Town Gown Turn Around Series

The International Town & Gown Association is hosting a webinar exploring questions such as, How healthy is your Town-Gown relationship?, How can you even go about analyzing it?  Moderator Sara Bloom explores these questions with an expert panel of unique solutions.  Hear how you can utilize different avenues and which might be best for your situation.  Panelists include:

Kristin Norris, Indiana University: Collaboratory is a software that helps institutions understand the landscape of their engagement – the who, what, where, when, and why of activities designed with and for their community. It originated from within the Institute for Community and Economic Engagement at UNC Greensboro, and was designed, initially, to serve UNCG’s need to track, report, and build awareness of hundreds of community engagement and public service activities and relationships for planning, reporting, and recognition purposes.

Samuel Bannister, Archway Partnership: The Archway Partnership is a unit of Public Service and Outreach at the University of Georgia. The faculty connect Georgia communities to the full range of higher education resources available at UGA to address critical locally identified needs and opportunities. Over the past several years, the Archway Partnership has developed an evaluation plan to measure impact on students, faculty, and communities.

Stephen Gavazzi, The Ohio State University: The Optimal College Town Assessment (OCTA) is designed to take the guesswork out of understanding town-gown relationships through direct measurement of campus and community members’ perceptions of one another. Scores generated by OCTA yield four distinct relationship types which can be compared against the database of dozens of universities and municipalities that have employed this measure since 2014.