Community Linkages with Universities w/ Ira Harkavy

“The model of how we learn and work is all wrong; we have to do this democratically and realize everyone has knowledge and value,” Ira Harkavy tells our listeners. Podsters Pete and Joe talk to Harkavy, the Associate Vice President and Founding Director of the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania. An historian with extensive experience building university-community-school partnerships, Harkavy teaches in the departments of history, urban studies, and Africana studies, and in the Graduate School of Education. As Director of the Netter Center since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop academically based community service courses, as well as participatory action research projects, that involve creating university-community partnerships and university-assisted community schools in Penn’s local community of West Philadelphia. We learn of the creation of PHENND, a national coalition of universities committing their institutions to working with their surrounding communities, much like settlement houses used to. In fact, Prof. Harkavy suggests a model that has transplanted traditional non-profit organizations that once supported low income communities that is moving forward with anti-poverty strategies.