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?