Cultural Collisions and Solutions in Non-Profit-Academic Partnerships Addressing Violence Prevention

Abstract

Community-academic partnerships are most effective when resources, expertise, insights, and commitment are shared in mutually beneficial ways. However, there are competing cultures of non-profit organizations and academic institutions, oftentimes with different constituents and different sites of knowledge making. A two-year grant-funded public health project sought to address state-sanctioned violence. While the academic partners were committed to anti-racist, anti-imperialist and Black transnational feminist praxis and epistemologies, the community partners insisted on remaining “neutral on a moving train”. We examine the role of these conflicts or “choques” in community-academic partnerships and their imperative within community accountable-scholarship.