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…

When academics, who occupy a traditional position of power and privilege, engage with community members whose thinking, attitudes, and responses have been shaped by ongoing sociohistorical oppression and disadvantage, democratic participation is not easy to attain. Yet, unless community members feel able to participate freely, the valuable local…

The Phillips Neighborhood Healthy Housing Collaborative learned valuable lessons through its work on two community-based participatory research projects in which it established a principled model of shared power and identifiable, mutual community-university benefits. A community impact statement (CIS) has evolved from this work. Like an…

This paper focuses on a community's educational improvement project in Tennessee that resulted from executive appointment of a citizen task force in each community. The paper reports project development and results; discussion emphasizes implications for school administrators. A joint task force, appointed in 1985, was directed to develop…