Our Approach
Goals and Methodology
The Phoenix Project has developed a distinctive and proven methodology to marshal university resources to build the capacity of nonprofit organizations and municipal agencies working to solve critical economic and social challenges of 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 work with community leaders, including nonprofit directors, municipal agency heads, elected officials and regular citizens, to identify their most pressing economic and community development needs;
- To work with 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 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 provide guidance and administrative support to the process 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 employing best practices developed by the Phoenix Project through our network of successful partnerships;
- To 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.
The Advantages of Phoenix Project-Facilitated Partnerships
The Phoenix Project model is a stand alone charitable organization working in partnership with universities and communities as an intermediary. We also design independent social entrepreneurship programs to produce effective pedagogy that can be integrated into the traditional curriculum of partner universities. This model offers several significant advantages over a university working alone to build and sustain a partnership with a distressed community. Among other benefits, the Phoenix Project:
- Is staffed full-time by individuals with expertise in civic education, university-community partnerships and mapping of economic, philanthropic and political landscapes;
- Works at an entrepreneurial pace;
- Brings the experience and best practices from its work across the state;
- Ensures constant maintenance of the relationships necessary for long-term sustainability;
- Serves as a structural buffer to the inherent imbalance of resources between university and community partners; and
- Prepares students for engagement in the partnership with an established and proven approach.
The Phoenix Project model is proven, can be put in place quickly, and is more cost efficient than the university and community working alone. Community stakeholders have their hands full on the front lines of their neighborhoods. University stakeholders are too busy doing what they do best—teaching, researching, learning and serving, to also be asked to do the massive amount of legwork and planning required to launch and sustain a meaningful partnership between two complicated entities. For a fraction of the cost of hiring internal personnel to design, facilitate, measure and promote the partnership, the Phoenix Project is able to do the work so that faculty, students and community members can concentrate their efforts to the greatest effect.