Community–Academic Partnerships: Developing a Service–Learning Framework

• Hallmarks of community–academic partnerships include mutual decision making, goal setting, and meeting community needs.
• Service–Learning is a valuable educational pedagogy that enables nursing students to apply classroom content to real-life situations through experiential learning. Service–Learning has the potential to be reciprocally beneficial to populations, communities, and individuals.
• The impact of service–learning projects on community partners and populations receiving the service is largely unknown primarily due to the lack of outcomes metrics and methodologies specific to service–learning.
• Feasibility, access, metrics, and consistency were identified through a community–academic partnership project as the foundation for a framework for reciprocity and measurement of service–learning benefits to those receiving the service.
• A service–learning framework provides unique learning opportunities consistent with national initiatives for nursing education, models best practices in health care delivery, and provides structure for reciprocity between academia, community agencies, and clients.

Academic partnerships with hospitals and health care agencies for authentic clinical learning have become a major focus of schools of nursing and professional nursing organizations. Formal academic partnerships in community settings are less common despite evolving models of care delivery outside of inpatient settings. Community–Academic partnerships are commonly developed as a means to engage nursing students in service–learning experiences with an emphasis on student outcomes. The benefit of service–learning projects on community partners and populations receiving the service is largely unknown primarily due to the lack of structure for identifying and measuring outcomes specific to service–learning. Nursing students and their faculty engaged in service–learning have a unique opportunity to collaborate with community partners to evaluate benefits of service–learning projects on those receiving the service. This article describes the development of a service–learning framework as a first step toward successful measurement of the benefits of undergraduate nursing students' service–learning projects on community agencies and the people they serve through a collaborative community–academic partnership.