Introduction

In August of 2009, Cleveland’s Mayor Frank Jackson and his administration convened a summit entitled “Sustainable Cleveland 2019.” The summit highlighted the city’s commitment to sustainability as a key economic development strategy.  Moreover, the summit served as an opportunity for the people around the region with expertise in sustainable practices to collaborate on scalable projects to achieve larger impact. One collaborating group consisting of architects, activists, and educators, from Cleveland State, Case Western Reserve, and Tri-C, as well as the head of Cleveland’s library system advanced the idea of a linking the pursuit of “world class sustainability education” to the context of a sustainable neighborhood. Such neighborhoods would feature a library, elementary school, middle school, high school, and a college that are connected by shared educational commitment to learning and implementing the concepts of sustainability in the community.

The group, which eventually named itself the “Collaborative Campus,” acknowledged that the infrastructure for the sustainable neighborhood they envisioned already exists in the community surrounding Tri-C’s downtown campus. The proximity of the Sterling library, Marion Sterling Elementary School, Jane Addams High School, and Design Lab Early College High School to Tri-C’s Metropolitan Campus and the willingness of the same organizations to collaborate present ideal opportunities to develop educational initiatives that support sustainability in the local community.

East 30th Street Learning Collaborative

The idea of a connecting the educational instructions around Metro into a “sustainable campus” comes at intersection of two other catalytic events. First, the reconstitution of the Quadrangle, a local community development corporation, as the Campus District is the occasion for the anchor institutions—St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, Tri-C Metropolitan Campus, and Cleveland State—to reinvigorate their partnership with each other and their relationship with the surrounding community. Second, the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority plans to redevelop the Cedar Extension housing units at 30th and Community College Avenue — one of the “campuses” of the Campus District. Both developments provide the context and the opportunity for students and faculty at Sterling Elementary, Jane Addams, Design Lab, Tri-C, and CSU to participate in and support a planning process.

“Community as Text”

City Works: Exploring Your Community isa curriculum that “outlines ways to engage teenagers in an exploration of the needs and resources of the community in which they live and go to school.” Created to provide hands on experiences in teamwork, communication, project management, community development, urban planning, and related areas, the curriculum uses an accessible series of projects from designing a personal portfolio to mapping the assets of a neighborhood to engage students at a variety of levels. It is also an exceptional vehicle for collaboration both among high school and college faculty across disciplines, and with other professionals—urban planners, architects, engineers, and so on—from the community.

Using the City Works curriculum as a model, a variety of community partners from educational institutions, the community development corporations, and other non-profits are creating a youth-focus project to explore opportunities for the Campus District as a community. The project may serve not only to provide a rich and unique learning experience for students from middle to graduate school and a tangible vehicle for faculty collaboration, but also as a catalyst for revitalizing a neighborhood, starting with its children. Few messages could be more powerful than showing students that their education is the instrument to rebuild their own neighborhood and their city.

Guided by faculty-consultants from Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, and the Cleveland Institute of Art, approximately 27 students–approximately half of whom are neighborhood residents–will spend summer 2010 leading basic concepts of planning, mapping community assets, identifying community needs, and developing ideas for projects that will benefit the community.  The goal is to produce a body of local knowledge and ideas that can be presented to the Campus District and Burton, Bell, Carr to inform the neighborhood planning processes which they are responsible for facilitating.