Colleges and communities structure time differently. They endeavor to engage the attention and effort of their members on schedules that are responsive to different needs and values. These differences create tensions and challenges in service-learning partnerships between colleges and community organizations. Roughly speaking, community organizations face a problem of molding into a coherent and continuing unity the capacities of student volunteers which the college calendar and the college curriculum tend to chop into fragments. I call this the "problem of time" in service-learning partnerships. In this paper I tell and draw lessons from the story of how one campus-community service-learning partnership--the Jane Addams School for Democracy in partnership with the University of Minnesota and the College of St. Catherine--has experienced and responded to this problem. In the first section, I give a general characterization of the problem. In Section Two, I recount how the Jane Addams School began, including its initial strategy for solving the problem. In Section Three, I tell how the School evolved and how its initial strategy for solving the problem failed. And in the final section, I review the lessons the School learned from the failure and its new strategy for solving it.
