NSF research project

This project is a partnership between the School of Social Work at the University of Georgia and a nonprofit organization Communities In Schools (CIS). Community in Schools (CIS) is the nation’s leading community based organization that focuses on bringing community resources into schools to help young people successfully learn, stay in school, and prepare for life. For the second year in a row, Communities in Schools has been selected by Worth magazine as one of the top 100 nonprofits in the U. S., based on innovation, strategic insight, and effectiveness. Communities in Schools (CIS) works closely with local business leaders and school superintendents and takes a community development approach to supporting education by unifying the existing resources of communities around children, families, and schools as a support system to help young people realize their full potential and take responsibility for their future. Since 1997, CIS has been lowering dropout rates and the incidence of school disruption, and has increased graduation rates.

Both parties – the UGA and CIS hope and believe that this project is only the beginning of a long lasting partnership. Among some of the long-term goals the partnership plans on working toward are 1) to design, implement, and assess the series of workshops on improving organizational capacity to innovate; 2) to seek funding to extend the current project to include schools and other community organizations, 3) to serve as a role model of effective partnership between research university and the user community by encouraging linkages between other CIS sites and local universities, and by demonstrating the usefulness of research to practitioners, and 4) to initiate recognition practice, through CISGA, for local sites demonstrating innovation as recognized in the research findings.