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Hello, listener, and welcome to the Faculty Forum, a podcast from Westchester University's Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. My name is Jimmy John, Graduate Assistant in the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, and I'm glad you're tuning in. This episode's topic is Cultivating Relationships with External Partners and the Importance of and How to Network with External Partners.

We are joined today with our guest speakers, Dr. John Albrecht, Dr. Megan Heckert, and Dr. Crystal Luce. Welcome everyone to our podcast. Please feel free to tell us a little bit about yourselves and your relationship with research.

Megan, why don't you go first? Sure. I am in the Department of Geography and Planning here at Westchester, and I am a geographer by training. I focus largely on issues related to green space in cities and long-term sustainability planning, and because it's going to be relevant to some of my thoughts, I will mention that I am a lifelong Philadelphian who only very recently actually moved much closer to campus.

As far as research, I would say that I have something of a love-hate relationship with research in the sense that I enjoy it, I'm committed to it, the doing part, super fun. The writing part, maybe not so much. The going through peer review, painful, but necessary, yeah.

Thank you so much. Crystal, would you like to go? Sure. All right.

Hi, everybody. I am an associate professor in the School of Education and Social Work, specifically in early and middle grades education. I teach courses in leadership and a lot of other areas as well in the graduate school.

My focus for my research surrounds three areas. One facet is leadership, the other area is teacher reflection, and the third area is early learning. Okay.

Thank you so much for sharing. John, would you like to go? Sure. Hello, everyone.

My name is John Ulrich, and I'm an associate provost in academic affairs in the Westchester administration. I work primarily on establishing and maintaining dual enrollment partnerships with area school districts. I've worked in higher education as a faculty member and an administrator for more than 30 years.

For much of my career, I worked for what is now the Mansfield campus of Commonwealth University. I'm relatively new to Westchester's administration, having worked here just for the last three years. Thank you very much for inviting me to join this podcast.

I'm looking forward to the conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you all for sharing a little bit about yourselves and about your relationship to research.

As mentioned before, we're going to be diving into our important topic of today, which is cultivating relationships with external partners, whether it's community organizations, local nonprofits, government agencies, or industry leaders. These partnerships help create incredible opportunities for researchers. They can open doors to resources, mentorships, and real-world impact, while also bringing fresh energy and ideas to our partners.

But how do you start building those connections? And what makes a partnership sustainable and mutually beneficial? And what skills can one carry forward from this kind of networking? Let's start unpacking these questions. Dr. Ulrich, I'll start with you. Why do external partnerships matter for faculty and students these days, whether it's research, teaching, or community work? Sure.

Well, I think partnerships with organizations outside of the university are important for a number of reasons. Where students are concerned, partnerships with employers can provide internship opportunities that enable students to gain valuable work experience related to their major course of study. And such internships, of course, can lead directly to job offers.

It's a great way for students to connect their coursework to their career goals. For faculty, partnerships with external organizations give them the opportunity to conduct research and share their expertise for the benefit of organizations that might not otherwise have the means or the expertise to conduct such work themselves. At the university level, too, such partnerships matter because our university is a public institution.

And as such, it's part of our mission to contribute to the public good. It's worth remembering that community and cultural engagement is one of our stated institutional goals. And forming mutually beneficial partnerships with outside organizations is one way we go about fulfilling that goal.

Thank you very much. Dr. Heckert, can you share a story where working with an outside partner really made a difference in your work? I can. And I have two thoughts about this.

I'll start with the more straightforward answer, which is to say that the research that I do would just not be possible without external partners. That the biggest project I have is one I've been working on for about 10 years at this point. And it's a collaboration with a colleague at Temple University.

And we work to develop tools to enable communities and governments to center equity in planning, particularly for climate change, but also general planning for the future. And because we see these tools as something that we want government agencies and community groups to use, if we don't actually involve them in the research, the chances of us actually achieving that goal are virtually nonexistent. But I also kind of want to think about reversing the question a little bit.

Because what's really more important to me is not that relationships with external partners benefit me or my students, but that they also benefit the partners themselves in some way. That it really should be a reciprocal relationship. And so sometimes it can be hard to see that, especially if your research is long term or if it's preliminary and you don't know if you'll ever get funded to do the real big project you have in mind.

So I don't have a ton of examples to really show, oh, we did this amazing thing. But I have one small example of some research that I did for my master's degree was with a partner at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. And I was researching the impact of an after school program that took place in parks on how the kids thought about parks and their neighborhoods and their sense of connection.

And one of the findings that I had that I thought was really interesting was that the program was happening in six places. Three of them made a real big difference. Three of them, not so much.

And the real difference seemed to be that the instructor in the three that made a big difference was a long time committed member of the community who worked in the park and had a real passion for the park and brought that to their work as opposed to the other three in which someone had been hired to do the job but they didn't have that sense of connection. And so being able to offer that insight back to the Horticultural Society changed some of their thinking and some of the ways that they administered that program and some future programs that they designed working with educators. Thank you for that great example.

Even though you thought it was small, the impact seems very great. Thank you so much. Dr. Luce, may I ask you the next question? What's your go to approach for starting a new relationship with a partner outside the university? And any tips for breaking the ice? There is no perfect recipe for breaking the ice, but I will say because I work with parents and hospitals and young children and the K to 12 education setting, it's really important for my research to be established, well established, because when I'm making a point with a partner, I have to have them understand the why behind the research.

So I will hail to Simon Sinek, who really emphasizes starting with the why in the business world. I think the same thing is true when you're doing research. So always putting out there the why behind the research, especially in K to 12 settings. 

I think it's getting even harder to get through the doors of those settings and for researchers to step into the school situations because of the existing climate that we're experiencing currently. As far as the hospital setting, it's really important to establish partners within the hospital setting and having clear goals so that they're aware of exactly what you want to do. And as far as parents and young children, it's essential to form relationships so they trust you. 

The children have to trust you and the parents have to trust you. And they have to understand why the research is necessary for society. Thank you so much. 

And the why is definitely important. What are some things faculty and students should not do when trying to build these connections? Dr. Ulrich, would you take that question? Sure. I'd make two recommendations here.

First, I think if you're interested in developing a partnership, don't go it alone. If you're a faculty member, make sure you're consulting with your department chair, with your dean regarding the concept you have in mind, the goals you want to achieve and so on. For a student, I would say also, please consult with a faculty member, consult with your advisor, your department chairperson, especially if this project involves undergraduate research. 

Secondly, where developing new partnerships is concerned, I'd recommend listening carefully. In fact, more than recommend, I would insist that you listen carefully to the perspective of the partner organization. In other words, don't start off with a rigid set of expectations that you want the partner organization to fulfill.

Remember, these are meant to be mutually beneficial partnerships. They're not one sided arrangements. So to achieve that kind of productive relationship, it's important for us on the university side to understand the potential partner's needs and goals and then to work on figuring out if the university can help meet those needs and goals in a way that benefits both organizations.

Thank you so much, Dr. Ulrich. Tapping into the resources around you and listening, those are definitely great takeaways from what you just explained to us. Thank you. 

Dr. Heckert, how do you maintain these relationships going long term, especially when everyone's busy or projects may end? This is a great question and another hard one. And I do want to acknowledge that, you know, sometimes relationships end and that's true in all facets of life. And so it's not always a bad thing.

But I will say that I've also had mixed success in terms of keeping partnerships and relationships long term. And it helps both to initially build the relationship and to maintain the partnership if you are generally in the same circles or the same place. Right. 

So this is where I said it was relevant that I'm a lifelong Philadelphian. Most of my research to date has centered in Philadelphia and most of my original research has started from past relationships. So I mentioned that my master's degree was with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

Just happened that one of my really close friends worked there and he knew that I was interested in looking at parks and he said, hey, this is, I think, a program that would really benefit. And then I continued to have a relationship with the Horticultural Society. When I left my master's, I didn't go right into my PhD.

I worked for an environmental nonprofit and part of my job was meeting folks who did environmental work all over the region. And so I was able to meet new people at the Horticultural Society and many other agencies. And I would find ways to bring back in people that I had met previously when I was working on my master's.

I then worked in software development, which might seem like a real shift, but I still continue to try and find ways to work with the partnerships that I had developed. So my company had a 10 percent time program where we could do pro bono work and work on our own projects. And I would try to do work again with different parts of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which I then took into my PhD.

And so my doctoral research was also with the Horticultural Society, where, funnily enough, the person who ran that program was the father of a childhood friend who I remember watching movies in his living room as a child, did not hurt in terms of keeping that relationship. What ended up getting tricky was when I started working here at Westchester. Even though I was still living in Philadelphia, I was no longer there all of the time. 

And that relationship becomes harder to manage. And so I do have collaborators who are at Temple still in Philadelphia, and now they do more of that sort of day to day work of maintaining those relationships because it's challenging. There's not really one necessarily right answer, but part of it is thinking about always trying to maintain those connections.

And even if it doesn't seem like a new project necessarily involves old partners, give a little thought to whether or not there might actually be a role for them or even just a way to connect with them about it. Thank you for that insight. Dr. Luce, what's one thing you wish you had known earlier about working with external partners? One is that the answer may be no to the funding.

So it's really important to go into research writing and the grant writing, knowing that you're going to put in hours. But sometimes the external funders can't or won't fund the project that you think is very valuable. And two is while you're completing research to make sure you use your data to tell a story.

I've been working on some research for at least 10 years, and every three years it was cyclical. I had to tell a story about my data in order to continue the funding. And so if you don't know your data or if you're not keeping good data during your research, that can be problematic.

Rejection is a part of life, right? And also selling what you're working on, right? Even it has to be repetitive. Thank you so much. I have one last question for all three of my guests and anyone can jump in. 

My question is, do you have any advice for faculty or students who are interested but not sure where to start? I'll start by saying if you don't have a specific partner in mind to begin with and just know that you have a project idea, then definitely start by thinking about connections you already have and how they might fit into your project idea, whether that's family and friends or professional networks that you have. If you're a member of any association, are there people you've met through that, that might be appropriate. If you have a particular partner in mind that you know you want to work with, but you don't have a connection, I would recommend seeing if you can attend an event or in some other way that's not a direct ask, meet them, see if you can establish rapport. 

You can, of course, always do a cold call and say, hey, here's who I am, here's what I'm interested in doing, what do you think? But I just think it's important to be prepared that a lot of potential partners have met a lot of academics who may or may not have made promises that they were not able to keep. And so you should expect that you might have to prove yourself to any potential partner, actually, in that regard. The other thing I wanted to say was if you think it's going to be a one off thing or if there's the potential for it to be a one off thing, then make sure you're upfront about that at the beginning.

Again, part of that, you don't want to make promises that you can't keep. So when I had a project, I had a planning grant from NSF. We worked with our partners and we were part of the goal of the work was to develop a proposal for the next round of funding.

And we were very clear with them. We're going to design this program. It's going to be great. 

We can't actually make any guarantees that it's going to happen because the funding landscape changes all the time. And that NSF directorate that we were working under doesn't exist anymore. And that's just part of the reality of doing research, too.

Thank you so much. My recommendation is geared towards students and that I'm currently doing research in two of my courses. And I just find it to be such a great opportunity to engage with the students and also help them understand the research process, especially graduate students who may later go on to get their doctorate or whom are in the doctorate process right now.

It's really helpful for them to see me carrying out research and and explaining the consent process, all the things that go with research. It's not just writing the research. There are so many things you have to follow through on.

Got it. Thank you very much. I think it's always helpful to seek out individuals who've had experience with developing and maintaining external partnerships, especially if this is a new territory for you, right, as an individual professor or student or an administrator even, because faculty have inevitably colleagues right around them that they can consult who might have more experience building partnerships like that.

Students could consult with faculty mentors or student affairs personnel about these kinds of things. I just think it's always a good idea to bounce ideas off of others first, right, before making that approach. And I think I'd also like to mention that, in my experience anyway, there's not a one size fits all approach to establishing a partnership, even if it's in sort of the same category.

You know, I work on primarily dual enrollment partnerships, but each partner is a little bit different and has a little bit different style, different history, different needs, different goals. And it's just important to kick off the conversation, right, and do that exploratory back and forth to figure out if there is a way in which our organization and theirs can partner in a productive way. And as others have mentioned already, you know, sometimes these things don't come to fruition, you know, despite everyone's best efforts.

But that's OK, too. The important thing is that you're exploring the possibility of working together and figuring out if there is a way for us to do that that would benefit both organizations at the same time. Thank you so much.

I might add one more thing as advice for both students and faculty here at Westchester is always thinking about the possibilities that exist within your alumni network. Also for engaging them as community partners. Thank you for that. 

Thank you, Dr. John Albrecht, Dr. Megan Heckert and Dr. Crystal Luce for being here today. It was very much appreciated. Well, that's it for today's episode of the Faculty Forum.

Be sure to tune in next time for more conversations with our amazing university faculty.

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