About UROC
The university’s Urban Research and Outreach Engagement Center (UROC) is emerging on the Northside of Minneapolis from a potent university/community history of hope, doubt, vision, confusion, promise, and possibilities.
It began several years ago with informal conversations between Mayor R.T. Rybak and President Bob Bruininks about how the university might join with the city to tackle the complex problems that faced North Minneapolis, one of the most underserved communities in the metro area.
This coincided with the university’s recruitment of Dante Cicchetti, a world-renowned expert who conducts ground-breaking work on family mental health, and applies this research to help families avoid out-of-home placement of children into foster care, and reverse the negative effects of poverty, neglect, and other problems facing impoverished communities.
The community’s response to and support for Cicchetti’s research was divided; there were critics and supporters (See related: FAQ for the University Northside Partnership, PDF format). This reaction led to a process of true community engagement that included focus groups and community meetings with different constituents in North Minneapolis, as well as formal votes. Representatives from the city of Minneapolis and Hennepin County joined these discussions.
In 2006, the University Northside Partnership emerged as the convening mechanism to bring together community organizations based in North Minneapolis, city and county representatives, faith-based leaders, and university faculty and staff. The goal was to create a broad-based partnership aimed at building stronger and healthier neighborhoods that would tie together community and university expertise and resources and leverage these with city and county services and resources, in order to realize a strong urban vision of community revitalization, provide improved education and training, and support effective business development in North Minneapolis.
The path to this point in history (See related: UROC timeline, PDF format) has not always been straight. But the footsteps along the path have never faltered, and towards the end of 2006, the university decided upon the creation of the first Urban Research and Outreach/Engagement Center (UROC) as the delivery mechanism to interface with the new UNP partnership.
UROC will increase the university’s ability to respond to repeated requests from North Minneapolis that the university facilitate collaborative projects, make its research and services more accessible, and allow for a more productive sharing of expertise and resources among community residents and organizations and university faculty, staff, and students. This direction is consistent with the suggestions and recommendations that emerged from the university’s own Urban Agenda Taskforce Report.
Since 2006, the university has invested $120,000 in the Northside Seed Grant Program, administered by the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), to support proposals from community organizations that operate programs that serve residents of the Northside community. The grant provides student research assistants and faculty researchers to carry out neighborhood-initiated and neighborhood-guided projects.
In November 2007, UROC’s first executive director (also an associate vice president at the University) was hired, and the final transactions to secure the former shopping center at 2001 Plymouth Ave. N. as UROC’s home were completed in February 2008.
The scope of the programs to be located in UROC will eventually cover the entire life cycle, and will be aimed at providing solutions to the complex issues that face North Minneapolis in the areas of education, economic development, and health and that reflect national trends in urban areas.
The UROC building will provide university faculty and staff work and office space in North Minneapolis for collaborative outreach and research programs in early childhood education, health disparities, and Extension (4-H, family development, nutrition, youth leadership, and Master gardening). The Center for Innovation and Economic Development, which received a $300,000 Empowerment Zone grant from the city to support programs for youth entrepreneurs, will serve as a business incubator and offer a computer refurbishing program, along with other technical assistance and support for Northside business and nonprofits. Multipurpose space in the facility will create opportunities for other university services to come into the Northside. The renovations for UROC’s new building are scheduled for completion in fall 2009.
As UROC’s building and programs take shape, different initiatives and projects at the university and in the neighborhoods are coalescing through the various work groups. The UNP work groups are aimed at building collaborative leadership among community participants and university faculty and staff, using participatory action research as a model.
The efforts of the FIPSE-UROC work groups are funded by a $750,000 grant from the federal Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education over three years, to document the process of community engagement around the themes of out-of-school time, healthy foods, and youth entrepreneurship.
The process accompanying the organization of community-university work groups and establishment of a center with engagement as its cornerstone is filled with both challenges and opportunities. As with any significant endeavor, different visions and priorities have affected expectations about exactly how this work between the community and the university, as well as city and county government, would come together.
The Urban Research and Outreach/Engagement Center is poised to anchor the university commitment to urban community engagement and find ways to use its resources to work collaboratively with community, city, and county partners to address the enormous challenges of our current times. Our future success will be shaped by what knowledge, creativity, skills, and strong mutual commitment and respect can achieve.