Vol. 1, No. 1 | Spring 2002
UC LINKS RESEARCH
How to Make Links: Social Capital and Community-University Collaboration
BY HONORINE NOCON
"It's people realizing that people have to help each other and talk to each other … That's the only way … the only way these things can make sense … I think as a team, we can make a difference."
Fran Forman, Regional Director, Head Start
"It's something that we get these agencies together and you work for the same cause or try to get these agencies to work together in collaborating on programs … I have learned a lot."
Raúl Castillo, Unit Director, Boys and Girls Clubs of San Dieguito
UC Links programs connect universities and community organizations to improve learning outcomes for children, youth, and undergraduates. The efforts of people who build the links, however, rarely get much attention. As UC Links community partners Fran Forman and Raúl Castillo suggest, the collaborative work of these diverse people is essential to building and sustaining after-school programs. Collaboration also produces reciprocal learning opportunities for people from the community and the university. These people and their efforts have been the focus of my research.
In my doctoral thesis, Developing Hybridized Social Capital: Communication, Coalition, and Volunteering in Non-traditional Communities (UCSD 2000), I explored the development of social capital, or bridging and bonding relations, between adults who worked with UC Links programs in San Diego County. I use the term "social capital" to mean a network of trusting relations among engaged participants. Once developed, this network of trust helps collaborators coordinate their efforts more effectively. My thesis illustrates the labor involved in building and maintaining social capital, labor necessary to sustaining UC Links after-school activities.
For four years, I worked as a participant observer with people who designed and operated the Magical Dimension, a bilingual after-school program in San Diego. University and community-based people from two other local UC Links programs, the Fifth Dimension and La Clase Mágica, provided materials and time to help launch the Magical Dimension. An unanticipated outcome of this assistance was the formation of a Coalition to generate financial support for all three after-school programs.
Coalition members included people who worked for Head Start, the Boys and Girls Clubs of San Dieguito, local schools and churches, the university, and the programs themselves. The Coalition work, which was conducted in both Spanish and English, consisted of coordinating resources (supplies, transportation, staff time and expertise), fundraising, and grant writing. Grant writing was a collective effort in which Coalition members gathered sources and materials and worked together on writing, editing, and compiling grant applications.
The Magical Dimension offered informal after-school activities from January 1996 through June 1999. Later, it "morphed" into a homework program affiliated with the Solana Beach Fifth Dimension. Similarly, the Coalition was active in generating grant proposals and funds through 1999, but became less active when Coalition members successfully lobbied participating institutions to include funding for UC Links in their operating budgets.
Although both the Magical Dimension and the Coalition have since evolved, the social capital created by early participants—the relations of trust between people—continues to sustain La Clase Mágica, the Fifth Dimension, and new UC Links programs and funding efforts.
The Magical Dimension/Coalition case study suggests that three things are necessary to develop and maintain social capital among diverse university and community partners: attentive presence, "translation," and collective support of individual interests.
Because prospective partners often come from different institutional cultures and personal backgrounds, a collaborator's physical presence at meetings and in the after-school programs is a powerful indicator of commitment. For example, when several Boys and Girls Club employees left their jobs at the same time, one of the university researchers volunteered to act as the Club's educational coordinator. He dedicated several hours per week to the Club's activities and was surprised when staff gave him a "Volunteer of the Year" award in January, 1999. However, during this time the researcher was often absent from Coalition meetings. That absence was noted at a February, 1999, meeting:
S: I'd like to have heard from the Fifth Dimension.
H: Yeah…
P: Uh. There's nobody here…and I don't know anything about what the Fifth Dimension is doing.
H: Did [the researcher] say why he couldn't come?
P: He just... You know…There was just a note on my chair this morning—[He] said he couldn't attend and he'll talk to me later…
Absence from Coalition gatherings was consistently (but not always accurately) interpreted as a lack of attention to the Coalition work and the volunteers carrying it out. In addition to facilitating communication at meetings, attentive presence was symbolic, a mutually understood representation of engagement.
The ability to "translate" institutional norms was as important as translation of participants' spoken languages. For example, Fran Forman came to understand multiple meanings of "community" associated with different institutional "languages":
You talk to my staff members [and] I'm not community. I'm management…What do I know about what it's really like to be out there in the classroom? What do I know? I get the good job. I get to be in my office all day, not being involved with the community… I told my boss this the first time I went to a…presentation of the Mellon Foundation, and I was introduced, and I was like "the Community." Y'know,"I'd like to introduce you to our representatives from the Preschool Program" and I knew what my role was there, and it was great, 'cause I'm like "The COMMUNITY."
Fran's experience made her alert to different institutional meanings of words and the different roles they implied. Often, however, different backgrounds contributed to misunderstandings, which provoked both training in and "translation" of institutional languages like "bureaucratese." Attentive presence in the Coalition meetings helped produce an environment conducive to ongoing "translation."
Translating institutional norms, however, requires knowledge and time. In the case of the Magical Dimension/Coalition, some participants took on a special role, acting as "spiders" who moved through the network of relations to gain and share knowledge of partners' needs. This role often fell to me as a privileged participant observer, but was also frequently taken on by Fran Forman (Head Start) and Duncan Smith (Boys and Girls Clubs).
Finally, collaborating people and institutions have both shared and individual needs and interests. Shared support of individual needs and interests strengthens both the individual partners and the network. This was made evident when Coalition members learned they could call on one another for letters of support, presentations of research to funding agents, technology assistance, and other forms of expertise. Another way this was evident was in the dual roles played by most Coalition members, who mixed paid work with unpaid efforts on behalf of the Coalition. Recognition that members had both basic survival and institution-driven needs required frequent negotiation, but also supported continuing engagement.
Presence, translation, and collective attention to individual needs and interests helped to build the social capital that has sustained the UC Links programs in San Diego County. Together these constitute an approach to university-community collaboration that supports programs and links people.
Honorine Nocon is a postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UC San Diego.
La Clase Mágica: New Communities of Learners
HumaniFest Online: Linking Humanities Out There and the Whittier Fifth Dimension
The Magical Web Fifth Dimension
Digital Storytelling in West Oakland
Brianna Guillermo-Newton, Miranda Cheang, and Robyn Rachac
Links for Kids
UC Links Research
How to Make Links: Social Capital and Community-University Collaboration
Growing up with UC Links: An Interview with Jesse Paulos