Metropolitan State University, founded in 1971 to provide alternative educational opportunities for working adults, has evolved into a comprehensive urban university serving 9,000 residents of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. In 1992, the university acquired its first campus and its first "neighborhood" when it occupied the facilities of an abandoned hospital in the Dayton s Bluff community on the East Side of St. Paul. In the years since, the university has worked closely with neighborhood organizations and agencies to build multi-dimensional partnerships based on mutual interests and shared values. These university-community partnerships involve faculty, staff, and students from every college and administrative unit, and encompass programs in such diverse areas as affordable housing and community economic development, neighborhood-based crime prevention and dispute resolution, health care, urban education, community arts, and social services. Taken as a whole, these partnerships have been designed with three overarching goals in mind:
- strengthen the capacity of residents to build and maintain a strong urban environment;
- provide community-based learning opportunities for students
- develop the capacity of the university to serve as an institutional resource in partnership with the community.
- Created an extensive partnership with Dayton s Bluff Elementary School that combines service-learning and curriculum enrichment programs (e.g. the America Reads program, Family Literacy, Peer Mediation, Philosophy for Children, Environmental Education, and College for Kids an on-campus college awareness program) with social service, parent education, and affordable housing initiates focused on involving low-income parents in addressing issues of concern to themselves and their families.
- Co-organized a comprehensive planning process to identify priority development projects for the community with an emphasis on creating more affordable housing and neighborhood businesses, and enhancing the physical and natural environment of the neighborhood.
- Conducted ongoing community-based research projects, both individually and in cooperation with other area colleges and universities, including a major study of the neighborhood economy; a community capacity inventory featuring interviews with over 100 community residents on contributions they have or could make to the neighborhood; an inventory of "problem properties" and a "toolbox" of strategies residents can use to convert these properties into neighborhood assets; and a multi-year study on issues and opportunities for members of newly emerging Asian-American, Latino, America Indian, and African American communities in Dayton's Bluff and St. Paul's East Side more generally.
- Established a campus-based community health clinic operated by the university s school of nursing to provide both on-site and outreach health services and practicum placement opportunities for nursing students.
- Created both practicums and community service field placements in the Dayton's Bluff community for students in the social work, community violence prevention, law enforcement and criminal justice, teacher preparation, and accounting programs.
- Adopted an institutional "shared-use" approach that includes the creation of a joint community-university library, and the establishment of a community job resource center on university property. Having received approval (and initial funding) from the state legislature, the library will be one of the country's first joint university-community libraries. The job resource center is operated by a community non-profit, with support from the university s career placement director and student interns. It focuses on supporting public assistance recipients in the transition from welfare to work.
Contact person: Susan Giguere, Director, Center for Community-Based Learning (CCBL) https://www.metrostate.edu/community