A Cornell-Ithaca community partnership hopes to receive a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assist in revitalizing neighborhoods and help enhance the quality of life in the city of Ithaca.
The proposed partnership includes Cornell and city of Ithaca community-based organizations and churches, residents and government agencies.
"The proposed Cornell University-Ithaca Flats Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) will coordinate campus-community partnerships in several city neighborhoods to examine and develop strategies to assist in improving the quality of life the neighborhoods support," said Patricia Pollak, associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell and the principal investigator/director of the ambitious project. "It would tackle issues such as youth and adult job training and skills development, economic development, strategic planning, housing, community leadership, health and safety issues and environment and organizational capacity building."
Although the grant request is for $400,000, Pollak said that up to $1.5 million in cash or services has been pledged to the project from the partners. Pollak hopes the HUD grant will be a launching pad to apply for other grants for Cornell faculty, staff, student and community partnership efforts to address Ithaca neighborhood issues.
If HUD approves the grant, Cornell would join a growing list of universities forging partnerships with communities to rebuild and revitalize urban neighborhoods. Said Cornell President Hunter Rawlings: "We want to commit our student, faculty and staff energy, attention and resources as we work intensely with local government, private agencies, civic organizations and residents of the neighborhoods around Ithaca Flats, which are suffering many of the same severe urban problems of larger cities.
"Although not a large city, Ithaca has an urgent need for our assistance," Rawlings said. "The university is eager to work on this initiative; it is central to our mission of working with upstate communities to address directly urban central New York's neglected neighborhood revitalization, economic development and housing problems."
Working out of the Southside Community Center, the Cornell-Ithaca Flats COPC partners would target Ithaca's Southside, Northside, downtown and Titus Flats neighborhoods. A wide range of activities would be initiated by Cornell faculty and students from many of the university's colleges and from: the Cornell Public Service Center and Cornell Department of Human Resources; Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County; the Southside Community Center; the City of Ithaca Planning Department; the Ithaca Urban Renewal Agency; the Ithaca Housing Authority; the Ithaca Youth Bureau; Catholic Charities of the Southern Tier; the Ithaca Police Department; and Cayuga Medical Center.
"We are extremely enthusiastic about Cornell's initiative to establish a Community Outreach Partnership Center that will support ongoing neighborhood revitalization efforts," said Eldred Harris, a member of the board of directors at the Southside Community Center. "And we are greatly honored to welcome the establishment of the COPC in our center. The Southside Community Center is a hub of community resource and information through year-round forums and activities in education, recreation, political and social awareness. COPC's presence here would greatly enhance and support the work we do."
The project would include initiatives in the following areas: computer skills training, youth mentoring and development, computer literacy education, employee and tenant rights, neighborhood "livability," street and park safety, remediation of environmental barriers, economic development, access to medical care, family financial management, remediation of indoor contamination from lead paint, radon gas, asbestos and biological contaminants in homes and child care facilities, availability of and access to food in the COPC neighborhoods and the development of community leadership.
So far, more than a dozen community organizations have committed to the project, and Pollak stressed that all organizations are invited to participate. Almost two dozen faculty members from six colleges at Cornell will be involved, as well as several Cornell administrative offices and at least one department at Ithaca College.
"For Cornell, this would represent an extension of the land grant mission, applying research to outreach. We would be using the university's expertise and resources to address issues identified by the city's residents, organizations and agencies," Pollak said.
Pollak pointed out that in four of the 11 U.S. Census areas in Ithaca, a large proportion of families live in poverty, according to the Community Development Block Grant Application, city of Ithaca statistics. In the Northside neighborhood, for example, nearly 100 percent of the children under the age of 5 live in poverty.
Minority households comprise about one-fifth of the city's population, yet they comprise nearly a third of those households officially classified as living in poverty. Almost one-third of the city's students participate in school meal programs; 13 percent of the residents do not have a high school education.
"The goal of the COPC is to focus attention on the needs of these residents and neighborhoods and to encourage a strong, effective collaborative partnership between the university, community agencies and organizations and neighborhood residents in the COPC area," Pollak said.
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