Happy Engaged New Year
I'll be traveling for the next month, so there will be no more blog postings until early February.
Have a happy, productive, and engaged New Year!
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I'll be traveling for the next month, so there will be no more blog postings until early February.
Have a happy, productive, and engaged New Year!
Harold Shapiro's A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society (Princeton, 2005) is a thought-provoking book. In Chapter 3 he writes about "Liberal Education, Liberal Democracy, and the Soul of the University". He points out that as universities are now constituted, there is usually a strong separation among undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. The undergraduate experience is typically looked on as the time to get a “liberal education�, while graduate and professional schools are the places to be trained in a profession.
This separation is unfortunate because, as Shapiro (p. 89) says, “…the philosophy of a liberal arts education presumes learning experiences that enable citizens to understand their interrelated social, moral, and professional responsibilities. This view is as central to high-quality professional education as to education in the arts and sciences.�
He goes on to point out that professional training—in theology, law, and medicine—has from earliest days been the main purpose of universities. Only recently have the liberal arts been viewed as the central core of the university. In fact, professional and liberal education have much overlap and should be more tightly integrated. As Shapiro (p. 113) writes, “Indeed, the most valuable part of education for any learned profession is that aspect that teaches future professionals to think, read, compare, discriminate, analyze, form judgments, and generally enhance their mental capacity to confront the ambiguities and enigmas of the human condition.� These outcomes are also the benefits claimed for a liberal education.
These arguments also apply to education in public engagement. We have recently put more public engagement-related content into the undergraduate curriculum, through service-learning, multicultural requirements, etc. In fact, the fully aware and responsible practice of a profession (whether prepared for in graduate school or professional school) also demands attention to respectful and reciprocal partnership with the public that the profession serves.
Our professional schools acknowledge this truth to some extent, through law clinics, medical and dental clinics in underserved communities, and the like. Our graduate programs largely lag behind. In neglecting the potentially rich public engagement content of their disciplines, they are doing neither their graduate students nor their disciplines a service.
9/11, anthrax, Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, bird flu, tainted spinach... This has been a time of great anxiety about real or potential disasters. The challenges to our public health preparedness systems are immense, and much responsibility falls on schools of public health to educate practioners, as well as students and the public, about how to prepare and cope.
The feature story in the Fall 2006 issue of Advances, the quarterly magazine of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, describes the work that the SPH is doing in public health preparedness. Among the efforts mentioned:
Many of these efforts are overseen by Debra Olson, Associate Dean for Public Health Practice Education. According to the article,
Olson believes that there are two essential components to the success of the programs: collaboration and coordination. The school's strong collaborative ties to leaders in the workforce mean curriculum and research are relevant and up-to-date. And coordination within the school means preparedness trainings and practices aren't duplicated.
Collaboration with community partners and coordination within the university's programs: key aspects of any successful public engagement effort.
A few days ago I received an email newletter: U-News from the Minnesota Youth Community Learning Initiative (MYCL) of the University of Minnesota. The Table of Contents is a generous sampling of youth-related issues that the MYCL and its community and university partners are dealing with:
According to its web site,
The Minnesota Youth Community Learning (MYCL) Initiative, funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, partners Konopka Institute staff at the University of Minnesota and seven Minnesota community coalitions. Their shared goal: to re-engage students who are disconnected from learning by connecting them with school and caring capable adults who provide skill-based mentoring.
It does so "by partnering with seven Minnesota communities to:
The Konopka Institute, located in the Adolescent Health and Medicine Division of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota, has the disarmingly simple goal "to get reliable information into the hands of everyone who is in a position to help adolescents." It is named after Dr. Gisela Konopka, a professor of social work at the U who pioneered work with adolescents. Some key parts of her intellectual biography can be seen here.
It's noteworthy that Konopka's vision and work, coming out of the Department of Social Work (in the former College of Human Ecology on the Saint Paul campus) is being carried forward in large measure by the Department of Pediatrics in the Medical School on the Minneapolis campus. There are lots of barriers broken down here: Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Human Ecology/Medical School, clinical medicine/social work. This kind of boundary-crossing is crucial if universities are to be adequately engaged with key societal issues.
The December 11 issue of The New Yorker has an enlightening article by William Finnegan entitled "New in Town: The Somalis of Lewiston". The article doesn't seem to be available online, but a slide show is.
The article describes how Somalis by the thousands have moved to the relatively small city of Lewiston, Maine, and how both they and the townspeople have adjusted.
What particularly struck me is the complexity of the Lewiston Somali community. (The New Yorker is good about getting under the apparent surface unities of unfamiliar situations, as evidenced by its coverage of the Middle East.) There are in fact two disparate groups: the Somalis and the Bantus, belying the apparent homogeneity of the immigrants. In Somalia, the Bantus were slaves of the Somalis; and many of the resultant attitudes have carried over to Lewiston. Needless to say, this introduces serious complications into who speaks for the community, who can be a reliable translator or social welfare worker, who dares to speak in whose presence, etc.
The implications for public engagement are obvious: a well-meaning service-learning or community-based research project can easily step into a minefield of inter-group competition and resentment. As our colleges and universities do more of this work, they should try to build up and share with each other a sustainable infrastructure of understanding of each community's dynamics.
A press release earlier this week tells about an impressive and important pertnership between the University of Minnesota's Center for Urban and Rural Affairs, the Labor Market Information Office at the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, and other government agencies and nonprofit organizations. They have developed a web-based mapping system called Minnesota 3-D (M3D), that provides "employment, housing, services and economic development information and analysis tools."
The web site for M3D is http://map.deed.state.mn.us/m3d/.
According to the press release,
The first-of-its-kind application in the nation, M3D brings together more than 90 data layers that may be displayed visually on a map and in report format using geographic information systems technology.
"The future vitality of our region depends on our ability to efficiently connect housing, jobs and services," said Kris Nelson, CURA project director. "M3D provides a significant tool for communities to inform policies and implement strategies for efficient and sustainable development to assure the well being of working families."
As reported in a recent study by the National Center for Housing Policy, working families in the Twin Cities metropolitan area spend 30 percent of their household income on transportation (and more than 27 percent on housing). The report recommends that "regions coordinate their housing and transportation policies to ensure they fully reflect the needs of working families--one example includes building more affordable housing near existing and planned transit hubs."
Over the next year CURA and other M3D community partners will be working to apply M3D to planning and development projects to achieve a greater balance between housing and employment opportunities within communities.
A project like this reminds us that in university-public partnerships, the public partners may be not just individuals or citizen groups, but also governmental or nonprofit organizations whose goals, just like the university's, are to serve society; and that the partners have much information and technical knowledge to contribute to the joint venture.
Yesterday, Kathy Draeger dropped off a just-published book, From the Farm to the Table, by Gary Holthaus. Kathy is Statewide Director of the Regional Sustainable Development Partnerships (about which I've written before in this space), and the book was published with the financial support of the Experiment in Rural Cooperation, which is the Regional Sustainable Development Partnership in southeastern Minnesota.
Over the past eight years, the Experiment "has been putting funds [provided by the State Legislature] into the hands of citizen leaders so they can use the resources of [the University of Minnesota] in projects that will lead to as sustainable society in this region."
The Experiment writes that it supported the publication of this book because it "believes that there is a story to tell about farming in Southeast Minnesota that is different from the story often told by mainstream media. The Experiment believes it is a story of success, at least some successes, even on small farms, and of people who are having satisfactory lives, making a living by adapting their farm practice to their particular landscape and nourishing it to bring health to the land, the animals, and the humans who live on it."
To quote from the description on the University Press of Kentucky web site,
In From the Farm to the Table, over forty farm families from America's heartland detail the practices and values that relate to their land, work, and communities. Their stories reveal that those who make their living in agriculture--despite stereotypes of provincialism perpetuated by the media--are savvy to the influence of world politics on local issues.
Gary Holthaus demonstrates how outside economic, governmental, legal, and business developments play an increasingly influential, if not controlling, role in every farmer's life. The swift approval of genetically modified crops by the federal government, the formation of huge agricultural conglomerates, and the devastating environmental effects of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides are just a few issues buffeting family farms. From the Farm to the Table explores farmers' experiences to offer a deeper understanding of how we can create sustainable and vibrant land-based communities by adhering to fundamental agrarian values.
This is obviously an important story to tell, and it is interesting—in the context of public engagement—to recognize that in this case universities (in Minnesota and Kentucky) didn't take the lead but played a facilitating role in enabling members of the public to tell their own story.
Research Universities and Civic Engagement
A couple of days ago I received copies of New Times Demand New Scholarship: Research Universities and Civic Engagement - A Leadership Agenda. This is the report of a Fall 2005 conference convened by Campus Compact and Tufts University of representatives from 12 leading research universities—six public and six private—"to discuss how their institutions are promoting civic engagement on their campuses and communities". The report (I was on the Editorial Committee) was insightfully written and edited by Cynthia Gibson. It is available as a PDF file at http://www.compact.org/resources/research_universities
The premise of the report is that the burgeoning civic engagement movement has largely been led "by community and liberal arts colleges and state universities [and that most] research universities have been much quieter, despite the ambitious efforts many have undertaken to promote and advance civic engagement in their institutions." The introduction continues:
The group not only shared their ideas; they decided to take action by becoming a more prominent and visible “voice for leadership� in the larger civic engagement movement in higher education. As a first expression of that voice, they have developed a case statement that outlines why it is important for research universities to embrace and advance engaged scholarship as a central component of their activities and programs and at every level: institutional, faculty, and student.
This statement, which has been endorsed by the entire group, argues that because of research universities’ significant academic and societal influence,world-class faculty, outstanding students, state-of-the-art research facilities, and considerable financial resources, they are well-positioned to drive institutional and field-wide change relatively quickly and in ways that will ensure deeper and longer-lasting commitment to civic engagement among colleges and universities for centuries to come. To advance this process, the group developed a set of recommendations as to what research universities can do to promote engaged scholarship at their own institutions, as well as across research universities, and ultimately, all of higher education.
The recommendations about what individual research universities and leaders at research universities can do to advance civic engagement across higher education are on pages 22 and 23 of the report. They are too lengthy to reproduce here, but propose an important, ambitious agenda for future work.
The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is one of the University of Minnesota's prime public engagement efforts. Part of the Department of Horticultural Science in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences, and situated on more than 1,000 acres of land about 20 miles southwest of the Twin Cities, it conducts horticultural research and has educational programs for both adults and children. It has been used by university researchers to develop many cold-hardy varieties for decoration and commercial use, and is frequented by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year who get ideas for landscaping, hold a party, or just enjoy the beautiful grounds which include northern woodlands, prairie, and marsh as well as formal gardens.
Among the many good activities of the Landscape Arboretum, some that stand out are education programs for school: field trips at the Arboretum; a Plantmobile that brings "live plants, activities, investigations, and take-home planting projects" to the classroom; and Learning Habitats for Neighborhood Schools. This last has been particularly exciting and successful for inner-city schools.
Imaginative and dedicated staff at the Arboretum are making a real contribution to enriching the lives and neighborhoods of more than 30,000 kids each year.
Universities: Servant, Critic, or Partner?
I've been reading Harold T. Shapiro's 2005 book, A Larger Sense of Purpose: Higher Education and Society. His major theme, neatly summarized on p. 15, is that the American research university must retain
“its dual role as … society’s servant and society’s critic. [U[niversities … must continue to provide programs that the society itself has identified as important as well as raising those questions and issues that society does not want to address. In some ways, universities can meet their responsibilities only by being a nuisance to the existing order of things."
This is a formulation that I like quite a bit. However, in this simple form it glosses over the great and growing differences in society. Evidently, Shapiro means the dominant, prosperous components of society; but we need to remember that there are many who don't share those comforts. Perhaps the formulation needs to be supplemented with that which Finley Peter Dunne concocted about newspapers a century ago, but which applies just as well to universities:
"The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
In addition, in the context of public engagement, the idea of partnership between the university and the public is missing. Casting the university as either servant or critic makes its interaction with society too unidirectional. There is a middle way.
Wikipedia has a stub that defines "Public History" as "the practice of history outside of the traditional academic setting of the university. Public historians are historians who work in museums, archives, preservation, government agencies, or private historical research consultant firms. Public history is history that both engages the public and invites the public to participate in the writing of history."
At the University of Minnesota we introduce public history to students in a course—HIST 3001 Public History—which places it both inside and outside academia. The topic this semester is the history of Dinkytown, the neighborhood that abuts the UM Twin Cities East Bank campus on the northeast.
The instructors for History 3001, Lisa Marie Blee and Andrew Theodore Urban, have given the following course description:
History need not be resigned to books and classrooms. This semester, we will research and design exhibitions that explore the history of your local community: Dinkytown. This course provides an introduction to the theory, methods, practice, and politics of "public history." Public history refers to the possibilities and challenges of producing and disseminating histories in nonacademic settings. Through readings, workshops by professionals in the field, and course assignments, students will learn about diverse forms of public history, including exhibitions, oral history, documentary film and radio, and web sites. This class also emphasizes the ways in which historical knowledge may enhance community and civic engagement. The major project theme this year - a history of the Dinkytown area - reflects this emphasis. Finished exhibitions will be on display along side the Weisman Museum's forthcoming national exhibit on Bob Dylan, who lived in Dinkytown for a time. The class will create a neighborhood history made up of linked projects, each produced out of collaboration between students and community partners. The final neighborhood histories will be presented to a broad public audience and made available to the community as a resource. Students may conduct projects on a wide variety of themes. For example, social protest and the anti-war movement or changes in the commercial and residential landscape of the neighborhood are two possibilities.
The course culminates in an exhibit, "Dinkytown Histories: Multiple Stories, Multiple Meanings", which opens today at the Nolte Center Library before it moves next year to the Weisman Art Museum. The exhibit is composed of five different projects:
This is rich stuff, from which all of us at the U—whether resident, business owner, student, faculty, or staff—will learn a great deal in an enjoyable way.
Yesterday's Star Tribune had a good story about a University of Minnesota program that places third-year medical students in rural practices, to work as a physician's apprentice. The program is "gaining national attention as a better way to train doctors."
The advantages for the student are that they gain continuous, integrated experience with a generational cross-section of patients, rather than seeing "cases" in a medical specialty context. They get front-line, hands-on experience, seem to learn at least as much as in the traditional curriculum, and don't develop the cynicism that now sometimes results.
The advantage for the rural physician is that they get some help, and the satisfaction of teaching.
The advantages for society are that more medical students may be attracted to rural practices, where the need is increasingly great; and that it may lower the cost of medical care. As the story says, "Rural care often emphasizes keeping patients well rather than treating them when they're sick, and providing continuous care -- sometimes across generations -- rather than the sporadic encounters with different doctors that define modern health care."
This is a great example of engagement: enriching teaching and learning, true involvement of community partners, and dealing with a crucial societal issue.
As I've written before in this blog, our energy future - with all the attendant issues of global politics and global warming - is one of the most important issues to which university research can make a contribution. I was therefore pleased that today's Star Tribune carried an editorial about the important work being done by David Tilman and his collaborators at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek research station. Some of the findings:
Perhaps by coincidence, the Star Tribune also carried a front-page story about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's "ambitious proposal to make the state more energy independent." Somewhat surprisingly, the connection between the front page and the editorial was not explicitly drawn. But it's clear that energy science, technology, and policy is a realm where university engagement with real-world governmental and commercial issues can have a big impact.
The National Endowment for the Arts has just released a report "The Arts and Civic Engagement: Involved in Arts, Involved in Life", available as a downloadable pdf file at http://www.arts.gov/pub/CivicEngagement.pdf.
The conclusion states "Americans who experience art or read literature are demonstrably more active in their communities than non-readers and non-participants. Their lifestyles reflect the same level of vigor and social commitment as those of sports enthusiasts. ... Thus, literary reading and arts participation rates can be regarded as sound indicators of civic and community health."
The conclusion is based on survey results from the U.S. Census Bureau, summarized in the first five of 10 ten findings. (The summary data are available on the pdf.)
However, the results are not encouraging with respect to young adult participation, which shows a 20-year decline:
Very likely these results correlate strongly with higher education, which should make us feel good about results with past generations of college students, but not so good about the current generation.
The December 10 issue of the New York Times has an interesting article by Amy Harmon entitled "DNA Gatherers Hit a Snag: The Tribes Don’t Trust Them".
The DNA gathering project at issue is one funded by the National Geographic Society "to collect DNA from indigenous groups around the world in the hopes of reconstructing humanity’s ancient migrations".
The fear is that origins and migrations reconstructed from DNA evidence may undermine other important concerns of indigenous groups: religious stories of origins, land rights, access to government-provided benefits such as health care, etc. Although it seems that peoples in most parts of the world have not worried about these issues, some in Alaska have pointed to potential difficulties.
“What if it turns out you’re really Siberian and then, oops, your health care is gone?� said Dr. David Barrett, a co-chairman of the Alaska Area Institutional Review Board, which is sponsored by the Indian Health Service, a federal agency. “Did anyone explain that to them?�
However this eventually works out, the lessons for researchers who want to do community-based research are clear: There's a lot of mistrust out there, much of it justified; benefits to the community as well as to the investigators need to be understood; and trust needs to be earned before research can, or should, be done.
On Wednesday I sat in on a Campus Conversations Lunch Series session on "Engaging Students in Campus Life". The discussion began with observations on the rewards of getting engaged, but quickly turned to the obstacles. Some of the points that were raised:
Most of these obstacles are not insuperable, and some useful suggestions arose from the discussion:
I'm pleased to report that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has announced its new Community Engagement classification, and that the University of Minnesota is one of the initial group of 76. To quote from the press release
Institutions were classified in one of three categories:
Curricular Engagement describes teaching, learning and scholarship which engage faculty, students and community in mutually beneficial and respectful collaboration. Their interactions address community-identified needs, deepen students' civic and academic learning, enhance community well-being and enrich the scholarship of the institution. (5 institutions)
Outreach and Partnerships describes two different but related approaches to community engagement. The first focuses on the application and provision of institutional resources for community use with benefits to both campus and community. The latter focuses on collaborative interactions with community and related scholarship for the mutually beneficial exchange, exploration and application of knowledge, information and resources (research, capacity building, economic development, etc.). (9 institutions)
Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships includes institutions with substantial commitments in both areas described above. (62 institutions)
The U of MN was one of the 62 institutions that qualified for both Curricular Engagement and Outreach & Partnerships, one of a handful of public research universities.
The press release notes that "even among the most compelling applications, few institutions described promotion and tenure policies that recognize and reward the scholarship associated with community engagement" and that "few institutions acknowledge community engagement as a priority in their search and hiring practices."
However, even though there's room for improvement, this new classification is a big step in the right direction. As Lee Shulman, President of the Carnegie Foundation, said, "Finding new and better ways to connect with their communities should be a high priority for higher education institutions today. The campuses participating in this elective classification provide useful models of engagement around teaching and learning and around research agendas that benefit from collaborative relationships."
We're pleased to be one of those models.
The lead article in the Fall 2006 issue of the University of Minnesota's Bioethics Examiner is entitled "The Impact of Pay-for-Performance Beyond Quality Markers–A Call for Bioethics Research". It's written by David Satin, MD, Assistant Professor in the U's Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Bioethics.
The pay-for-performance (P4P) approach to physician reimbursement, which Medicare and Medicaid are about to adopt across the country, pays clinicians more "if their patients score well on a particular set of health care quality markers." Satin proposes the following research questions to investigate potentially serious adverse effects of P4P:
He argues that examining these questions "from the perspectives of disciplines such as ethics, psychology, sociology, economics, epidemiology, public health, and clinical medicine is exactly the kind of interdisciplinary research bioethicists ought to be doing." I can't help but agree, and ask rhetorically
This approach to P4P is well on the way to being an exemplary piece of publicly engaged scholarship. What it needs to take it all the way is involvement with health insurers, government agencies, and concerned citizens to fully inform such research and take action on the results.
The Fall issue of Bioethics Examiner is on-line as a downloadable pdf at http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/publications/be/2006/BE-2006-fall.pdf.
Yesterday I had lunch with a group of faculty and staff from the Human Resources and Industrial Relations Center in the Carlson School of Management, along with their guests from several nonprofits and government agencies in the Twin Cities. The occasion was to thank the guests for having provided opportunities for students to intern in various HR capacities in the nonprofit and governmental sectors.
This is a program with many mutual benefits. The agencies get bright, motivated students to help them with the many HR tasks (writing policy and training manuals, developing on-line employee surveys, etc.) that are important but tend to get set aside in resource-thin organizations. The students get great experience and valuable entries on their resumés. The HRIR program gets a valuable attractor for students and an important augmentation to its teaching capabilities. The many benefits of a good public engagement partnership are manifest.
At lunch I talked with an HR representative from the Courage Center, a remarkable organization about which I had heard a little but was glad to learn more. According to its web site,
Since 1928, Minneapolis-based Courage Center, a nonprofit rehabilitation and resource center, has had a legacy of advancing the lives of people experiencing barriers to health and independence. Our continuum of care includes rehabilitation therapies, transitional rehabilitation, pain management, vocational and community-based services, and camping and sports and recreation programs for people of all ages and abilities. Courage Center offers comprehensive rehab services for people of all ages and abilities. We specialize in pain management, brain injury, spinal cord injury and congenital disabilities. We offer accessible fitness centers, aquatic therapy, vocational and community based services, a transitional rehab program, and sports, recreation and camping.
What a great opportunity for our students to develop their professional skills and resumés while aiding an organization with such an important mission.
The main article in the Books section in the November 6 issue of The New Yorker is "Sick City" by Steven Shapin. It's an essay on cholera occasioned by Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.
The article, and the book, focus on the discovery by John Snow, a mid-19th century London physician, that cholera is transmitted by contaminated water. By mapping the incidence of chlolera deaths, Snow traced the locus of terrible London epidemics in 1848 and 1854 to a well in Broad Street, and stopped the spread of the disease by having the handle removed from the pump. Sounds simple now, but it wasn't at a time when cholera was attributed to miasmic air and blamed on the unsanitary habits of poor people, and water-borne bacteria were not recognized as a cause of disease.
This is a fascinating and enormously important story, but I was particularly struck by the following passage near the end of Shapin's article:
The brilliance of Snow's map lay, as Johnson argues, in the way that it layered knowledge of different scales--from a bird's-eye view of the structure of the Soho neighborhood to the aggregated mortality statistics printed in the Weekly Return to the location of neighborhood water supplies--all framed by particular understandings of how people tended to move about in the neighborhood, of the physical proximity of particular cesspools to particular wells, and of the likely behavior of specific, still invisible, and still unnamed pathogens. A city is a concentration of knowledge as much as it is a concentration of people, buildings, thoroughfares, pipes, and bacteria. Maps like Snow's allowed the modern city to remake itself and to understand itself in a new way. They collected different sorts of knowledge, represented them vividly on the scale of a tabletop, and made that representation available as a resource for urban reform: a plan and a plan of action.
I have written before about the relation of the "universal" and "local" aspects of public scholarship. Snow's work is about the best example I can think of.
The October 30 issue of The New Yorker has an interesting article by Connie Bruck, "Millions for Millions", exploring the development and ramifications of microcredit and microfinance. This concept has become prominent since its "godfather", Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize this year.
Much of the article focuses on whether microcredit/microfinance should be non-profit or for-profit. This debate has some relevance to considerations by colleges and universities, and other substantial institutions (e.g., churches and synagogues) about whether they should deposit some of their funds in neighborhood banks. The banks can then lend to small local businesses and civic organizations, funding local development that can improve the social health of the neighborhood.
This approach, called community (re)investment, seems like an attractive additional way to move toward the goals of neighborhood improvement that institutions now try to implement by community service, service-learning, and similar volunteer efforts.
Hesitations about community investment arise because of concerns about fiscal prudence and maximizing investment income. The data show that microcredit loan defaults are very infrequent, and neighborhood banks specialize in assessing such risks.
Maximizing investment income is a different issue. If an institution has made trying to improve a neighborhood one of its priorities, does it make more sense to maximize return on investment and then use the money to fund neighborhood improvement programs, or to accept a slightly lower return on an investment that enables the neighborhood to help itself?
These options are not mutually exclusive, and some of each might be the most productive strategy.