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Developing Community Sustainability Indicators through Campus-Community Partnerships
Learning Outcomes• Workshop participants will learn from examples presented the ways
in which • city and county governments are exploring partnerships with local
colleges, universities, and non-profit organizations.
• Participants will be able to • begin visualizing how they can reach out to local area governments and
non-profits to explore partnerships.
• Participants will learn about a variety of approaches to explore appropriate indicator sets and identify what might be the best fit for their communities.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
-Peter Drucker
Starting Point in the Room• Show of hands:
Who is already engaged in a community indicators project?
Is your campus playing a role in facilitating the process, gathering data, or in another way?
Check-In• Of those in the room who are currently engaged in a
community indicators project…
• How many are engaged in the STAR Community Index? Eco-District? Other?
• How many are working with local government? NGO? Other?
Wake Forest• Tri-lateral partnership slipped• Community NGO fail• Indicators NGO re-org• Higher ed misaligned assets
• What’s next• County Comp Plan as launch pad• Reinvigorate stakeholder collaboration after cool down
• Square-Peg-in-a-Round-Hole Takeaway: • When the process seems unnecessarily difficult, step back and
evaluate
Ecodistricts: National Movement; Atlanta Context
Performance Areas
• Neighbors & citizens
• Businesses• CIDs• Utilities• Developers• Development
authorities• Institutions• Local political
representatives
Critical Stakeholders
5
Target Cities
Outcomes
• Civic pride & engagement
• Management tool for aggregating impacts & guiding future decisions
• Enhanced brand for district& its businesses
• Improved quality of life for those who live, work, play in district
• Quick project FIRST – build momentum, then governance
• Organizational capacity critical – MUST be someone’s day job
• Broader community investment critical
Lessons Learned from Atlanta
Community Approach
Austin/Central Texas Pre-STARS Community Indicators Moved to a campus
Central Texas Sustainability Indicators Project
• Began as a joint venture between a community leader, a UT Austin faculty member, and a City of Austin official
• Populist indicator selection process
• Unusual in scope then and now
• Eight Reports, 2000-2012
Case StudyINTENT REALITY
• Partnerships with other regional efforts
• Focus filling gaps in data collection and measuring what community was talking about
• Viable stand alone non-profit
• Leaders will fund data collection and analysis of their priority programs and if you build the data warehouse, they will come to use the data
• Cult following among regional leadership, sparse formal use
• Success in data collection, but people don’t need data to form or hold a political opinion
• Now on fifth business model• Housed at City
• Housed at Community College
• Stand-alone
• Housed at for-profit PR firm
• Now at UT-Austin
• No they won’t
What’s Next• Becoming a Research Resource within UT Austin• Identifying value to emerging community efforts
• City of Austin STAR, EcoDistrict• Community Action Network• Neighborhood based efforts
• Identify resilient structure for collaborations between university and community
Synthesis• Takeaways re Community Asset Mapping
• How can we make our efforts more resilient?
• What elements of your process have worked well; what adjustments would you make with hindsight and/or moving forward?