Gregory Trencher and Masaru Yarime, writing in OurWorld2.0, a publication of United Nations University, provide a call for more town and gown collaboration and partnerships for area sustainable development. They also provide a nice list of some current projects that fit into their category of "Universities Co-Creating Urban Sustainability." That list, with links, is below—after the quote, which is the first two paragraphs of their essay:

The sustainability crisis has provoked an unexpected and dramatic response from academia. Until now, higher education institutions have tended to focus on sustainability within their own borders. This has predominantly been via sustainability education, research and designing green or carbon neutral campuses. Yet borders between society and academia are dissolving. Many high-profile universities across the world are reaching out past campus boundaries to form ambitious partnerships with industry, government and civil society organisations. In this role of ‘co-creation’, a university attempts to materialise sustainable development by working with society, to create society. That is, it collaborates with diverse social actors to trigger and then drive the sustainable transformation of a specific region, city or community.

Table 1. Various cross-sector collaborations for sustainability transitions

 ^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

How to create community=university partnerships that can be sustained over time is the theme of Volume 4 (2011) of the journal, Gateways: the International Journal of Community Research & Engagement. There are quite a few excellent pieces of interest to planners in this volume—which is not at all focused on infrastructure. Definitely worth a read if your work on campus involves planning for workable community partnerships in some way. 

Requires free registration to access. Here are two examples from the many interesting articles in this issue:

Collaboration Between Universities: An effective way of sustaining community-university partnerships ... 

[E]xplores the potential for universities to collaborate on building effective engagement mechanisms (such as helpdesks, ‘hub and spoke’ contact models, and research groups to review ideas for activities) that will support an ongoing flow of new projects and partnerships over time. ...

In an ‘age of austerity’, we contend that collaboration between universities may be an efficient and effective way of engaging with local communities but that such inter-university collaboration is not cost-free and requires high-level strategic buy-in by institutions. ...

However, the resources required to create the ‘infrastructure’ to support community engagement are sometimes overlooked. A significant proportion of these costs are for academic and administrative support staff time, although there may also be marketing and promotion costs as well as general office-related overheads.

A Mutually Beneficial Relationship: University of the Third Age and a regional university campus is definitely of interest to planners with regard to engaging “active retirees” in the academic community.

A mutually beneficial relationship has developed over the past 15 years between a regional South Australian branch of the University of the Third Age (U3A) and the local university campus. Arising from the initiative of a community member, the group sought assistance from the university, and has now become integrated into campus life.

The ‘third age’ is the age of active retirement, following childhood and youth and then the age of full-time employment, and preceding a more dependent old age for some. 

In Change magazine's current issue, John Seely Brown, Ann Pendleton-Jullian, and Richard Adler, examine the role of land-grant universities and their part in the "now" and the "future." While keeping a very broad perspective, they eventually examine as a case study North Carolina State University, its Centennial Campus, and review a number of learning and research initiatives, such as: Red Hat Software, MedWestvaco, and NC Textile Connect - digging even deeper into some of the latter's projects: William Shinn's Aorta, Mansour Mohammed's process, LAAMScience and APJet - as well as the North Carolina Program for Forensic Science.

In search of new models of learning for the 21st century, we visited North Carolina State University, a 120-year-old land-grant institution located in Raleigh, North Carolina. NC State provides some interesting clues about how America's land-grant colleges and universities might reinvent their mission for the 21st century. While initiatives similar to the ones at NC State can be found at other institutions, the school is worth studying because of its relatively long history of innovation and its commitment to expanding the meaning of “engagement.”

NC State has developed a reputation for pioneering an expanded definition of the university around the concept of actively engaging with the larger community and the regional economy. The pursuit of greater engagement has inspired the development of new academic practices that blend old and new forms of learning—practices that honor both the traditional transmission of codified knowledge and new forms of knowledge building through inquiry, speculation, and problem-solving.

This “blended” model of education is the foundation of an ecosystem in which students and faculty operate in the territory between the intellectual activity associated with the academy's imperative to ask questions in a manner that does not typically happen elsewhere and the pragmatism necessary to create impact in real-world settings. This is a complex territory, because it is often conflictive by nature. Yet it is precisely in the negotiation of conflicts that resiliency is formed.

Many institutions have found it useful to publish a "Community Impact Statement," by one name or another. The statements attempt to make clear the value of the campus to its surrounding community and region. SCUP has begun a collection of links to such statements. You can view the current collection here and you can add additional links to more community impact statements at this easy to use online form.

We have links to community impact reports from North Carolina A&T State University, Missouri Western State University, Nicholls State University, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, University of Texas at San Antonio, State University of New York at Oswego, Smith College, and Southeastern Louisiana University.

Please share yours.