The founders of the University of Oregon’s Sustainable Cities Initiative have been asked if they would consider forming a partnership with a city outside of Oregon. They would rather tell other colleges how to copy the City Year program and adapt it to their own situations.
And so, for the past two years, the Eugene-based program has held an annual “replication conference.” This year’s session, held last month, included attendees from Arizona State University, the College of New Jersey, Earlham College, San Diego State University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Maryland, among other institutions.
Some attendees of last year’s conference have already started their own versions of SCI, in pilot projects with nearby cities. The emerging programs often operate very differently from Oregon’s.
The University of Iowa’s “Iowa Initiative for Sustainable Communities,” for example, is not forming partnerships with communities one by one. Instead it manages university-led projects—as diverse as public-health studies, city branding campaigns, and redevelopment plans—in a group of Iowa cities, including Cedar Falls, Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Muscatine, and Washington.
Charles Connerly, director of Iowa’s school of urban planning, who founded the program, says spreading the projects like that has “obvious disadvantages, in terms of a lack of focus.” But in a state where only 10 cities have more than 50,000 people, he thinks this is a better strategy.
“A town like Muscatine,” population 22,800, “can only handle so many projects,” he says.
Minnesota has become a hotbed of projects modeled on the Sustainable Cities Initiative. The Associated Colleges of the Twin Cities—a consortium that comprises Augsburg and Macalester Colleges, Hamline University, St. Catherine University, and the University of St. Thomas—is coordinating projects for the City of St. Paul.
And a program at the University of Minnesota, called the Resilient Communities Project, has worked with the City of Minnetonka, an affluent Minneapolis suburb, over the past academic year. Fourteen projects covered stormwater-management research, an analysis of the city’s affordable housing, studies to prepare the city for mass transit, and other topics. Next year the program will work with North St. Paul, a working-class community.
Mike Greco, the program’s manager, says 70 percent of the students involved in the projects have never worked with a real client during their college careers. “That’s pretty compelling, that we are making possible an experience that students would never have” otherwise, he says.
While the Oregon program brings in $200,000 to $300,000 from each of the cities it works with, these other programs have been more reluctant to ask the cities to pay. The small towns of Iowa can’t afford such sums, says Mr. Connerly. This year his program will be supported through a $108,000 grant from the University of Iowa provost’s office; the towns each will pay a small sum—"$4,000 or $5,000 at the most"—to cover student travel and other expenses.
In Minnesota, getting cities to pay $200,000 or more “wouldn’t work here, for lots of reasons,” Mr. Greco says. A main one: As a land-grant institution, the University of Minnesota already contributes free services to the state’s communities, through extension and other programs.
The cities applying for next year’s program had to pledge some money—$20,000 to $180,000—but they were not chosen on that basis. North St. Paul pledged $40,000. Mr. Greco says the Resilient Communities Project will try to move to a model in which the university, the city, and nonprofit organizations each cover a third of the costs.
So far the project has supported itself through grants from research centers at the university, but it has struggled to get money from central administration and the various colleges on campus, says Carissa Schively Slotterback, an associate professor of urban and regional planning, who founded the project.
“We float—we are not affiliated with a particular college, we are not funded by the provost’s office or the office of public engagement,” she says.
She and Mr. Greco are trying to tie the program to existing sustainability initiatives at the university. But without a more central or secure source of money, she says, “it will be a challenge to figure out how to sustain this program.”
