Conference Agenda

Campus-Community Partnerships are increasingly important for service-learning and higher education’s Third Mission. This workshop introduces the Campus-Community Partnership (CCP) Framework developed by the German Higher Education Network “Bildung durch Verantwortung” (HBdV) as a practical instrument for strengthening, organizing and scaling university-community collaboration.

The workshop builds on the framework’s development within the HBdV network and invites participants to test its usefulness for different institutional contexts. Rather than presenting the framework as a finished model, we treat it as a working tool that can be refined through dialogue with practitioners. The central aim is to explore how campus-community partnerships can be structured so that they are sustainable, reciprocal, and institutionally supported.

Guiding the workshop are three central questions:

How can reciprocity in campus-community partnerships be meaningfully operationalized in practice?
Which structural and institutional conditions are necessary to sustain partnerships over time?
What makes partnership models transferable and scalable across different higher education contexts?

Participants will work with selected elements of the framework in small groups and relate them to their own institutional and partnership experiences. The workshop is framed by the conference theme of strengthening democracy through service-learning and civic engagement in the sense that campus-community partnerships create conditions for meaningful collaboration between universities and societal actors. They support mutual learning, shared responsibility, and the institutional anchoring of engagement-oriented higher education. In this sense, the CCP Framework addresses questions of sustainability, transferability, and institutionalization that are central to Track B.

Participants will discuss how partnership structures can be strengthened through governance, quality criteria, and role clarity, and how barriers to long-term collaboration can be addressed. The workshop therefore offers both a conceptual contribution and a practical tool for participants working with service-learning, community engagement, and institutional development. Participants will leave the workshop with concrete take-aways, including actionable insights, reflection tools and initial adaptation strategies for applying the CCP Framework in their own institutional context.