What is a Community Partner?
A community partner is a co-educator who works directly with faculty to provide high-quality service- learning projects for groups of students on a semester basis. This entails providing training, orientation, guided reflection and supervision for students who serve from 15-90 hours per semester, or more.
Is Your Organization Interested in Becoming a Community Partner?
The Center for Community Engagement (CCE) serves to create, maintain and sustain partnerships with our local and regional community. To be a partner, the following is required at the time of signing an agreement:
- Site must maintain a current non-profit 501c(3) status
- Maintain general liability coverage of at least $1,000,000 per occurrence, $2,000,000 aggregate. Insurance must be placed with insurers with a current A.M. Best rating of at least A: VII.
- If the organization requires student's fingerprints, it is the organization’s responsibility to: l) determine whether such fingerprinting is required; 2) obtain the student's fingerprints; 3) obtain criminal background clearance from the appropriate agency; and 4) incur the cost of fingerprinting. See below for more information*
- If required, TB testing shall also be at the expense of the organization.
Sites can not provide opportunities that have students:
- driving as part of service responsibilities
- participating in activities that pose a significant safety risk to participants
- any paid service activities
*More Information on Background Checks
The decision of a community partner to require a background check is solely up to the learning site's interpretation of the laws or regulations that govern it. Community partners are solely responsible for requesting background checks for service-learning students placed at their sites. The university plays no role in this decision and only needs to know which learning sites require background checks.
Federal and state laws and regulations governing background checks are very strict regarding the privacy of the person being reviewed. Most allow only the entity requesting the background check to have access to the results. Consequently, because the university is not the requesting agency, no faculty or staff member will ever be given the specific results of the student's background check. Community partners are under strict guidelines to keep all background check information private, and can have their licenses revoked if they violate this right of privacy.
Partnership Readiness Assessment
Being a partner has tremendous benefits from increasing volunteer resources to leveraging resources with the University. Through the partnership, you play a vital role in contributing and preparing the next generation of community leaders, non-profit employees, and public servants. Understanding this role and assessing the readiness of your organization through the questions posed in the Partnership Readiness Assessment is important to do so prior to fully committing to the partnership.
"I found [the Partnership Readiness Assessment] to be extremely informative...It covers aspects of the program that one might not necessarily consider. Definitely food for thought in laying out our needs going forward." - Debi Mauck, Volunteer Coordinator, Search Dog Foundation
Request to Initiate a Service-Learning Partnership
If you are interested in a service-learning partnership or would like to know more about our program, please complete the Request to Initiate a Service-Learning Partnership form or contact Jennifer Raymond, DrPH, Community Partnership Lead at jennifer.raymond@csuci.edu or 805-437-3191.