Program Overview

University-Community Partnerships

The Phoenix Project’s university-community partnerships program engages Virginia colleges and universities in the Commonwealth's most distressed communities. The aim of the partnerships is to provide distressed communities with resources to address economic and community development challenges and partner institutions, their administrators, faculty and students, with opportunities for teaching, research and service. The central principle of the Phoenix Project’s partnerships is that the community should set the agenda, and that university resources should be deployed to assist with projects identified, defined and prioritized by the community.

Working closely with community and university partners, the Phoenix Project helps communities identify challenges, translate them into specific projects and match projects with appropriate university resources to maximize the benefit for participants. The Phoenix Project does not seek to supplant or compete with existing university outreach efforts, but rather to supplement and complement them. Currently, the Phoenix Project is facilitating three such partnerships in Petersburg, Northern Virginia's Route 1 Corridor, and Southeast Newport News.

Social Entrepreneurship and Nonprofit Leadership Programs

The Phoenix Project designs innovative nonprofit leadership and social entrepreneurship development programs for undergraduate, graduate and high school students throughout Virginia. In our flagship Nonprofit Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship Program (“NLP”), undergraduate and graduate students simultaneously learn the challenges facing economically-distressed communities, provide capacity building services to organizations serving those communities, and develop the relationships, knowledge and courage to become Virginia’s next generation of social entrepreneurs.

The Phoenix Project’s educational model is innovative in several ways. It combines intense classroom learning with equally challenging on-the-ground experience, engaging students in the powerful context of a severely economically-distressed community. This process couples a comprehensive curriculum in nonprofit management with new theories of leadership and social entrepreneurship lessons drawn heavily from the private and public sectors. Drawing students from across the Commonwealth, the NLP is the first of its kind in Virginia and the nation.

The Phoenix Project’s Nonprofit Leadership Program meets both short term and long term needs. In the short term, Petersburg, the Commonwealth’s most distressed community, needs additional capacity in its nonprofit and municipal sectors to respond to opportunities for revitalization, as do the other distressed Virginia communities which many of the students serve upon graduation. In the long term, Virginia needs a new generation of highly skilled nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs (defined as leaders who can apply entrepreneurial principles to civic challenges through the nonprofit, public and private sectors) who will ensure that Virginians in all regions can realize the promise of the Commonwealth.

The Phoenix Network

The Phoenix Project is committed to convening, launching and sustaining in Virginia a statewide network of institutions of higher education and distressed communities committed to mutual improvement—The Phoenix Network. More than 750,000 Virginians live in poverty in communities that well understand their challenges but lack the additional hands and minds required to implement solutions. Virginia’s world-class institutions of higher education are home to students, faculty and others who possess those capacity-building resources. Conversely, the challenges of distressed communities provide the crucible in which our universities can improve teaching, research and service, remind the public of the practical value of higher education and prepare the next generation of social entrepreneurs to create pattern breaking solutions to society’s most intractable challenges.

Virginia universities’ work in our distressed communities is both more than the outside world recognizes and less than the universities’ true capacity. By joining a highly visible network committed to collective action in a limited number of exceptionally underserved communities, universities will leverage greater impact and recognition than they achieve individually. Similarly, while Virginia’s distressed communities confront many similar underlying challenges, they rarely collaborate in exploring shared solutions and often struggle to reinvent the wheel in relative isolation. Through the Phoenix Network these communities enjoy greater strength in numbers and vastly improved access to the capacity building resources of our system of higher education. Virginia is the first state in the nation to call its universities and most distressed communities together in a formal network aimed at mutual improvement.