Service-learning projects become successful and permanent by developing stable long-term relationships with a range of partners and other stakeholders. In addition, maintaining strong partnerships is the foundation for spreading a commitment to interfaith service-learning throughout your community.

Who Are Your Partners?

• Faith-based organizations that provide services and offer service experiences as part of their programming;
• Social service and other nonprofit providers or associations that engage young people and adults as volunteers;
• Community-based youth development organizations and after-school programs that include service or service-learning as part of their programming;
• Financial partners, which may include foundations, corporations, or social entrepreneurs;
• Parents, caregivers, and other family members of the youth who are engaged in your interfaith service-learning activities; and
• Other community leaders and change agents who recognize interfaith service-learning as a key strategy for strengthening community and improving society.

Developing Partnerships

See the sections on inviting participation and youth leaders and adult allies for more information on getting started with partnerships.

 Keys to Sustaining Effective Partnerships

• Establish a long-term vision. A key factor for sustaining interfaith service-learning is the establishment of a formal, cohesive, long-term vision for the partnership and for the interfaith service-learning movement in your town, city, county, or other sphere of influence.
• Start small. Developing and maintaining effective partnerships is time-consuming. Starting with a few partnerships while recognizing the long-term vision increases the chances that these first partnerships will become vibrant, strong, and sustaining. You'll also learn a lot about forming partnerships through these first efforts.
• Over time, engage a wide range of stakeholders as partners. One study of rural service-learning found that having a wide range of advisory boards, committees, and governance structures helped to sustain their efforts because of the high level of buy-in among a wide range of stakeholders.
• Be intentional. Starting programs with staying power results in slower, but more intentional, growth. Helping partners understand the actual investment required to provide high-quality interfaith service-learning is time-consuming, but it helps partners know what their investment needs to be over the long term.
• Communicate regularly with partners. Provide them with regular progress reports, encourage site visits, and offer to visit with them.
• Ask partners to help expand your networks. Partners can open new avenues and broader networks for support and involvement.
• Encourage peer learning among the youth and adult leaders across the partnership. Invite them to learn from, support, and inspire each other as they share resources and collaborate on projects.
• Balance quantity and quality. Encourage partners to work towards simultaneously maximizing the quantity of interfaith service-learning opportunities and optimizing the quality of these opportunities.
• Focus on cultivating trust and mutual respect among partners and stakeholders. These emerge from being in relationship with others and recognizing commonalities and unique strengths of each person, organization, and perspective, even in the midst of ideological or doctrinal differences. (See more on creating safe places for interfaith engagement.)
• Celebrate and recognize the contributions of all partners. Highlight their efforts in your communication about your work. Send them thank-you notes and letters. Host special events where partners are honored. These activities reinforce their commitment to the interfaith service-learning vision.

Toward City-Wide Movements

In some senses, formal partnerships are a means to a larger end: Stimulating local capacity and creativity to create a community-wide commitment to interfaith service-learning. Elements of this include:

• Unleashing a critical mass of young people, adults, and influential leaders who share a commitment to interfaith service-learning.
• Bringing together likeminded youth and adult leaders around a shared vision for young people and religous pluralism.
• Embedding effective practices into community and organizational life.
• Creating new norms of youth as resources and of respectful pluralism as norms of community life.

More Information

• Developing Partnerships for Service-Learning: Starting Points for Community-Based Organizations, a fact sheet from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse.

• Building Effective Partnerships in Service-Learning, from the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse.