Leveraging University Capital and In-Kind Resources into Community Partnerships

Public universities with campuses in urban, low-income neighborhoods have an opportunity and civic responsibility to engage with the K-12 schools, non-profits, and community-based organizations that directly serve their community. However, many community-engaged administrators and scholars are working with limited budgets and without formal strategic plans that prioritize or operationalize the commitment of university resources, suggesting that the need to institutionalize community engagement remains. This paper presents five types of capital that can be leveraged from universities as in-kind resources to create educational programming for youth from low-income communities. This paper features three community-facing partnerships alternatively based within a community center, on campus, and in two public schools providing out-of-school time education. A document review and deductive thematic analysis of archival data capturing the in-kind resources from the university over six years found the following types of capital were leveraged: physical, financial, intellectual, human, and social. Findings reveal granular examples of what, where, and how to leverage in-kind campus resources to launch and sustain educational youth programming and the early renderings of a strategic model for establishing inter-organizational alliances with cross-campus units for mutually beneficial outcomes from operationalizing community engagement.


Introduction
Public universities with campuses in urban low-income neighborhoods have a unique opportunity and a civic responsibility to engage with the K-12 schools and non-profit organizations that serve their community directly.Public institutions of higher education are often non-profit organizations with missions oriented towards educational access, social justice, and economic mobility and, thus, already deeply engaged with their respective communities.However, the lack of centralization of our community-facing work and the need to institutionalize community engagement (Beere et al., 2011;Cunningham & Smith, 2020) leaves community-engaged administrators and scholars with limited budgets and often without formal strategic plans that prioritize or mandate the commitment of university resources.Dostilio (2017) conceptualized hyperlocal engagement as instances in which a postsecondary institution has strategically organized community engagement efforts to focus on a bounded area within its larger city or metropolitan region in ways that enhance the institution's ability to form partnerships and advance community development.Dostilio, Ohmer, McFadden, Mathew, and Finkelstein (2019) went on to assess hyperlocal community engagement efforts aimed within these bounded geographical areas and presented a comprehensive review of the pre-existing physical infrastructure, proximity of the sites, length and purpose of engagement, and reporting requirements.Dostilio and colleagues (2019) present a pivotal document that identifies the mesolevel interactions of community-engaged professionals in this field.

Hyperlocal Community Engagement
The Carnegie Elective Classification for community engagement has been the most salient and wide-scale assessment since 2006.It provides institutions of higher education with a set of 14 criteria against which to self-assess their engagement efforts, followed by a thorough review and potential designation by the Carnegie Foundation.The most recent documentation framework for first-time applicants seeking this prestigious designation has four items that asses the fiscal aspect of a given targeted hyper-local engagement effort (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2024): • Description of how the business operations of the campus align with local economic and community development agendas through hiring, purchasing, and procurement.
• Description of the specific mechanisms employed to assure community benefit when the campus is involved in local property acquisition and real estate development.
• Description of the campus's participation in a local Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) program.
• Description of how your campus provides unencumbered financial resources to local communities of color and/or other historically marginalized communities.
This section on infrastructure and finance probes a university to describe what funds have been earmarked for community engagement.This is a comprehensive tool for evaluating what has been leveraged because it requires a university to identify how they aligned their business operations, what types of resources this coordination leveraged, and whether or not their priority population centered on diversity and equity.

University Capital
Bell and Ellis (2016) urge leaders of non-profits to name and claim the full array of capital that exists within their respective organizations, which is critical in achieving large-scale social impact.They offer the following six types and definitions of capital (Bell & Ellis, 2016, p.482): 1. Financial capital is the money the nonprofit uses to buy what it needs to fuel campaigns, provide services, or generate the artistic expression that creates its particular social value.2. Human capital is the value of the knowledge, skills, and creativity of the non-profit's staff, volunteers, and board, which allows them to effectively perform the work that creates its particular social value.3. Political capital refers to the trust, goodwill, and influence the nonprofit has with the public and political figures.This goodwill is a type of invisible currency that nonprofits can use to mobilize people or public officials about the issue.4. Social capital is the value created across organizations and networks; transactions are marked by reciprocity, trust, and cooperation, and people come together in service of a common good. 5. Intellectual capital includes the intangible assets provided to a nonprofit by its employees' efforts and knowledge assets such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and other human innovation and thought results.6. Physical capital focuses on physical assets such as facilities or equipment used in the nonprofit's operation.This includes any kind of real physical asset that makes an enduring contribution to the organization's work.Garton (2021) reviewed the targeted community engagement initiatives led by anchor institutions from 1970 to 2010 and developed a typology of the capital leveraged.Noting the external pressures from government entities largely behind this economic engagement, Garton points us toward the vast financial, physical, intellectual, and human capital leveraged during these anchor efforts (Garton, 2021).This meta-analysis offers an extensive set of initiatives that universities put in place and a shared language to facilitate discussions about what is possible when the university comes to the table with its breadth of capital resources-an entry point for a newly appointed anchor institution to see potential macro-level outcomes.Holland (2009) also discussed the importance of funding and fundraising and the value added to community engagement when combining internal and external funding.However, she notes that analyzing the exact internal funding allocated is challenging due to the variance between universities regarding what constitutes engagement and which activities directly or indirectly serve the public (Holland, 2009).
Given the requirement of matching funds on federal grants, the expanding literature on capital resources (Bell & Ellis, 2016;Garton, 2021;Holland, 2009) continues to lend itself to community-engaged scholars applying for these opportunities and in need of identifying sources to tap.However, the process of leveraging this capital remains to be formalized into a set of strategies accessible to the practitioners and community-engaged scholars who run communityfacing programming.

The Significance of In-Kind Resources
In-kind resources are defined as payments given in the form of goods or services other than money (Renz, 2016).In-kind gifts are donations that can be distinguished as either a liquid asset, such as stocks/bonds that can be converted to money, or an illiquid asset that the organization has to manage (Gray, 2007).Sirotnik (1991) shared ten lessons learned from a case study featuring a school-university partnership that required a college of education to contribute in-kind resources to a local public school district, including staff, faculty, space, support services, etc.The coordination of direct funds coupled with these in-kind resources produced a substantial enough budget to hire staff who secured grants and contracts (Sirotnik, 1991).Driscoll and Lynton (1997) put forth a framework for documenting the professional service activities that faculty engage in beyond teaching and research.In their review, they recognized the opportunity to create and obtain resources from quite unexpected sources.They urged us to think creatively about the generation of in-kind contributions from people and organizations not ordinarily considered potential donors.For example, they cite the importance of "the innovative use of time and space, the involvement of students, and the mobilization of interest and voluntary help from individuals never involved before (Driscoll & Lynton, 1997, p. 30)." To that end, community partners often lead the acquisition efforts and provide insights into what is being leveraged.In a national review of state and federally-funded afterschool programs using the Harvard Family Research Project's (HFRP's) Out-of-School Time Program Evaluation Database, evaluators found that school districts provided more than 20 percent of program costs.A major portion of that support came from in-kind contributions, such as transportation, snacks, custodial assistance, and rent-free use of the school building (Wimer. Post, & Little, 2004).Their work was based on the framework Ferguson and Dickens (1999) created to capture the in-kind physical, financial, social, and intellectual resources that community-based organizations were relying on to supplement their afterschool programs.When monetary donations were not available, one director of a local non-profit stressed the value of in-kind donations of sports equipment and athletic apparel from their local university's athletic teams, which sustained their youth sports programming (Svensson et al., 2014).Collectively, these insights from community partners confirm how critical these contributions are to service delivery and suggest that this can be an entry point for university engagement.
Winchell ( 2006) made a rare reference to the actual monetary value associated with different forms of university in-kind during a targeted three-year initiative.Winchell cited that $70,000 came from faculty support, $250,000 was from student time in community-based servicelearning classes and internships (given a value of $10/hour), and 10,000 hours were committed by neighborhood resident volunteers largely in the form of their time attending bi-weekly meetings with university stakeholders.
Several more scholars note the significance of in-kind resources in the way they position colleges to provide extensive services (Russel & Flynn, 1997), are a considerable portion of resourcing an initiative (Cripps & Holland, 2003), and cover faculty release time (Poulin et al., 2007), but collectively do not explain how they were identified and deployed.

Purpose
The purpose of this study is to highlight the multiple types of capital available at a university to meet the needs of community-facing educational programs serving predominantly Black youth from low-income communities.This work couples the concept of various forms of capital (Garton, 2021;Bell & Ellis, 2016) and the abundance of university-based in-kind resources, understood to be non-cash contributions of goods and services (Gray, 2007).This research attempts to capture the internal process of how resources were identified and leveraged into external community partnerships that provided critical educational youth programming.The larger objective of this research is to contribute to the growing recognition of universities to institutionalize community engagement (Beere et al., 2011;Cunningham & Smith, 2020) by operationalizing how to leverage capital and in-kind resources into these partnerships.

Theoretical Frameworks
Equity-Centered Collective Impact Kania and Kramer's (2011) collective impact framework is when a group of cross-sector partners commit to tackling a complex social problem using a guiding strategy that includes a common agenda, shared measures, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone team.Given the university's siloed nature as a set of separate colleges/schools, centers, and departments, collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011) is a fitting framework to guide the formation of inter-organizational alliances with cross-campus units for mutually beneficial outcomes associated with community engagement.Kania and colleagues (2022) later applied an equity lens over their original theoretical framework that positioned the beneficiaries (i.e., intended recipients of the effort) as collaborative partners from the beginning and throughout.The components of collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011;Kania et al., 2022) coupled with the university's anchor mission included: • A Common Agenda: Convene external partners and cross-campus units to revisit and elevate a shared vision for providing equitable college access and educational opportunities to create a prosperous workforce with economic mobility.• Shared Measurement: Ensure key diversity metrics are co-established and assessed through the development of qualitative and quantitative instruments created to collect data, measure results, and tell the narrative behind these initiatives.• Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Identify the points of synergy being created by this diverse group of cross-sector partners demonstrate the larger continuum of services along an educational pipeline and career pathways model.• Continuous Communication: Arrange continuous and shared communication with each stakeholder through advisory meetings, subcommittees, ancillary grant planning, and annual reporting to recognize and appreciate the common motivation behind this effort.• A "Backbone" Team: Allocate a dedicated staff of faculty, administrators, and graduate students, separate from the partners implementing the work, who plan, manage, and support the common agenda, goals, and ensure the partners' commitments are fulfilled through ongoing facilitation.Taking this type of systems thinking approach to large-scale organizational change can guide the assembly of stakeholders, identification of a common agenda, use of shared language and measures, and engagement in mutually beneficial activities (Stroh, 2009;Stroh, 2015).
Ultimately, the community-engaged administrators and scholars involved in this initiative were facilitating a collaborative change management process and using an equity-centered collective impact approach (Kania et al., 2022) that integrated the unique contributions of both the initiative's beneficiaries and the set of cross-campus partners.

Place-Based Community Engagement
During the mid-nineties, Barbara Holland (1997) was one of the early scholars who assessed the level of commitment to community engagement demonstrated by evaluating 23 universities and their relative portfolios.Her work generated four tiers of commitment, from low, medium, and high relevance to fully integrated and cross-referenced the institution's missions to form a matrix for assessing the level of community engagement.Yamamura and Koth (2018) point out that "most universities are not fully utilizing their ability to be agents of change in their local communities."They define place-based community engagement (PBCE) based on a five-phase framework for rolling out this work that emphasizes the university-wide nature of this work that animates their mission statements and draws upon collective impact (Yamamura & Koth, 2018), which is understood to reference the cross-sector partner contributions needed for a shared vision for sustainable social change (Kania & Kramer, 2011).In a meta-analysis of 35 institutions conducting PBCE, Yamamura, and Koth (2019) found the significance of the mutual community and university impact and contribution in what they refer to as the "50/50 proposition."Findings from interviews revealed that universities provided financial input, offered free classes for community members, assigned faculty to serve on community advisory boards, and created externally facing administrative positions to coordinate the work.
Launching a place-based community-engaged educational program takes both the community engagement professionals (CEPs) (Dostillio, 2017) within administrative roles working across the organizational boundaries to broker the formation of these partnerships (Gaunter & Hansman, 2017;Weerts & Sandmann, 2010) coupled with the community-engaged scholars who serve as faculty representatives orienting university leadership to the legitimacy and importance of these in-kind investments.Beere, Votruba, and Wells (2011) recognized the need for universities to institutionalize community outreach and public engagement on campus through academic and administrative priorities.Cunningham and Smith (2020) provide an indispensable tool for initiating and guiding this process.

Gaps in the Literature
The literature as a whole provides competencies and outcomes associated with successful community-engaged work (Doberneck et al., 2010;Dostillio, 2017;Garton, 2021) and an abundance of guidance on how to document, evaluate, and communicate these efforts (Holland, 1997;Driscoll & Lynton, 1997).However, the field still lacks an exploration of the granular micro-transactions that need to be identified for the university-based personnel working directly with school and community leaders to plan, implement, and supplement community-facing youth programs with critical university-based resources.In-kind contributions are recognized as filling gaps in service delivery, but the breadth of what type of program-related resources are available is not fully explored.Moreover, there is no discernable system explaining how personnel within large public institutions of higher education locate and release these out from bureaucratic holds and into community-facing programs.The question remains of how to operationalize the internal process of leveraging a university's capital and in-kind resources.

Contextual History of the Partnerships Under Review
In 2014, a federal neighborhood revitalization grant was awarded to the local municipality where the university's main campus resides.The university under review in this study was asked to serve as the anchor institution and commit educational resources to local families as a fully inkind contribution.During the needs assessment phase, the principals of local schools, community leaders, and parents identified a need for more high-quality and culturally responsive afterschool programs and summer learning opportunities for Kindergarten through Eighth graders.While K-12 out-of-school-time (OST) education is not traditionally part of the mission of an institution of higher education, this became a critical entry point on the college access pipeline to funnel its commitments to the neighborhood surrounding its main campus.University administrators and faculty mobilized to secure external funding from additional grants, alumni donations, and service contracts.Three OST educational programs were established through partnerships with public schools, local non-profits, and community-based organizations.During the design phase, the collaborative approach with community members and the focus on collective impact made for innovative curriculums and educational events.Launching these programs with limited budgets and without sustainable revenue streams during the implementation phase created significant challenges.The need to supplement the operating budgets of each program became a constant priority that catalyzed the search for universitybased resources beyond what was originally committed to fill critical gaps in program delivery.

Community-Facing Educational Programming Sites
The university under review in this study is a predominantly white institution (PWI) of higher education, with its main campus located in an urban, historically Black neighborhood.The focus is on community engagement efforts during the six years from 2014 to 2020.It served as the anchor institution on a federally designated urban development grant, specifically the internal transactions that occurred to support community-facing programs.
Table 1 describes the operational demographics of three OST educational programs launched in response to the need for after-school and summer learning opportunities.Across all three programs, 100% of participants qualified for Free or Reduced Price Lunch (FRPL), which is a proxy for low income, and between 85% to 99% of participants identified as Black or African American, as identified on state and federal reports required by the overarching federal grant in place.Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was not required, given that the nature of this data collection was not for the purpose of reporting outcomes among participants and that no identifiable information was included in the data set.
First, the campus-based program under review provides longitudinal support to cohorts of students starting in middle school and through high school by engaging youth (n = 18) in leadership opportunities, community service, and college-going activities.Students receive mentoring from men and women of color at each stage of the college and career pipeline who are chartering their own pathways to success.Educational activities included monthly Saturday mentoring sessions, trips to museums, campus tours of PWIs and HBCUs, and seed grants for student-designed community improvement projects.
The community-based program is a resident-led, university-assisted model for delivering afterschool programming to K-8 students (n = 110) within a community center located in a lowincome urban neighborhood.The university was approached by the resident council of a public assistance housing community to help launch and operate an afterschool program and summer camp for the children within their neighborhood.The community-based staff of residents provided instruction and administrative supervision of the daily operations.University-based staff co-designed curriculum and co-facilitated professional development with the communitybased staff while university faculty conducted program evaluation and reporting.Educational activities included daily afterschool programming, homework help, project-based learning, literacy and math instruction, field trips, and an eight-week summer camp.
Finally, the school-based program is a STEAM-focused afterschool program incorporating college and career readiness for youth (n = 250) enrolled in two public elementary schools located adjacent to the main campus.An established non-profit educational organization was subcontracted as the service provider while the public school district recruited student participants and provided the operational space for programming.Educational activities included daily afterschool programming, homework help, STEAM instruction, field trips, and a six-week summer camp.

Data Collection
Data collection focused on a six-year period from 2014 to 2020, which included the planning phases prior to the launch of each program and the coordination efforts during the implementation phases of program delivery.Originally, the data collection was requested by the federal sponsor of the overarching neighborhood grant in which these efforts emerged.This study used an internal document review to analyze archival data exclusively supporting the three OST educational programs identified in Table 1.Document review has been cited as an advantageous methodology for analyzing qualitative data collected in educational settings (Lincoln & Guba, 1985;Bretschneider et al., 2017;Bowen, 2009).

Data Sources and Extraction
The data under review is considered archival because it was originally collected for federal compliance purposes and not as a part of this research.A data extraction form was created to aid in the collection, and a privilege review protocol was followed to ensure that identifiable information was redacted.Archival data sources included the following documents: meeting agendas, meeting minutes, letters of commitment, grant awardee notifications, faculty effort reports, quarterly and annual reports to sponsors, participant sign-in sheets, vendor invoices, receipts, course syllabi, university banner system reports, facilities request forms, event planning notes, event flyers, and anecdotal planning notes.

Data Analysis
A coding structure was developed to inform our understanding of administrative efforts occurring within the university during the planning and implementation of youth-facing programming.Six codes were initially created prior to the deductive coding process.Codes were based on the six forms of capital defined by Bells and Ellis in the Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management (2016): physical capital, financial capital, human capital, intellectual capital, social capital, and political capital.The initial round of analysis used descriptive coding using the example terms in Table 2.A decision was made to collapse political capital and social capital into one code for social capital due to a lack of prevalence of political figures, campaigns, or community organizing involved.The political capital, described as the "influence the organization has with the public (Bell & Ellis, 2016, p. 482)," was decidedly more aligned with the presence of social capital yielded by the university.A second decision was needed to distinguish between when an item was human capital and intellectual capital.For example, when the role of a given individual was to provide direct youth-facing service as a practitioner with measurable outcomes, such as a student teacher or event volunteer, it was coded as human capital.When the role of an individual was to provide research guidance or mentorship, such as a guest speaker, the item was coded as intellectual capital.Structural coding was used in the second round of coding guided by questions such as "what" need did this resource fulfill at the programming level, "where" was this resource located at the university, and "who" was the point of contact and/or authority that approved the resource.Finally, the data was categorized to identify: a) types of capital available within the university, b) programmatic needs identified, c) in-kind resources leveraged, and d) university's units, personnel, and partner.

Discussion
University-led community engagement has expanded in scope and value, evidenced by newly mandated reporting, grant matching requirements, and diversity, equity, and inclusion-focused strategic planning.There are technical guidelines available for grantee applicants on how to establish cost-sharing with partners and calculate matching funds (McGeary & Hanna, 2004;Blank et al., 2010), and there is literature on how to document, evaluate, and communicate these efforts (Beer et al., 2011).Some frameworks highlight the competencies needed within the community engagement professionals who do this work (Dostillo, 2017), typologies tailored for the community-engage scholars (Doberneck et al., 2010), methodologies for researching this phenomenon, and matrix to measure the level of commitment by a university (Holland, 1997).Garton (2021) provided the landscape of what outcomes are possible when a university's capital is leveraged.However, little is known about how to operationalize the internal process of leveraging the in-kind resources, specifically within the context of launching or supporting community-facing educational programming for K-12 students.The findings in this paper speak to that process and, thus, hold utility for faculty and university administrators driving the implementation of work that supports community-facing educational programming for K-12 students.
This study can serve as a practical tool for a) reviewing the tangible resources available, b) locating them within the university, c) identifying cross-campus units to form interorganizational alliances with, and d) highlighting the mutually beneficial outcomes that can move from a transactional to transformational relationship between the community and university.The significance lies in the potential for these findings to serve as a replicable model that can be mapped onto other types of service-oriented programs, community partnerships, and stakeholder engagement.

Limitations
A glaring limitation of this study is the one-dimensional approach of only assessing the university's contributions.Future research is needed to showcase the capital leveraged by the public school partners, community members, and non-profit organizations that collaborated in designing and implementing the OST educational programs featured in the study.Without the K-12 schools and non-profit partners and the additional capital that only they could leverage, the larger work that provided educational opportunities for youth (n = 378) each year would not have been possible.
Another concern surrounds the question of how race and power function in this work.When a PWI engages with a historically Black neighborhood where there is an exchange of resources and services, it raises questions about whether the university is maintaining inequities or dismantling pre-existing power dynamics.
While this case study is not replicable, the results are transferable in that the resources identified can be found at other large public institutions of higher education.A comparative study using this framework to analyze the efforts across different institutions that served as anchor institutions on this same federal grant could reveal if these findings are consistent with the process other community-engaged scholars and administrators implemented.

Lessons Learned
Due to the siloed nature of a large institution of higher education, this study used an equitycentered collective impact framework (Kania & Kramer, 2011;Kania et al., 2022), which was originally meant for managing a group of external cross-sector partners and applied it to an internal set of cross-campus units.Being an anchor institution does not initially entail the award of financial resources, as in this study.Thus, the findings in Table 3 reveal granular examples of what, where, and how to leverage in-kind campus resources to launch and sustain educational youth programming when direct revenue sources are insufficient.This is intended to serve as the early rendering of a strategic model for establishing inter-organizational alliances that un-silo cross-campus units to institutionalize and operationalize community engagement.
Among the five components of the collective impact framework applied, the largest lesson learned from this effort was that the mutually beneficial nature of university-community partnerships created the most traction with internal and external stakeholders.Initially, this effort appeared to be one-directional, with resources flowing externally from the university into the community.However, the return on these transactions led to the creation of new administration personnel positions, university-led research, grant generation, revenue from service contracts with city agencies, alumni donations, and meaningful experiential learning opportunities for the college's pre-service teachers.While all of these newly generated university-based resources were siphoned back into each program as student-facing resources, it demonstrates that the university benefits equally, if not more, from this partnership than the community.To that end, equity-centered approaches to community-university partnerships with transparent cost-benefit reporting need to continue to be at the top of our agenda.

CUMU Conference Reflections
This work was featured as a roundtable presentation at the 2023 Coalition for Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) annual conference, which was hosted in Washington, DC.
The CUMU members who attended the roundtable were a mixed group of administrators or faculty who lead community-engaged work at their institutions, which range in geographic location from the East and West Coast to the South and Midwest of the United States.
There was a collective experience of always asking for university support and rationalizing why this work was important to execute.Several roundtable attendees asked the author to explain more explicitly how these resources were released from bureaucratic holds.
This question of "Why was this effort effective?"pushed the author to think beyond the data points and identify the interpersonal and organizational strategies that led to the success of this initiative.The author described the steps taken before "the ask" and the follow-up after each transaction.First, research the respective partner/unit's mission and align it with the request.Calculate a dollar amount that represents the value of the in-kind resource.File backup documentation that can be referenced for the rationale behind the calculated value of the resource.Recognize the contributing partner/unit in a thank you letter, which is official evidence of their contribution.Finally, with permission, write these matching funds and resources into future grants, MOUs, and service contracts to ensure sustained support.With these strategies, the efforts featured in this study were conservatively calculated at tripling the original commit of $1.2 million to ultimately providing $3.4 million of in-kind contributions towards these community partnerships.

TABLE 1 .
University-assisted OST educational programs

TABLE 2 .
Guide for coding