Ira Harkavy, Ph.D.
- Founding Director and Associate Vice President, Center for Community Partnerships, University of Pennsylvania
- Senior Fellow, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics
An historian with extensive experience building university-community-school partnerships, Harkavy teaches in the departments of history, urban studies, Africana studies, and city and regional planning. As Director of the Center for Community Partnerships since 1992, Harkavy has helped to develop service learning and academically based community service courses as well as participatory action research projects that involve faculty and students from across the university. He has been actively involved in working to involve colleges and universities in democratic partnerships with local public schools and their communities.
Executive Editor of Universities and Community Schools, Harkavy has written and lectured widely on the history and current practice of urban university-community-school partnerships and strategies for integrating the university missions of teaching, research, and service. He served as consultant to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help create its Office of University Partnerships and is a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics.
Harkavy is a member of numerous international, national, regional, and local boards, including the Advisory Committee for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Directorate of the National Science Foundation; Widener University Board of Trustees; the International Consortium on Higher Education, Civic Responsibility, and Democracy (co-chair); Coalition for Community Schools (chair); Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development (co-chair); West Philadelphia Partnership (interim chair); and the Board Policy Committee of Campus Compact.
He is the recipient of Campus Compact’s Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning (2002), the University of Pennsylvania’s Alumni Award of Merit (2004), a Fulbright Senior Specialists Grant (2005) and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s Heritage Award (2006); and, under his directorship, the Center for Community Partnerships received the inaugural William T. Grant Foundation Youth Development Prize sponsored in collaboration with the National Academy of Sciences' Board on Children, Youth and Families (2003) and a Best Practices/Outstanding Achievement Award from HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (2000).
Harkavy received his B.A. and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania.