"We can't be here forever": university students' reflections on terminating community-engagement relationships

Abstract

Studies on community engagement (CE) focus on its benefits but not enough on termination and difficulties experienced at the personal level with exiting projects. A study on CE with service-learning students and volunteers at a South African university identified issues and themes pertaining to termination as systematic process, emotional responses to termination, and the need to find closure. This paper argues that termination should be more integral to CE processes, and considering that CE experiences can influence further involvement, it is important to end engagement processes more conscientiously than currently happens.