The guidance offered here is directed primarily at those campus professionals who serve as coordinators of community service, service-learning, volunteerism, or other campus-community partnership efforts.

By federal mandate, 7% of the federal funds that your institution receives for the Federal Work-Study (FWS) program must be used for community service positions. The federal government requires higher education institutions to develop and market community service positions to the students who are eligible for FWS.

Forming a partnership with the financial aid professionals who control and manage FWS funds can give you greater access to and control of the FWS positions on your campus. The resulting benefits can include increasing the staff capacity of your programs, offering meaningful leadership positions to students, and increasing the number of students serving the community.

This document provides a basic orientation to the federal regulations governing the use of FWS for community service positions and offers strategies for forming or strengthening a partnership with Financial Aid.

Partnering with Financial Aid: Approach

In approaching the Financial Aid office on your campus, the best way to ensure succsess is to build a relationship built on mutual understanding and trust. Following are several tips for forming the type of relationship with Financial Aid that will allow you to have a bigger role in the decisions regarding FWS positions in the community.

1. Build a personal relationship or partnership.

   It is beneficial to think about your involvement in FWS as a partnership between your office and the people at your institution who currently manage FWS. In a partnership, combining the assets of both sides allows for a better outcome than working in isolation. You should not approach this as an opportunity to take over the way your institution manages FWS in the community. Instead, you are offering your expertise, abilities, and networks for the benefit of strengthening the program for all involved. You should see this as an opportunity to listen to and learn from the expertise of the professionals at your institution who manage FWS.

2. Educate yourself as much as possible about FWS facts.

   There are many unfamiliar terms and processes associated with FWS. Many of them are defined in this document or in helpful websites listed elsewhere in this publication. It is in your best interest to learn the basic facts about FWS in the community before launching into a conversation with others at your institution who know much more about the program. The way FWS is managed differs from one institution to the next because the federal regulations governing the program provide for flexibility. It is important to understand what is required by the federal government versus what your institution has decided to do with the program. This is especially true if you are hoping to change the way that the FWS program currently operates.

3. Be flexible: understand that different people use different language or use different approaches.

   This document uses the terminology most common in the fields of FWS and campus-community initiatives. You may use different terminology (e.g., community based FWS instead of community service). Language choices in this document are not meant as value judgments. If you have strong feelings about the right way to talk about campus involvement in the community, you should understand that others at your institution may have different views. You can also use language to your advantage; simply because the federal regulations refer repeatedly to work-study or community service, perhaps different language will work better for your institution (e.g. Community Scholars or Off-Campus Student Employment).

4. Understand that changing FWS practice at your institution will take time.

   Human beings can be amazingly creative, flexible, and intelligent, but they can also be averse to change. Given limited time, the professionals who manage FWS at your institution may have established routines and systems that work for them and that they do not want to alter. They probably do not need to involve you in their work, so it may take time for you to build a trusting relationship that will ultimately result in your increased involvement. You will be more satisfied and experience more success if you take a long-term approach to building a partnership that increases your involvement in FWS over time.