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South African educators meeting in Cape Town with representatives from major philanthropic and economic-development organizations at the Third Annual Kresge-Inyathelo South Africa Leadership Retreat explored the potential benefits and challenges of closer collaboration between universities and communities.

During the three-day gathering, on Oct. 22-24, local and international thought leaders shared stories of how they had re-imagined themselves by engaging their communities. They also encouraged vice chancellors representing more than a dozen South African universities and a small contingent from Nigeria to consider the applicability of this concept to their own institutions.

Rip Rapson, president of The Kresge Foundation, delivered formal remarks that addressed the importance of universities in building community prosperity and democracy and described five areas in which he believed Kresge’s help would be most beneficial. They include improving learning and teaching; increasing the quality and quantity of locally produced research; strengthening and assisting university management; nurturing university innovation, and promoting university-community connections.

Read Rip Rapson’s full remarks:  “Positioning Your University for Investment:  The University and Urban Renewal.”

Experts acknowledged that although university-community engagement is not a common strategy in South African higher education, this type of relationship building could lead to payoffs for both higher education and their urban or rural constituencies. By creating more varied and robust partnerships with their communities, universities could strengthen their long-term mission of graduating more students while achieving financial sustainability. Working together, universities and communities also could address pressing educational, social and economic problems more efficiently and utilize their combined resources to pursue the common good.

“Universities’ greatest contribution to community is to increase the number of graduates they produce,” Rapson said. “Yet in pursuit of that mission, many American universities have walled themselves off from their communities to avoid messy, confusing, and often disruptive politics or problems.

“But in the more visionary cases,” he continued, “we see universities embracing their neighbors. They realize they have enormous investments in place and can’t just pick up and leave. So instead they begin to look at their communities to see what common interests they can pursue to benefit both the university and the community at-large.”

As part of its program to strengthen South African higher education, Kresge has partnered with Inyathelo – the South African Institute for Advancement – in a five-year, $10 million Special Initiative in South Africa to build private fundraising capacity at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the University of Pretoria, the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Witwatersrand and the Red Cross Children’s Hospital Trust.

The theme of this year’s Kresge-Inyathelo leadership retreat, “Building Connections Between Universities and their Communities for Mutual Benefit,” introduced and examined the fifth area of Kresge’s strategic effort to strengthen South African higher education – promoting university-community connections.

William F.L. Moses, a Kresge program officer and leader of the International Team, also attended the retreat. “We believe that by engaging with their communities more effectively to respond to local needs, South African universities could potentially enroll better-prepared students and produce more graduates to strengthen South Africa’s economy,” says Moses.

“In addition, universities that engage in community-building practices, such as hiring local residents and improving surrounding neighborhoods, will find they can attract and retain more students, faculty, visiting scholars – and even donors,” he adds.