Collaborations as a resource: Doing what we can with what we have
Sarah Clancy (Amnesty International)
Abstract
‘Changing Perspectives - an exploration of the portrayals of the Majority World in the West of Ireland’s local print media’ is the title of a booklet published by the Galway One World Centre in August 2008. The booklet reports the results of a research project that was carried out as collaboration between four postgraduate students on the NUIG Masters programme in Ethics Culture and Globalisation and the Galway One World Centre. The students undertook the project in order to fulfil the Service Learning requirement of their Masters programme. Whilst the project, and the manner of its realisation were in effect carried out in a ‘made up as it went along’ fashion the process itself highlighted that there are myriad opportunities for mutually beneficial collaboration between students of the social sciences and social entrepreneurial organisations.
Though this type of collaboration is customary, accepted and highly resourced in spheres of research that are valuable to industry and business, there remain many unexploited overlaps between the research or service learning based modules that many university social science courses require of their students and the needs for research within civil society organisations. The economic climate that faces Ireland in the immediate future will force civil society organisations to behave more innovatively in terms of resources and this paper will argue that the ‘man hours’ of students in many spheres might, with mutual benefit, be put to the use of such organisations.
Using the specific example of the project above this paper will examine some of the practical issues that were encountered. Though the paper will focus on the experience of the host organisation - the Galway One World Centre and the observations of the project supervisor – the opinions of the other stakeholders will be presented. The paper will display that the capacity for creating and fostering such collaborations is one that may easily flourish at a grassroots or community level and as such might prove resilient and durable despite likely restrictions on funding. In its concluding section this paper will suggest some practical ways of instigating such collaborations on a national level.
