding this network of alumni has been in locating the graduates and finding common issues of interest for international alumni to better connect them to the university and each other.

.
The Alumni Association and Office of International Programs conducted a survey of the eight academic colleges for information about their international alumni and began developing a database. The Alumni Association also sent questionnaires to existing international alumni through alumni publications, electronic newsletters, and the alumni web site in 1999. Working with the Office of International Programs, the Alumni Association identified units on campus that have on-going involvement with their international alumni to further the goals of chapter development, student recruitment assistance, and fund-raising. The Alumni Association executive director and the director of international programs began coordinating efforts with faculty and administrative offices that plan trips overseas, in order to facilitate meetings with interested alumni. In part as a result of the above endeavors, formal Alumni Clubs have been established in Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan, with two additional active informal clubs functioning in Korea and Thailand. (See Chapter 17 for additional information.)

.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

.
The strategic planning process and the implementation efforts that have followed adoption of the plan have given community partnerships and service greater prominence on campus. There is widespread consensus, from both faculty and administration, that engagement with the community is both a social and an academic value. Faculty and students have responded strongly to new service learning opportunities. Intra-campus collaborations are giving increased strength to campus-community projects. The College of Extended Learning has become an especially strong mechanism for developing fertile new collaborations with Bay Area employers and civic organizations and for extending the university’s presence into the downtown community, as well as other locations in the Bay Area.

.
However, there is a need to move forward on the following fronts:

.
• Developing a comprehensive community relations strategy for the university, including neighborhood assessments and new publications targeted at specific audiences;
• Continued compilation and updating of SFSU projects in the community (including service learning courses);
• Bringing together related university centers, institutes, and external projects for information sharing and collaborative endeavors;
• Developing a new SFSU alumni web portal;
• Continued expansion of SFSU alumni clubs and chapters in the U.S. and abroad;
• Creation of additional partnerships with community colleges.

.
Issues which remain thorny as we move ahead involve time—community service, whatever form it takes, is likely to be time-intensive, especially if added to an existing full work load; funding—grants, corporate support, and the university budget itself still can fall short of our needs in sustaining community partnerships; and, perhaps most difficult of all, faculty rewards. This last issue is acknowledged nationally as critical if colleges and universities are to make real progress in service learning and in graduating students who are prepared and eager to take an active role in their communities. Released time or recalculation of "weighted teaching units" for service learning activities is one approach; but for not-yet-tenured faculty to participate in service or service learning activities, some provision for recognizing this work in promotion and tenure review will need to be developed (2). The SFSU Academic Senate has engaged in preliminary discussion of this matter, and it lies ahead as an area for future work.

.
(2) See a "Model for Assessing Impact of Faculty Involvement in Community Service Learning" at http://thecity.sfsu.edu/~ocsl/assessingcsl.htm .

.
The university has made great strides in the last few years in communicating—both within and beyond the campus—about its community engagement strengths, interests, and initiatives. This has strengthened the university’s reputation and provided ways for faculty to find—and perhaps join with—those with similar interest in external projects and partnerships.

.
Fundamental to SFSU’s record of community activity has been the strong, continued support of top administration, starting with the president, whose views on the matter of providing support to faculty were articulated in a speech in April 2000:

.

I imagine that every faculty member in this room could speak more powerfully than I to…the need to develop appropriate incentives, support mechanisms, and rewards for faculty involved in this complex and labor-intensive kind of pedagogy. With all the good news about higher education’s growing commitment to civic engagement, we have not managed to do nearly enough about this issue. First, and most fundamentally, we need to guarantee a place for service learning in retention, tenure, and promotion policies. Frankly, we have no choice if we are sincere about making civic engagement a permanent and significant part of university life.

.
Then there is the fiscal issue, which is also a faculty issue. While short-term resources for service learning planning have not been too difficult to find…long term support is another matter. Service learning is labor-intensive and therefore costly. Indeed, a program that relies upon regular interaction between the students and the community, careful oversight of that interaction on the part of the faculty member, and the thoughtful integration of that experience into the classroom makes for courses that are extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming to develop, to teach, and to assess.

.
We may need to consider how we weight faculty time for teaching a service learning course, or how we can supply substantial assistance with such things as monitoring each student’s service experience with the agency involved…[M]ost of us have yet to develop a secure and satisfactory funding base for the full dimension of our service learning programs.(3)

.
(3) Keynote address delivered by President Corrigan at the Western Campus Compact Consortium 3rd Annual "Continuums of Service" Conference; University of Washington, Seattle, April 13, 2000.

.
Administrative support has extended well beyond words, to budgetary choices (e.g., funding to establish the Office of Community Service Learning and to pay for curriculum development for new service learning courses). Given the combination of top-down and bottom-up support—and student interest—SFSU’s expansion of its already-strong role in the community is well under way and becoming ever more prominent as a major institutional commitment and priority.

Return to Section F: A Community-Oriented University | Return to Accreditation | SFSU Home | Top of page