Public Engagement

A large public research university like the University of Minnesota reaches out with its teaching, research, and outreach missions to embrace the whole state and beyond. But there's always the question: how much can we achieve by focusing on a single neighborhood?

Among the potential virtues of concentrating engaged work in a particular neighborhood are developing synergy among related projects, establishing long-term relationships with and among neighborhood people, building partnerships with city and county government projects, building connections with official and non-official neighborhood leaders that can ease arrangements for off-campus work, devoting enough resources to actually make a difference, sharing knowledge of possible subtle neighborhood structures among researchers, and getting favorable notice from foundations and other funding agencies.

Potential downsides of concentrating in a single neighborhood are feelings of exclusion or neglect on the part of other neighborhoods or municipalities, accusations of partisanship, the possibility that if one project goes seriously wrong it can poison the well for many others, the possibilities that a particular neighborhood is not a good one for a particular project or that it's already saturated in that area or a control group in a different locale is needed, or that the neighborhood can feel besieged and manipulated by too much attention, however well-intentioned (particularly if it is not fully trusting of the university's intentions).

An example of how the positives outweigh the negatives comes from long-term efforts on the West Side of St. Paul, which has been a focus for some of our most conscious and grounded public engagement activities originating from the Center for Democracy and Citizenship in the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.

Efforts on the West Side began about ten years ago with the establishment of the Jane Addams School for Democracy, "created ... by students and faculty from the University of Minnesota, the U of M’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, residents of St. Paul’s West Side neighborhood, staff of the Neighborhood House and the College of St. Catherine. The school’s mission is to assist immigrants to learn English, pass the U.S. citizenship tests and become engaged citizens. Immigrant families originally from 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are involved in the school. They meet at Humboldt High School each week and work on their English and citizenship tests with college students and volunteers." (UMNnews press release, 7/27/2005)

From the Jane Addams School has developed an additional - and broader - effort, the Neighborhood Learning Community (NLC). The NLC is supported in part by a $1.5 million grant from the Wallace Reader's Digest Fund to the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. To quote from a recent story

Through the West Side NLC, the people and institutions of the West Side neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota intend to create a culture of learning, an environment where the entire community is engaged in the ongoing work of connecting formal and informal learning opportunities to children and their families. The West Side NLC intends to build meaningful learning relationships across generations and ethnic groups, highlight existing, invisible learning resources and generate new ones, and develop people’s capacity to see themselves as contributing, creative members of their families, neighborhood, and our society. If this culture of learning can evolve and sustain itself, then learning for children ages six to ten will improve.

The West Side neighborhood, in many ways, is an ideal setting for this project. Sometimes called the Ellis Island of the Midwest, the West Side has been a portal of entry for immigrants dating back to the mid-19th century. Over the years many immigrant groups have settled in the West Side community, and the neighborhood’s rich cultural diversity has long been a source of identity and pride. West Side history is expressed in more than 60 public art pieces and murals visible along the streets and inside buildings in the neighbor- hood. Currently the largest immigrant groups are Latino and Hmong, with Somali beginning to find residence in public housing. While the West Side has been considered a low-income neighborhood, poverty has not marred the values embraced by its residents.

The West Side of St. Paul model shows the virtues of long-term, consistent engagement with a single locality, albeit one with an evolving population. It will continue to be an important model as the University of Minnesota develops its urban agenda.