Ald. Clare Kelly (1st) and Northwestern administrators are in talks about forming a center for community partnerships similar to the Netter Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
The Netter Center for Community Partnerships is a center for civic and community engagement at Penn that brings together resources from the university and the Philadelphia community to help solve issues of poverty, health, inadequate education and environmental sustainability in historically underfunded areas of West Philadelphia and Philadelphia at large.
With the Coalition for Community Schools and Rutgers University-Camden, the center developed a University-Assisted Community Schools Network to share best practices and resources to advance university-assisted community schools policy and practice.
Kelly said she hopes developing such a center will create a more transparent, cooperative and beneficial relationship for both the University and Evanston.
“I care deeply about Northwestern. It is a tremendous asset to our community, and I’m very much interested in strengthening our town-gown relations all the way around,” Kelly said. “I know there is some wonderful work that we could do together by working by relying on the Netter Center to help guide us.”
Then-Penn President Francis Sheldon Hackney proposed the university-wide center in 1990 after years of students rallying to work on community service projects in West Philadelphia. Founding Barbara and Edward Netter Director Ira Harkavy formally created the center in 1992.
The center received an endowment in 2007 from two board members where it received its official title: the Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Now, Harkavy said the center is focused on bringing service into an academic setting to mutually benefit college students in their studies, as well as local organizations’ philanthropy work.
“The three components of the Netter Center that have been core to the work are academically based community service, which is the integration of research, teaching and service together,” he said.
The center offers Academically Based Community Service courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels that bring college students into public schools, centers of faith and community organizations to complete service projects.
As a former educator, Kelly said she is particularly interested in bringing the ABCS program to the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 and Evanston Township High School District 202.
“I know (NU) already does much to support our schools but I would like to continue that work by working with the Netter Center,” Kelly said. “(The Netter Center) can connect us to other university towns that have also moved forward with strengthening programs that rely on the university’s research and expertise to work together to look at how we can use that to solve local issues and problems.”
Kelly said she has talked to Senior Executive Director of Neighborhood and Community Relations Dave Davis several times and has spoken with University President Michael Schill who she said seemed “perfectly amenable” about the idea. The University told The Daily it had no updates at this time.
Harkavy said working with local schools around universities unites the entire community because schools are not just centers of learning, but have an impact on the neighborhood as a whole.
Moreover, he said the implementation of university programs for community partnerships is intrinsically linked to the values of higher education institutions.
“Universities can make a great contribution to their communities because they’re the largest purchaser of goods and services, have extraordinary senses of culture and business. They represent tremendous resources,” Harkavy said. “But most importantly, they have very smart and idealistic students, faculty and staff who can make a real difference.”
Email: ninethkanieskikoso2027@u.northwestern.edu
Email: claramartinez2028@u.northwestern.edu
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