| Connecting Iowa communities with UI faculty and students to advance shared goals. | IISC is a campus-wide community engagement initiative that empowers students, faculty, staff, and community partners to co-create mutually beneficial projects in pursuit of vibrant, sustainable, and equitable futures. The program offers energizing and applicable learning experiences to graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, while simultaneously providing valuable services and substantial outcomes to communities. Each year, we facilitate 30-40 community engagement projects with units across campus, involving more than 200 UI students and faculty.
Winner of the Campus Compact Excellence in Community-Engaged Partnerships Award | | | | A longtime University of Iowa initiative has been recognized by a leading national organization for its excellence and exemplary best practices. Campus Compact, the largest national coalition of colleges and universities dedicated to community engagement, has bestowed its Excellence in Community-Engaged Partnership Award on the Initiative for Sustainable Communities (IISC).
Campus Compact’s president Bobbie Laur said the award recognizes “outstanding programs and initiatives that exemplify the core principles of effective civic and community engagement—reciprocity, collaboration, transdisciplinarity, and sustainability—and address specific social issues affecting communities, such as public health, violence prevention, economic development, K-12 education, climate change, or houselessness.”
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| | | Along with land use, housing, and transportation planning, many cities are adopting arts and culture plans. Recognizing the power of arts and culture to bring people together and provide a sense of shared belonging, West Burlington and Burlington have tasked a group of UI students with creating such a plan. As part of these communities’ yearlong partnership with IISC, the team is assessing existing strengths, talking with residents about their visions, and researching planning models and best practices. Evidence shows that communities with vibrant opportunities to experience the arts and co-create culture often attract new residents and retain existing ones, see decrease in crimes and increase in health and well-being.
READ MORE | | | | "As someone coming from a more urban area, I really appreciated connecting with a part of Iowa that was unfamiliar to me and learning about small town governance," said Caleb Smith (MPA, '22) of his capstone project with the City of Maquoketa. "I got so much out of this project and referenced the experienced a lot in job interviews."
Smith was in the first cohort of Masters of Public Affairs students at the UI. Previously, he majored in Political Science at the UI and served in the Undergraduate Student Senate and as chief justice of Interfraternity Council. We caught up with Smith about his experiences at the UI and his current work in the City of Chicago’s Office of Inspector General where he focuses on the effectiveness, accountability, and transparency of the Chicago Police Department.
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| | | Pathfinders RC&D and IISC are in the early stages of an information-gathering and mapping project that will help Iowans and visitors to the state easily learn what features are available where. Those with knowledge of parks, museums, performance venues, playgrounds, and other sites, including city, county, and nonprofit workers who oversee these spaces, are encouraged to contribute to the map by responding to the survey.
“The survey is a crowdsourcing tool to help create a thorough map that will benefit the thousands of Iowans and tourists who visit these sites ,” says Travis Kraus, director IISC and a faculty member in the School of Planning and Public Affairs. “This is the best way to get a snapshot across all 99 counties. We really hope people across Iowa will contribute and make this a unique tool and model for other states.”
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