Description
The University of Virginia’s Thriving Cities initiative, launched five years ago at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, seeks to provide cities access to research and data they can use in practical ways to ensure that their citizens prosper. Thriving Cities was founded by sociologist Joshua Yates and represents an unusual approach to urban research and research-informed policy and practice: Yates and his colleagues recognize that both communities and scholars possess knowledge and understanding that is crucial to the development of effective strategies for addressing community challenges.
Too often, though, researchers prescribe without listening carefully to communities’ own diagnoses of these challenges—and their insights into possible solutions. At the same time, communities do not have access to the data, analysis, and perspective that researchers can offer. Thriving Cities has designed a collaborative approach in which university-based scholars work together with communities to understand and improve those communities.
Thriving Cities has worked collaboratively with several urban communities to produce both a framework for understanding urban thriving and a toolkit that communities can use as they seek to tackle the challenges they face. The initiative aspires now to expand its reach, establishing a permanent, university-based, multidisciplinary research center and an allied non-profit organization that can partner with urban communities to identify needs and develop interventions.
Before Thriving Cities embarks on this new stage of development though, Yates and his colleagues want to understand better the range of university-community partnerships that already exist. This effort will not only inform Thriving Cities’ plans to formalize and expand its own work, but will also provide other universities and cities with information about effective partnership models and the challenges partnerships have faced.
Yates observes that there has not been a systematic attempt to classify and assess these university-community partnerships, despite a proliferation of such activities over the last few decades. Thriving Cities proposes to undertake such a study. It will identify and gather information about 100 partnerships, prepare three detailed case studies based on multi-day site visits, and identify best practices and recommendations for establishing university-community partnerships. The final product will be made broadly available to the public.
The Higher Education program’s guidelines emphasize the importance of disseminating research outside of the academy as well as establishing partnerships between researchers and communities of practice. Indeed, these priorities are evident in much of the Foundation’s work which seeks to make academic knowledge useful to and usable by non-academic constituencies. Thriving Cities is an outstanding example of such knowledge transfer. The present project will enable Thriving Cities and the larger field of university-community partnerships to assess their knowledge transfer efforts and to ensure that they are maximally effective.
A grant of $50,000 will cover the entire cost of the project, including compensation for Professor Yates, a research assistant and a case study writer, travel costs to the case study sites, and the production and dissemination of the final report.
This would be the Foundation’s eighth grant to UVA. Altogether, the Foundation has provided $1.8 million directly to the University.
For these reasons, I am pleased to recommend a special grant of $50,000 to the University of Virginia to support a research project of Thriving Cities, a program of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture.
