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The Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring as a university-community partnershipUniversity-community partnerships are designed to address pressing social problems by combining the goals and resources of colleges and universities with those of community stakeholders.Ideally, partnerships develop as symbiotic projects that empower community organisations, enrich the community, and provide unique sources of data for research and evaluation. Partnerships take many forms and have a wide range of goals, from promoting health, to developing sustainable neighbourhoods, to improving public education. They may involve university students serving an under-resourced area of the community, or community members entering the university to participate in dialogue, planning and research. Universities and community partners may also work together to make research findings accessible to the wider community, increasing the chances that important advancements in scientific knowledge are applied in practice.Likewise, partnerships provide a forum for professional knowledge to shape the direction of academic research. With so many variations, locations and goals -and because securing funding for partnership projects is increasingly difficult (US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2010) -it is important for partnership researchers to identify commonalities present in the most effective university-community partnership models.Researchers have recently begun to define the characteristics of successful university-community partnerships.Following a review of recent developments in the literature, this article explores the utility and flexibility of one of the more comprehensive partnership frameworks by applying it to a distinctive university-based summer institute designed to foster the exchange of knowledge between researchers and practitioners in the field of youth mentoring. One aim of the study reported here was to evaluate whether factors typically considered important for these partnerships would translate across contexts and provide a relevant conceptualisation for the summer institute model.Another goal was to learn how partnership criteria might be