Since the early 1980s, Lawrence has served as an “urban laboratory” for DUSP (Department of Urban Studies and Planning) faculty and students in many ways; they engage with the community through volunteer work and research. However, the lack of coordination in many cases meant that though this academic work was beneficial to students and professors that undertook it, the Lawrence community received little substantive help in the process.
To counter this one-sided relationship, MIT@Lawrence was founded to formalize this partnership. MIT@Lawrence established the confluence of two factors: the emergence and stabilization of a network of non-profit organizations in Lawrence, several of which are headed by MIT alumni, and a renewed focus within DUSP on service-learning. Despite, and perhaps because of, the social and economic challenges Lawrence faces in its lack of independent capacity, a rich network of community-based organizations, including Lawrence CommunityWorks, Groundwork Lawrence, Habitat for Humanity, Bread and Roses Housing, Inc., and the Higher Education Resource Center, have emerged, working cooperatively to address the city’s multi-faceted challenges.
In 1999, Kristen Harol, Tamar Kotelchuck, and Jessica Andors, all graduates of the Masters in City Planning Program at MIT, moved to Lawrence to revive a nearly defunct community development corporation. Initially, local residents were unreceptive to these “outsiders.” In the spirit of community organizing, the MIT alumni acquired the community’s trust by offering summer youth programs to families in Lawrence. Soon after, Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a community development corporation with more than 2,200 members today, was instituted as a consequence of these efforts.
In January of 2002, Kristen Harol was invited to MIT where she spoke of the challenges facing Lawrence and LCW’s network-organizing philosophy of “gentrification from within” based on asset-building. Professor Lorlene Hoyt, then a newly hired assistant professor in DUSP, recognized the opportunity for a mutually beneficial partnership and set in motion a plan to connect LCW and DUSP, instigating what evolved into a long-term commitment between the City of Lawrence and MIT.
In 2002, the LCW-DUSP partnership formally began through a seven-week DUSP course entitled Advanced Geographic Information Systems in which the students of the class used mapping technologies to illustrate the distribution of community assets throughout the city of Lawrence. In 2003, students in a subsequent course created an online neighborhood information system that organized and integrated city-owned spatial data with data from the US Census to support the zoning overlay district campaign sponsored by the Reviviendo Gateway Initiative.
Concurrent with the newly founded LCW-DUSP partnership, a focus on service-learning reemerged in the DUSP. Since the late 1960s, practicum subjects had become less prevalent as urban planning departments across the country had shifted toward a focus on theory. In the 1990s, DUSP students expressed an “interest in working with community members, engaging in collective decision-making processes, and directly confronting issues of race, class and gender.” As the student demand for practicum subjects was increasing, the DUSP’s MCP Committee, chaired by Professor Dennis Frenchman, launched the MCP Core Practicum Committee to create criteria for new practica and manage course selection and development. The Committee settled on six criteria for core practica: (1) Involve constituents in an issues at a particular place, (2) Provide opportunities for reflections and appraisal, (3) Include opportunities to put theory into practice, (4) Encourage exploration and innovation, (5) Address cross-cutting issues and involve allied disciplines, and (6) Make and test proposals. Faculty members were encouraged to develop subjects that met these criteria, and Professor Hoyt’s engagement in Lawrence through some key courses at DUSP proved to be a solid foundation from which to design and implement a new practicum.
Subsequently, Professor Hoyt collaborated with Professor Langley Keyes to offer a service-learning practicum based in Lawrence-Information, Asset Building and the Immigrant City. Picking up on Professor Hoyt’s previous course offerings, the 2004 practicum involved the use of hand-held computers to collect property information from local residents. This information was combined with data from the previous years to create a comprehensive picture of property ownership and conditions throughout the North Common neighborhood. Similarly, the 2005 practicum worked with two other not-for-profit affordable housing developers in Lawrence-Bread and Roses Housing, Inc. and Merrimack Valley Habitat for Humanity-to build on the knowledge of the previous courses. DUSP students in the 2005 Practicum combined bottom-up and top-down data collection techniques by compiling city data on property vacancy and tax delinquency and completing a windshield survey of two neighborhoods. The information had many practical applications and could also be used to determine properties for affordable housing developers to pursue.
As these practica continued, a growing concern over the incompatibility of the MIT term calendar and community-based work began to emerge. Perceived imbalance in the LCW-DUSP relationship compounded this concern. LCW felt that DUSP students were able to learn from the service-learning courses and that the final products from those courses could be useful, but could not be effectively implemented because of LCW’s inadequate staffing. Additionally, since these courses lasted only four months, the final products were often put on hold for eight months before the next year’s practicum students could work on them. Further, there was little consistency from year to year because students rarely remained involved with work in Lawrence after the practicum finished. There was also a perception that considerable knowledge was lost which the LCW-DUSP partnership could not regain given the time lag from the previous year.
Professor Hoyt’s concerns over constraints of the university term schedule and especially the use of Lawrence as an “urban laboratory” yet again, without providing real benefit to the community, motivated her to seek external funding to overcome these challenges.
To sustain the relationship, she applied for several grants, and in 2005, MIT and its community partners secured financial and in-kind commitments from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to build on these relationships and support the creation of additional connections between MIT and Lawrence. A growing network of MIT alumni living and working in Lawrence provides additional community support for this project.[/lang_en]
