Getting to Know Community Partnerships
An in-depth view into Community Partnerships
optiMize as an organization strives to inspire student leaders to create a positive impact in their communities. The Social Innovation Challenge is our more front-facing program, but another equally important facet to our organization is Community Partnerships. The purpose behind this program is to be good neighbors with the belief that social innovation is not just limited to one campus. With optiMize chapters at community colleges, Eastern Michigan University, Wayne University and other colleges on their way, Community Partnerships is helping to create a more transfer-supportive culture at the University.
What is Community Partnerships?
Katie Avila, the head of Community Partnerships and one of optiMize’s full-time staff, describes their catch all phrase as “being good neighbors.” Since 2015, optiMize has been working on collaborative projects with Washtenaw Community College and Eastern Michigan University focused on higher education access for high school and community college students in Washtenaw County. Building on this success, in early 2018, optiMize received funds from the Mellon Foundation and the U-M College of LSA to build transfer bridges between more community colleges and the University of Michigan. In addition to our existing partnerships with WCC and EMU, optiMize started working with Henry Ford College, Grand Rapids Community College, and SchoolCraft College with the aim of getting students excited about social innovation and helping those who may want to transfer to Michigan.
“The beauty of Community Partnerships is we are able to use the resources that the University of Michigan has to support community college students as those colleges notoriously do not receive the same funding federal universities do. We are a public institution and we believe education is a public good, so being able to provide our programming to community college students is one of the ways we are able to do that.”
Community Partnerships sees themselves as a transfer programming bridge. The first part of the bridge is to support students while they are at their community college, letting them know that there is a social innovation program they can participate in. The program includes resume reviews, application readings, and peer mentorship from Mellon Fellows who are also transfer students at the University. After participating in this program, students are able to apply to the moMentum fellowship. Students that are interested in transferring to the University can apply to the moMentum fellowship, a two day program where students can receive up to $1,000 in funding for their social innovation project. Similar to the Social Innovation Challenge, those in the moMentum fellowship share their projects with others, talk to mentors, and meet other entrepreneurs.
Impact
“Transferring from a Community College where I had such a large connection with the community, the thought of having to start over and find a new community was really stressful for me. As soon as I came to U-M, my fear became true. I was lost in a new environment without knowing a single soul which made my first semester rather rough. Coming into my next semester, I became involved with optiMize as a Mellon Fellow, which helped me not only find this sense of community but also helped me realize something else I was missing: a sense of self. My fellow leaders made me feel worthy, and for that, I can never be more grateful.”
Now, just over two years since conception, Community Partnerships has become an integral part of both optiMize’s mission and our close-knit community. Every week, students who came to optiMize through the Mellon or moMentum fellowships do vital work not only to further advance Community Partnership programs, but also on the Social Innovation Challenge, passing their wisdom and experience on to Michigan’s future leaders. In this way, the impact of Community Partnerships is twofold; there is the impact that CP students have had on optiMize, helping us to cultivate a supportive community and stay true to our mission, as well as the impact that Community Partnerships has had on these same students and many others. Our very own June Rayburn, who Co-hosted workshop 3, emphasized that “as a first-generation college student, transferring to a new school and city was really intimidating... Community Partnerships reached out to me once they knew I was a transfer from GRCC and was really helpful in making me feel like I deserved to be at UM. Without Community Partnerships, I may have dropped out of the SIC last year and I would not have met all of the incredible people at optiMize who have quite literally made it worth staying at UM.”
Future
Cedric Ingram, a member of our Leadership Team and a Community Partnerships veteran for optiMize, describes Community Partnerships as the “outreach department” of optiMize, connecting U-M to students and social innovators at colleges around the state of Michigan. Here at optiMize, we’ve long held the view that one day, higher education may resemble optiMize programming. We know how bright and forward-thinking U-M students are, and we know they’ll continue to amaze us with their visions of a better future. But, as Katie often points out, we also know that “social innovation cannot happen in isolation,” and Community Partnerships is grounded in that belief. We think of Community Partnerships as the center of a “ripple effect,” in which social innovation learning and the resources that the University of Michigan has to offer are increasingly made available to students and communities that previously may have had little or zero access prior. Whether that manifests through bringing transfer students together over dinner to discuss what resources are available at U-M or traveling across the state to deliver workshops to community college students, optiMize is striving to build a more inclusive network of social innovators.
optiMize’s Mission Statement challenges us to help everyone that we meet to ask themselves “Why Not Me?” not just the people who are already most likely to have access to optiMize. So if we genuinely believe that our model of social innovation can transform education and help to build a more just and sustainable future, then it is our duty to do all that we can to, as our beloved Katie would say, “be that good neighbor to help bring social innovation to the masses.” To us at optiMize, Community Partnerships is that future, and it’s why we put time, effort, love, money, and thought into the work done by the beautiful people in optiMize Community Partnerships.
