Effective partnerships across different stakeholders are essential to the collaboration required for learning cities to contribute to sustainable development. Through partnerships, formal educational institutions, such as schools and universities, play a vital role in establishing and sustaining learning cities, often by facilitating the…

In the fall of 2015, Northern Kentucky University began a sustained, multidimensional effort to explore our region's devastating heroin epidemic. The goal was to engage NKU's students, faculty, and staff with the community through public dialogue, experiential learning, and research. Taken together, our engagements would contribute to public…

The challenges and successes of planning, implementing, and evaluating a nature-based four-year-old kindergarten program are shared as well as a description of the first years of the program that is designed to enhance the students' academic, physical, social, and emotional development. In addition, a description of how the partnership among a…

This community-partnered participatory study explores the outcomes of adult alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) users who qualified for special education under autism and/or intellectual disability. This multiple case study examines outcomes, the transition to adulthood, K-12 and special education experience, and the diagnosis and AAC…

This chapter offers strategies for creating support resources for students who face nonacademic barriers such as housing insecurity, food insecurity, lack of transportation and dependable childcare, and the need for mental health care and illness. These strategies should be viewed as ideas to help retain students and create lasting partnerships…

Teacher empowerment is a central issue in relation to the efforts to improve the quality of education. However, teacher empowerment will remain an abstract idea if its implementation is not supported by an appropriate strategy. The demands for a quality education will be unreciprocated if teachers do not have the opportunity to empower themselves.…

This article discusses how religious education began at Esperanza College in North Philadelphia, one of the poorest counties of the United States. It also is the largest community of returning citizens in Pennsylvania. Student access and success in higher education continues to be impacted by the effects of structural racism and systemic poverty.…

This study investigates the role of a family literacy program in facilitating critical literacy among Maya immigrant parents as evident in their ability to navigate inhospitable institutional structures, re-writing their role as advocates for their children in school decision making. The study highlights the conscientization that emerged among…

Social workers play a critical role in assessing and treating individuals and families with mental health and addiction concerns. Although social workers are key professionals in the mental health workforce, there are gaps in the training and education of mental health, addictions, and suicide, and many students are inadequately prepared for field…

In this paper, we examine the nature and impact of coalitional work within a research-practice partnership (RPP) between university-based researchers, families, and youth as we navigated shared investigations into educational equity within a digital mediated space. We conceptualize our community and collaboration using Montoya's metaphor of…

This study provides an overview of the literature of Florida's only Community Partnership Schools™ model, as a strategy to enhance family and community engagement in low performing high poverty elementary schools. More specifically, the focus of this study was to determine to what degree parents perceived the effectiveness of family and community…

With state funding and student enrollment on the decline, community colleges are looking for creative ways to grow revenue. To meet this challenge, community colleges are becoming more entrepreneurial in nature. Successful colleges understand their strengths, recognize the needs of their community and develop programs that marry these for…

The Role Model Moms (RMM) program supports low-income mothers completing their General Equivalency Diplomas. Postsecondary education (PSE) can break cycles of intergenerational poverty; however, existing PSE orientation resources were not designed for this group. A need existed for a new university resource utilizing a collaborative and…

This article describes the first year of a partnership between a university and a community organization working to improve and expand a community-based multigenerational mentoring program for African American adolescent girls ages 12-17. The mentoring program, set in an urban Midwestern city, is a collaboration between university…

Community collaboration is essential to the survival of theatre and performance labour in the neoliberal university. This evidentiary document describes one project of a successful collaboration between Hul'q'umi'num' Elders and teachers, community organisations, and a range of Canadian West Coast universities, including the University of…