Our Approach
The Phoenix Project has developed a powerful model for helping universities and communities build lasting partinerships around social innovation. The partnerships build the capacity of nonprofit organizations and municipal agencies working to solve critical economic and social challenges in severely distressed communities, while providing university faculty, students, administrators, staff and alumni with new opportunities for teaching, research and service and cross-institutional collaboration.
The goals of Phoenix Project partnerships are:
- To help community leaders, including nonprofit directors, municipal agency heads, elected officials and regular citizens, to identify their most pressing economic and community development needs;
- To help students, faculty, administrators and staff at colleges and universities to identify the intellectual, physical and economic resources they possess that match the needs identified by the community;
- To help the partners identify opportunities through which matching university resources with the community’s needs will advance the instruction, research and service objectives of the university generally and its faculty, student, staff, administrator and alumni stakeholders specifically;
- To demonstrate processes through which community projects are tackled by university and community leaders and sustainable relationships of mutual trust and respect are built between key stakeholders;
- To minimize the transactional costs of the partnership to both the university and the community by conveying best practices developed by the Phoenix Project through our network of successful partnerships;
- To help the partners document and measure progress of the partnership according to fixed metrics and to promote the successes of the partnership to stakeholders, the public, the media, public officials and other universities and distressed communities;
- To use the context of the partnership and the Phoenix Project’s leadership programs to prepare partner universities’ students as Virginia’s next generation of social entrepreneurs and to work with faculty to integrate proven pedagogies into the university curriculum.