It’s possible to set up service learning or entrepreneurial projects without a formal school-community partnership. You can work on an ad hoc or informal basis with local businesses or service groups. Some projects can even be carried out entirely within the confines of the school, although the most effective projects extend their reach into the community.

Children and adolescents face historically unprecedented challenges in finding a sense of purpose and a sense of connection with adult roles of authority and responsibility.

However, there are distinct advantages to organizing a group of school and community representatives that can plan and oversee your project, and to using a formal collaborative process to guide the group’s operation. Those with experience in community-based projects strongly recommend a structured process. Bruce Miller and Karen Hahn (1997), for example, emphasize that:

Activities cannot be random. There must be a process to build vision, identify strengths and needs, set goals, create time to share, build commitment, . . . provide for equitable sharing of ideas from across the community, and adequately plan. (p. 75)

Collaborative arrangements can help to bridge the factionalism that often crops up within a community. As Cathy Jordan, program manager of the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory’s Rural Collaborative Action Team program, observes, "Small communities cannot afford to have their resources split." Yet factionalism and divisiveness often cripple efforts to initiate community-based projects or pass bond issues. By offering a neutral setting and process, an equal voice for all participants, and guidelines for keeping the focus on issues rather than personalities, a formal collaborative can help to bring all parties to the table and get them working toward common goals.

Especially in small communities, where people see one another in many contexts – at church, at school board meetings, in the post office – there is sometimes a tendency to avoid discussing controversial issues or to dwell on personalities, on who is talking rather than on what is said. But in order to get the work done, to identify goals and the means of accomplishing them and muster the support needed to carry them out, it is usually necessary to work through disagreements rather than to suppress them. The collaborative process provides tools and strategies for airing concerns in productive ways, and for making decisions that everyone can support.

By working through a collaborative group, you can help assure that your initiative will weather changes in personnel or politics. Good ideas need time to take root, but time also means change. Almost everyone who’s worked in the public schools has seen a terrific program or instructional approach die when the teacher or administrator who nurtured it moved on to another locale. With a broad base of support, however, good ideas are no longer dependent on the energy and dedication of a few.

By having a collaborative group, you increase the pool of resources available to get the work done. Given the many responsibilities educators face these days, this is no small benefit–especially in rural communities where superintendents may serve double duty as principals, principals as teachers, teachers as bus drivers, and so on.

In addition, collaborative groups build local capacity for other community development efforts. According to one expert, "Many scientists and policymakers believe that the key to addressing rural problems lies in the ‘capacity building’ of local leaders and citizens," that is, in "enhancing the potential of local people to solve problems" (Hustedde, 1991, p. 111). As members of a collaborative group learn more effective ways of working together, they acquire skills – in planning, in leadership, in communicating effectively, to name a few—that they can apply in other contexts.