The unheard voices: Community organizations and service-learning

This article reports the findings of in-depth interviews with sixty-seven community organization representatives about their experience with service-learners. We found that partnerships have much room for improvement in several key areas: com-munication and relationship-building, managing and evaluation of students, and cultural competency, as well as the challenge of short-term service-learning. IntroductionS ervice-learning has become an institutionalized practice in higher education. A lot of institutional hype accompanies service-learning, and a lot of research promotes its positive impact on student grades, attitudes, and sensitivities (Lansverk 2004; Myers-Lipton 1998; Krain and Nurse 2004). There are also claims that service-learning positively impacts host communities (Cruz and Giles 2000) but much less research to back up those claims. In fact