Bridging Campuses and Classrooms: University Partnerships That Power Community Schools

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Related Links

Bass Connections Project: University-Assisted Schools
Durham UACS Research Collective Instagram @durhamuacs
Duke Partners with NCCU
How Local Universities Are Supporting Community Schools
Southeast Regional Coalition for University-Assisted Community Schools

Full Transcript

Welcome to season two of Duets, a Duke Trinity podcast that explores research collaborations between faculty, students and community partners across Durham and North Carolina.

Today we’re joined by Alec Greenwald from Duke University and Yolanda Dunston from North Carolina Central University. From their first meeting six years ago, Greenwald and Dunston have been united in a shared vision: supporting public schools that serve as hubs of opportunity, healing and innovation. Through the university-assistance framework, Duke and NCCU act as a unified partner for local public schools, providing targeted support based on direct input from the school’s community, including its students, families and teachers. The partnership helps facilitate the integration of university-assisted academic programs and social services, and demonstrates how when universities join together, they can use collective resources to strengthen our local communities.

Alec: I'm Alec Greenwald. I'm an associate in research with the program in education at Duke University. I also direct the Southeast Regional Coalition for university assisted community schools, a Regional Training Center, and also a former educator.

Yolanda: I'm Yolanda Dunston, and I'm a professor in the School of Education at North Carolina Central University. I'm in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and I've been there for this is going on, my 23rd year in the School of Ed. And prior to that, interestingly, I was a public-school teacher — I taught in Charlotte Mecklenburg and Durham Public Schools and Wake County Schools. 

So, tell me about your favorite teacher, a teacher who stands out in your mind as quite memorable, and why.

Alec: My favorite teacher was my ninth-grade social studies teacher, Mr. Griffo, and I remember lots of things about him. He was a bald dude, which I now am. He had experience teaching at a lot of different schools with a lot of different communities, so he had a diverse teaching background, and so it felt interesting to me, as a ninth-grader who was from a certain community my entire life, to be interacting with someone who had interacted with different types of people. At the core of his social studies pedagogy was justice rights, was movements, political movements, social movements, which is the kind of teacher that I fancied myself. 

How about you? Who was your favorite teacher and why?

Yolanda: My favorite teacher is Mrs. Allen. I just thought she was the most amazing person, that she was just so calm and she moved with such smoothness, like literally, when she walked, it seemed like she just floated. I was able to be in her dance class, and she even became our cheer coach, and she had this way of making you feel so heard. I talk a lot about developing rapport when I'm working with pre-service educators — college students who want to be teachers — and she did that. She was the epitome of making students feel seen and heard. She appealed to so many students because she didn't just have a specific kind of student that she reached out to. She reached out to everyone and made everyone feel like they belonged and that they had a space there. And I think that I model what I do after how she made me feel. I want my students to feel that way, like they can come to me not just about they don't understand the math or they don't understand the literacy, but that they can come to me and talk to me and feel like I'm listening and I appreciate them as a human. So, she really did have a strong impact on the teacher that I became.

Alec: How do you think collaboration has been important for our work?

Yolanda: I’m really glad you asked that question, because the whole idea of us working together across two universities is it's a really big deal to have these two universities that are in such close proximity to each other, that care so much about the Durham community, to join forces together to support our schools and communities right here in our own backyards. The collaborative piece, to me, is pretty important, because our institutions have such different things to offer. We have such amazing expertise in a wide variety of disciplines. We have research, we have service, we have different things that we bring to the table. And, while those things would be wonderful in isolation, we're so much stronger when we pull our resources together, human resources, material resources, ideas, the collaboration and the impact on the community is so much stronger. And I believe that when the community in Durham sees the two of our universities working together, I think they appreciate that, that it's not just there's a thing in this part of the city and there's another thing in this part of the city, but these two entities are working together to support our community, that we're all on the same page. And not only that, but to take it to the next level, we're collaborating with the actual community and what they say, what they have identified as their own needs and their own wishes, and how we can support those.

Alec: I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what it means on the ground with the students from Duke, from North Carolina Central, and our day to day?

Yolanda: We do this wonderful thing that I absolutely love, where we spend half of our time in the semester on NCCU’s campus and our buildings and our spaces, and then the other half of our time on Duke's campus, learning about what it feels like to be in a different space, but still working towards the same goal. We travel together. When we go to these site visits, we get a chance to learn so much more about each other, and we're not just in our student or faculty capacity, but we learn the human side of each other.

Yolanda: What makes you feel hopeful about what we're doing?

Alec: So, when we started this work, we were all volunteering for the first four years. We all volunteered for this work. It meant that we were meeting weekly as team leads. It meant that we were meeting weekly with our students. It meant that we were supporting them in between those meetings for an entire four years with no sort of salary or even supplement, and we kept putting one foot in front of the other, and were able to make enough noise through what I call kind of “currency on university campuses,” publications, presentations, relationships to be put in more relationships with folks that had resources to apply for real resources. So, four years into this project, we developed a coalition that came together to apply for federal funds to scale community schools across the state, and we were not funded. And it was a moment where we really could have tucked our tails, and said, "you know what, four years of volunteering, four years of having a vision and a dream that people, at least for this proposal didn't believe in, is like enough to be like, I've got enough on my plate, like, let's go do something else.” But we didn't. We kept working, we kept moving forward, we kept recruiting students, we kept telling our story, and came back the second year, wrote an even more ambitious federal grant and now have real resources — $10 million a year for five years, $50 million to scale community schools to rural, low income districts across the state of North Carolina — that has the support of the Department of Public Instruction and probably a dozen different statewide partners that are advocates and policy makers around public education. And that makes me feel really, really hopeful that if we continue to show up, if we continue to do the hard work and kind of scrap, that people will believe our story and believe in the vision, and that we can actually have real impact and put real dollars into our schools.

Yolanda: The things that make me hopeful, as we think about experiences that we've had and ways that we've shared our work, I'm thinking back to the meeting that we had last October, and we invited all these higher ups from NCCU, because we really want everyone to know about the work we're doing. And we invited our chancellor and our provost and some really big names of people on our campus, and we let our students speak to what we do. I mean, we handed them the reins, and that's what we do in our program. We hand the reins to the students, and we let them tell our story, and it was so well received that I got calls and texts and emails from folks saying, “We love what you're doing. We want to know more about this. How can we continue to help you all build this bridge across the two universities, to support not just Durham Public Schools, but the community in Durham,” and so that makes me hopeful that when we allow our students to share, they have so much energy and they have a way of making the work seem real, like down-to-earth and ready to be moved from this moment to the next step.  

Alec: Well, let's not forget that that convening that we had, we invited about a dozen staff and faculty and students from Elizabeth City State University and East Carolina University, and now Elizabeth City State University has a university-assisted community school course on the books where they will be giving students credit to carry on this research, and that doesn't happen without them being in conversation with you directly about how we have built the thing on a campus that is similar to Elizabeth City State University, right, another public HBCU.

Yolanda: To see that, that growth has happened, and that what started off as a very, I don't want to say limited, but very small scale type of endeavor has all of these far reaching impacts, and how excited people get about the work that we're doing and saying, “I want to get my hands on that. How can we use that? Or how can you help us create that in our community?” To see that type of evolution of what we're doing over time has, it's part of what's kept me continuing to come back year after year to see what's going to happen next. What's going to happen now? Where's this branch going to take us next? 

Alec: Shout out to all of the folks who make this work move. Yolanda and I are the representatives for this on this podcast, but we've probably had over 20 different staff and faculty from both campuses who show up every single day to do this work, and probably have graduated over 150 students from both universities who show up every day, and often year after year, to do this work.

To learn more about our work, or join our coalition, you can find us on Instagram at Durham University Assisted Community Schools. 

Yolanda: Our other program is SERCUACS, which stands for the Southeast Regional Coalition for University-Assisted Community Schools. You can search online or follow us on social media.

Duets is produced by Trinity College of Arts & Sciences at Duke University.

Senior Editor and Producer: Cara August, Trinity Communications
Audio Editor and Mixer: Marc Maximov
Assistant Content Editor: K’Mari Peede, Dr. MAC Fellow, Trinity Communications, Summer 2025
Music Composition: André Mego, T’20 | MMS ‘21
Production Sponsor: Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke University
Recording Date and Location: June 2025, Bryan Center Studios