The National Forum in Brightmoor
An Overview
The National Forum has been working with the Brightmoor Alliance, a community leadership coalition, for over a year to help Brightmoor better position itself to utilize available resources. A December 2007 meeting of 20 University of Michigan faculty members, community representatives, and officials from the mayor's neighborhood investment office concluded that University entitities need to understand better their own patterns of engagement in Brightmoor. Hundreds of students and faculty from area universities are at work in Brightmoor each semester, with little cohesion between their efforts and little understanding of their collective impact. Accordingly, current National Forum efforts in Brightmoor center around enhancing strategic institutional engagement by developing cohesive community-university partnerships.
Developing Community-University Partnerships: A Model
1) Conducting a concentrated, cross-disciplinary, collaborative study of institutional engagement in Brightmoor
2) Develop a workshop series, consisting of:
2a) A University of Michigan-based workshop on identifying modes of optimal institutional engagement in the Brightmoor community2b) A community-based workshop on maximizing university-community partnershpis in Brightmoor
About the Study on Institutional Engagment
The study on institutional engagement will be conducted by the University of Michigan, with potential partners. The institution(s) will independently chronicle their efforts in Brightmoor and then come together to compare and contrast data, which will then lead to a collaboration on the development of a model of university-community engagement. Ideally, insights from University of Detroit-Mercy, Wayne State University, Marygrove College, and Lawrence Technological University will be incorporated as well. Goals for the study are two-fold:
1) To inform the activities of the workshop series to be held at the University of Michigan and in Brightmoor in 2008 and 2009
2) To publish a monograph or book that challenges other universities to examine multiple engagement efforts and assess and strengthen their impact on defined communities
Workshop Series
The institutional engagement study will inform and run parallel to workshop planning efforts. The first workshop will be hosted at the University of Michigan in October 2008 and will be designed to give University parties the opportunity to foster enhanced understanding of strategic institutional engagement. The workshop will also build stronger partnerships with one another prior to presenting a unified institutional plan to community entities at the second workshop, to be hosted in Brightmoor in January 2009.
The second workshop will focus on the development of an action plan that will lead to sustainable, synergistic, community-university partnerships. Taken together, the workshop series will contribute to the development of a long-term community revitalization infrastructure in Brightmoor.
Major Sources of Support Include:
The Brightmoor Alliance
The National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good
The National Center for Institutional Diversity
The Ginsberg Center of the University of Michigan