Seminar by Dr Andre Goodrich & Prof Mokgadi Molope

You are cordially invited to a seminar by Dr Andre Goodrich & Prof Mokgadi Molope, from the North-West University. Dr Goodrich is the Director of the School of social Science (NWU) and Prof Molope Deputy Director of the School on the Mafikeng Campus and tasked with the portfolio of Community engagement.

Topic: Centring Community Engagement: Building an infrastructure for sustainable transformation.

Abstract

Policy, planning and strategic documents at the sectoral and institutional levels of South Africa’s higher education landscape have, since the late 1990s placed growing pressure on faculties and academics to increase community engagement activities. Across the same period, civil society in South Africa has swelled from an estimated 98 920 NPOs in 2002 to over 280 000 NPOs registered with the Department of Social Development in September 2023. Faced with these two narratives of growth, one would be forgiven for expecting an accompanying growth in the number of partnerships entered between universities and NPOs. However, registers of MoUs between the NWU and community organisations (as opposed to corporates or state structures) presents itself as something of a departure from this expected trend, both at the level of magnitude and of sustainability.

Faced with this departure, our team, has undertaken a project to understand how it comes about and to map out avenues for an intervention to address it. Our team is comprised of participants from local NPOs, the JB Marks City Council, and the School of Social Sciences. Our brief exploration has revealed numerous pressure points that frustrate the development of longstanding impactful relationships across sectors. These include the everyday challenges facing NPOs on the ground; the impact of state structure and funding requirements on the development and maintenance of clear foci; the diffuse nature of the concerns NPOs attempt to engage; the institutional expectations of and constraints relating to community engagement in HE policies and structures; and the challenges of realising these expectations by individual academic colleagues in the broader context of workload pressure and career development. This presentation offers preliminary framework for a transformative intervention to begin realising the expected growth of CE partnerships between these two sectors.

Join meeting here

Passcode: 160744