Getting Started

If you have a project or program that you think would work well in partnership with an academic course or research project, contact the CUPS office (656-0095; partnerships@uvm.edu) or complete a Community Partner Interest Form.

Schedule a Project Meeting

Once your project has been matched with an appropriate faculty member and course, meet with the faculty member and/or students to make adjustments to the project based on course goals and/or your organization's needs.

Tailor the Project to the Students' Skills and Interets

CUPS or the faculty member tries to match individual students or groups of students with the project based on their abilities and learning goals. In addition to the tools they are learning in the course, students may come with a surprising range of skills such as web-design, surveying/interviewing, writing, geographic information systems (GIS), design/art, and interpersonal. Students also connect your organization to the wide range of information and software resources available through university libraries and computers.

Specify a Timeframe

Community partners should be aware of the number of hours students should be dedicating to the project, and define tasks that fit within that timeframe. Most course-based projects will need to be completed within 10 weeks, with each student dedicating 1-3 hours per week to project work (depending on the proportion of the class set aside for the project). Assigning a larger team of students to compensate for the workload can usually accommodate a larger project. There is often time at the beginning of a partnership to tailor the project goals to the amount of time the students, and your organization, have available.

Create a Memorandum of Understanding

The partnership should be based on reciprocity, which means sharing knowledge is as important as sharing benefits. In addition, the student(s) will learn more if they engage in the process of creating a product that is useful for you. To ensure useful and high quality projects, students, faculty and community partners must clearly communicate their expectations. To do this, draft a loose written contract or "memorandum of understanding" in early meetings. Our office has examples of these documents and can assist you during this process.

Here is what a community member had to say:

“We had such a good relationship with UVM, that when this project came up, we wanted to work together again… Besides the tangible accomplishment the UVM students will bring to the town, what’s neat for me is to see how the students, in a matter of a few weeks, really came to appreciate this land.”
- Dan Gaherty, Milton Conservation Commissioner, remarking on his partnership with a graduate course at UVM that helped him develop a forest management plan for the Town of Milton

Click here to return to the main menu