Student Resources:
Developing and Strengthening Your Toolset: Creating Mutually-Beneficial Partnerships with Nonprofits to Foster Innovative, Evidence-based Programming
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Graduate students have skills that can be useful for community-based organizations, in areas such as grant writing, evaluation, and policy research. This session will discuss how graduate students can market their skills and develop partnerships with community-based organizations that are beneficial to both parties. Based on examples from the presenters’ past experiences the session provides practical advice that will help students understand issues including: how to balance work and school, how to talk about work conducted outside of the school setting (e.g., during interviews), and how to lay the foundation for turning community partnerships into jobs after graduation. It will also present the organizational perspective, including the advantages of working with graduate students, and how to recruit the right student(s) for your project. This session is closely related to this year’s conference theme of “Evidence for Action:
Encouraging Innovation and Improvement” in that collaborations between graduate students and organizations are often innovative and help build organizational capacity while students strengthen skills and gain experience. It will begin with examples from the graduate student presenters’ experiences utilizing their professional networks during graduate school to find and create paid opportunities for evaluation- and research-based consulting positions. From the organizational perspective, a practitioner will discuss the advantages of working with graduate students to build capacity and program development within several university-nonprofit partnership models, including short-term research projects and internships.
