Following are some questions to ask as you move through the process of partnering with colleagues in Financial Aid. First determine what you want from the relationship so you know where to begin. Equally important, be prepared to articulate how Financial Aid personnel and the institution can benefit from your involvement. Finally, this section offers suggestions for overcoming resistance to the idea of sharing control over community service FWS.
What Are You Asking for From Financial Aid?
Before meeting with Financial Aid personnel, it is important to clarify what you are really asking for. Even if your first meeting is meant only to better educate yourself about the FWS program at your own institution (a good first approach), you should think through your vision for your increased involvement in the program. Knowing what you want will help you ask better questions. Being clear about your self-interest is not bad; you will more likely to create a partnership that serves your needs and interests long-term. Following are some possible goals for increased involvement in community service FWS.
A Few Students to Build the Program Capacity
FWS students might help add capacity for your community service or service-learning efforts. For example, you may wish to employ a small number of students in your office to support your work. These students may serve as “student coordinators,” “issue area coordinators,” “partner liaisons,” etc. If the students have a role interfacing with your community partners (such as when you choose one FWS student to be the primary liaison with one or more key partner organizations), they can qualify as community service FWS. If the students in your office or program are doing strictly administrative work in the office with no community interaction, they probably don’t qualify.
A Large Number of Students for Direct Service or Program Coordination
You may wish to have a large number of FWS students (perhaps all of your institution’s community service FWS positions) allocated to your office so that you can, in turn, involve them in direct service positions with community organizations and/or leadership roles.
A Role in Managing Community Partners
You are likely to have some idea of which community organizations work well with your students through past volunteer or service-learning interaction. You may have a system that identifies key community partners. Without managing the entire community FWS program, you could tell the Financial Aid office which organizations you recommend or with whom you have a pre-existing working relationship.
A Role in Promoting the Program
You may want to increase visibility of community service FWS opportunities among students and/or community organizations. Your office might offer to help market the opportunities through existing or new systems.
A Role in Supporting Students in the Community
If you have a well established community service or service-learning effort at your institution, you are aware of the importance of properly preparing students for community-based experiences and offering them structured ways to discuss and learn from the challenges and opportunities they face during those experiences. You might offer to help the Financial Aid office prepare community service FWS students, engage them in structured reflection or education opportunities, and/or develop student leadership through your office.
A Role in Connecting Community Service FWS with Academic Study
Federal regulations discussed in this document show a desired link between students’ area of study or career plans and their FWS experience. Your office might be able to help form these kinds of connections — for example, offering FWS positions to students who want to continue their service after completing a service-learning experience, helping develop and market community service FWS positions that relate to typical areas of study, or creating FWS student assistant positions to support faculty who do service-learning (e.g., communicating with partners, observing students in the community, arranging transportation options, facilitating reflection).
Full Control of the Institution’s Community Service FWS Program
You may be willing to take on nearly all the tasks involved in managing your institution’s community service FWS program. These include the items listed above, plus preparing and executing required written agreements with each organization where FWS students work, tracking timecards and wage payments, managing invoicing of community organizations for their portion of the wage match (if applicable), and monitoring through site visits, among others. The Financial Aid Office will, however, always be involved in reporting your institution’s use of community FWS to the federal government and approving aspects of the program.
Why Should Financial Aid Collaborate with You?
In addition to thinking through why you want more involvement in the community service FWS program, you can help educate Financial Aid colleagues about why working with you will serve their interests. Understanding and helping meet the Financial Aid office’s needs is the best way to form a partnership with them.
What Challenges Do Financial Aid Professionals Face?
Managing the community service aspect of FWS was probably added on to the Financial Aid professionals’ jobs at your institution, and those people are probably still responsible for everything were doing before. Relatively little administrative money accompanies the FWS program, so the 7% mandate and other program requirements simply add responsibilities for the people who manage the programs. It is unlikely that Financial Aid personnel think of community FWS as an established program rather than as a requirement that they meet. In addition, professionals in Financial Aid do not usually have any training in working effectively with community organizations, finding community partners, building campus-community partnerships, or working with students who are dealing with (potentially challenging) community experiences. You can bring a wealth of experience in these areas to your partnership with Financial Aid.
What Motivates Financial Aid?
As noted earlier, Financial Aid professionals primarily see their job as promoting access to higher education. Professionals who focus specifically on Student Employment want to provide work opportunities that help students hone in on a career path and build their skills and experience. Second only to earning money for education, Financial Aid and Student Employment professionals will share the following major desired outcome for your institution’s FWS program:
Provide an excellent work experience for students that offers developmentally appropriate tasks, teaches useful skills, is well supervised, and can be used to show work experience on a student’s resume.
The benefits that high-quality community service FWS positions may offer over most traditional, on-campus FWS positions include:
- Balancing an interest in service to the community with a need to work
- The “legitimacy” that an off-campus position may provide when listed on a resume
- More responsibility
- Opportunities to take on a leadership role
- Links between community work and academic interests
- Varied opportunities to gain career experience
- Strengthening campus-community partnerships
- Good public relations for the institution
If you think you can help create FWS positions that will accomplish the above benefits, make sure to articulate those to your Financial Aid colleagues.
Additional Ways to Serve Financial Aid’s Interests
Relieving some of the work burden. Developing community service FWS positions can be much more labor intensive than creating traditional on-campus positions. Your office may have an existing infrastructure for service or service-learning that could take on some program management elements without much financial outlay. Offer to help with some of the work, such as identifying community partner organizations that work well with your students, orienting students to community experiences, making site visits to community organizations for monitoring purposes, executing written site agreements, interviewing students to find good matches in the community, marketing the program to students and organizations, evaluating the program, and tracking timesheets.
Providing structure to improve quality. As stated above, your institution may not think of community FWS as a “program” with goals, staff, evaluation results, criteria for appropriate community positions, etc. If you can offer the opportunity to create such a program by relying on some of your existing infrastructure and capacity, the experience for all stakeholders will be improved.
Generating supplemental funding. Some institutions do not use all of the FWS funds they receive and they return these “deobligated” funds to the Department of Education. Other institutions that do use all of their funds and would like to receive more are eligible to apply for “reallocated” funds if 5% is already being spent on community tutoring/literacy programs and the institution has a “fair-share shortfall” (your Financial Aid office can clarify this). Reallocated funds can be used as wages only for community service jobs. So, if your institution would like to increase the amount of FWS funds it receives, strengthening the community portion of the FWS program is important. With a supplemental increase in the overall amount of FWS funding your institution receives and uses comes a modest increase in the Administrative Cost Allowance funds (for staff and other administrative costs).
Assist with future FWS rule changes. As FWS program requirements change (e.g., increases or changes to the mandate for community service), your institution will be in a better position to react to those changes if you are in partnership with Financial Aid and have a coordinated program.
How Can You Overcome Resistance?
You may take the time to become well versed in the community FWS program, to understand the challenges facing the Financial Aid professionals at your institution and the ways you can help alleviate some of the burdens, and how program quality will improve through your involvement, and your Financial Aid colleagues may still not be interested in working with you. Below are some common responses you might get and some thoughts on how to deal with them.
Control Issues
“We’re unwilling to give up control of the program.”
Stress that you are not looking for total control of the community FWS program, but instead are hoping to help make it stronger. Listen and understand which portions of the program the Financial Aid staff feel are vital to keep in their office and suggest ways that you can relieve the burden in other ways.
Interpretation of Regultions
“It doesn’t matter what we do, because there’s no enforcement.”
“We think that ‘community service’ means serving our campus community.”
You may need to remind your colleagues that the regulation is clear: community service positions should serve the community at large and not the campus community. Administrators should generally not side with a campus department that gets around a federal regulation by interpreting the language they way they want to. Even if the federal government does not examine the program closely — which cannot be counted on, especially given the signal given by the Department of Education’s recent letter about enforcement to financial aid professionals (see the section in this document on Enforcement) — your institution’s external auditors should be comparing the federal regulations with the position descriptions on file to ensure compliance.
General Resistance
“I don’t make the decisions…”
“There’s no extra money to increase the number of community positions…”
“Other departments really need the student workers…”
The people in Financial Aid to whom you have access may not make (or want to make) certain decisions regarding allocation of budgets and management practices. You may also hear that your Financial Aid colleagues have no interest in changing current policies, including the amount of funds allocated for community FWS positions. Either way, you may need to go higher up in the administration to have your ideas considered.
- Once you have tried your best to have productive conversations around these issues but have not made progress, you may need to take your concerns to another audience. Before doing so, make sure you understand the climate in the Financial Aid office correctly and that you know how to articulate the benefits of changing or strengthening the community service portion of FWS. You may need to get access to someone higher up in the chain of command in Financial Aid or at the institution. If you do not personally have the access it requires to be heard at that level, enlist an ally who does (i.e., someone with power or connections who believes in your work).
- Look at the mission statement of your institution, its strategic plan, and recent statements from the president’s office (or those of other top administrators) for examples of ways the institution might be trying to strengthen its commitment to civic or community engagement. Talk about how community service FWS is one piece of a larger commitment that your institution can make to your local community and to increasing civic engagement among your students.
- Find examples of strong community service FWS efforts at peer institutions. Talk with your Campus Compact office for suggestions or review “Principles of Good Practice in Community Service Federal Work-Study” for strong program model examples from diverse institutions.
- Remind your colleagues that while the required minimum for community service is 7% of FWS funds, the national average is about 15%.
- Be persistent, keep listening to (rather than talking at) the Financial Aid personnel, and talk with a variety of people at the institution about the benefits of having a strong community service FWS program.
