How One College Went ‘All In’ in Its Neighborhood

Andrea Lonas

Even as many campuses have become towns or cities unto themselves, they are also more contiguous, physically and operationally, with the towns and cities beyond. Leaders must coordinate a complex network of services — like planning and development, housing, and transportation — with constrained resources and heightened expectations, Meanwhile, colleges are taking a more active role in their communities and tackling broader issues, such as affordable housing and sustainability.

The Chronicle recently released a special report, “The Campus as City: Crucial Strategies to Bolster Town-Gown Relations and Run a Thriving 21st-Century Institution,” to examine the tensions and challenges of running a city within a city. The report explores creative new ways to deliver services, what it means to be a responsible anchor institution, and the deep collaborations that drive large-scale projects. Here is one profile of a promising partnership.

Educational opportunity is vital to a thriving city. And while entrepreneurial Portland, Ore., is doing well in many respects, some neighborhoods, as anywhere, are down and out. That’s especially true on the north side, near old industrial sites, where the population is less white and Concordia University, a private liberal-arts institution, for years shared a corner with a rundown elementary and middle school.

That geography led the university and local school system to come together with several companies and foundations to plan a new school. The idea was to put — under one roof — students in kindergarten through eighth grade, the university’s college of education, an early-childhood center, a medical and dental clinic, a low-cost food club, and other services for students and their families.

The ties between the university and the school formed between two people. When a new principal arrived at the school and found herself overwhelmed by the building’s deterioration and students’ needs, an education professor at Concordia approached her to offer support. Initially, the university helped to set up an arts program for the school, but Gary Withers, president of the Concordia University Foundation, saw an opportunity that could excite donors.

He recalled that Judith Ramaley, a former president of Portland State University, where he had spent part of his career, once lobbied to put its school of education on the top floor of an elementary school. But the plans were never realized. What if Concordia, he thought, could integrate its education department with a new, state-of-the-art school next door?

“The strongest opportunity — from a philanthropic standpoint or for community engagement — was to make sure that we had a very deep and integrated collaboration,” Withers says. The project emerged with a tagline, “3 to Ph.D.,” to signal the learning at all levels that would take place there and the goal of lifting children’s prospects to “break the cycle of generational poverty and inequality,” per the school’s website.

Concordia and Portland Public Schools found partners in the health-care company Kaiser Permanente, as well as a local provider of mental- and behavioral-health services and a local supermarket chain. The university and the school system asked them to commit for the long haul, with little to no chance of profiting directly from the project.

“It wasn’t a thing where you could just drop in for six months or a year,” says Kevin Matheny, chief development officer for Concordia’s foundation. “You can’t build trust if people are coming and going all the time,” he says. “People lose faith real quick, and they’ve been damaged enough up here in this part of Portland by people saying, ‘Yeah, we’ll help you,’ and then they come and go. You have got to be all in.”

The two main partners came up with $48 million — $33 million from a school bond and $15 million from the university and its donors — and planned to demolish the old building and replace it with a 138,000-square-foot new facility. The roof of the old gymnasium collapsed before demolition started.

The new Faubion School, which opened in 2017, would be the envy of any public system. Portland’s cloudy sunshine filters through skylights into open spaces, an architectural element based on research showing that students learn better in environments with ample natural light. Along the hallways, decorated with pictures of Martin Luther King Jr. colored by each student and mounted on construction paper, teachers’ and professors’ offices are intermingled to encourage collaboration on research and teaching methods. Concordia’s education students have many opportunities for experiential learning as they work with children on a range of activities.

The school promotes holistic education with a nurturing approach. The medical and dental clinic, supported by Kaiser Permanente, gives Faubion students and their family members (along with Concordia students) access to free visits without having to get across town. Basics, a supermarket chain founded by the former owners of a line of organic foods, has a store on site offering discounted prices to students, families, and staff members. Donated items are collected, bagged, and distributed to the neediest families at the store. The school also features a community kitchen for cooking demonstrations.

One challenge for the future stems from the success of Faubion and the transformative promise of its model. In line with its mission, the school is designated for children from the city’s lowest-income families, and it’s already overenrolled, serving almost 1,000 children from preschool through eighth grade, more than 80 percent of whom are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.

It’s up to Portland Public Schools to determine which students get to benefit from this partnership.

Scott Carlson is a senior writer who covers the cost and value of college. Email him at scott.carlson@chronicle.com.