When Leigh Bailey from Sasha Bruce Youthwork started attending every pre-semester planning meeting with GW's Human Services and Social Justice faculty three years ago, she wasn't just looking for student volunteers. She was initiating a shift toward authentic reciprocal partnership.
Sasha Bruce has supported homeless youth in Washington, DC through shelters, programs, and policy advocacy for fifty years. The organization had been mentioned to HSSJ students as a potential service-learning site for many years, but in Spring 2023, the relationship deepened significantly. Rather than simply receiving student projects, Sasha Bruce began actively shaping how those projects could simultaneously build organizational capacity and advance student learning in nonprofit management and social change.
The partnership now structures the learning experience across four HSSJ courses each semester. Faculty and community partners coordinate through pre-semester planning meetings where both groups contribute their expertise. HSSJ faculty share their learning goals and course topics, while Bailey and other community partners weigh in on competencies nonprofit leaders actually need and propose projects that align with coursework.
Bailey's leadership in this process has been crucial. She attended multiple "Deepening Partnerships" events, discussing with students, faculty, and other community partners how to improve collaboration and achieve better outcomes for everyone. Her active participation in shaping the partnership model has influenced how HSSJ now works with 8-10 key community organization partners across the program.
Students experience Sasha Bruce through progressively complex engagements that reveal different facets of nonprofit work. In HSSJ 2177: Social Justice & Public Policy, students create advocacy materials and conduct research to support Sasha Bruce's organizing efforts. In 2024, students developed informational one-pagers about youth homelessness in the DMV area, researching funding structures, interviewing staff, and producing materials Sasha Bruce now uses to raise awareness and secure sustainable funding.
The program evaluation course (HSSJ 3100W) engages students in sophisticated data gathering and analysis. In 2023, students evaluated the Promise Place program, which provides short-term housing for unhoused youth. Their work included creating detailed logic models to help visualize impact pathways and recommending program expansions for Spanish speakers and LGBTQ youth. Students presented their findings at the GW Research Showcase. Other HSSJ courses involving Sasha Bruce include HSSJ 3110W: Nonprofit Management and HSSJ 2200: Ethical Leadership. The deepening relationships across multiple courses create opportunities for extended engagement. Last year, a student who completed a complex program evaluation project continued working with the organization the following academic year as an intern.
The impact extends beyond HSSJ courses. Bailey's willingness to listen to students' skills and learning interests while finding meaningful roles for them has made her a model community partner. She frequently serves as a guest speaker at GW, both in individual courses and at the Nashman Center's Welcome to Community Engaged Scholarship events, where she encourages students to find their unique contribution to the community.
Faculty in other departments have benefited from Sasha Bruce's openness to new partnerships. The organization now works with courses in communication design (where an entire year-long class used design thinking to develop strategic plans as Sasha Bruce approached its fiftieth anniversary), health communication, economics, public health, and first-year university writing. Sasha Bruce has also become a regular partner for GW's Days of Service, hosting students for
service projects to support their residents.
What distinguishes this partnership is HSSJ's systematic approach to coordination. By bringing community partners into pre-semester planning conversations and asking them to shape learning outcomes alongside faculty, the program has created structures for authentic collaboration rather than transactional service placements. Students committed to social change gain excellent learning opportunities while providing high-quality work in program evaluation, grant-writing, testimony collection for advocacy, and other projects that genuinely build organizational capacity.
The relationship demonstrates how ten years of engagement can evolve into three years of true partnership when a community organization actively participates in shaping the academic experience and faculty create consistent structures for that participation to occur.