· Digital divide intervention like Trinfo Café is most effective when intended users understand and appreciate benefits of technology.
· Community Learning Courses are a positive academic and personal experience for most students involved.
· Cities Data Center is a valuable resource for students, faculty and community groups.
· Many of the most successful and enduring connections between the College and the surrounding communities have been “grass-roots,” collegial ones. These collegial connections cannot be designed or enforced from the top, but incentives and resources can be provided to encourage and nurture them.
· On the College side, the effective “catalytic” leaders in building partnerships with the community have been ones with an understanding of the community grounded in experience in civic and community organizations that extends beyond their official College positions. They are able to “translate” the College’s needs and resources to the community and vice versa.
· A key lesson learned has been the complexity of labeling any urban geographic space as a “community,” and the importance of defining the multiple groups that comprise the concept of “community,” such as residents in the immediate neighborhood and the City of Hartford as a whole, neighborhood groups and activists, community organizations, city agencies, elected officials, etc.
· More funding and resources are needed to make residents aware of resources available to them through the Kellogg Project and the components of the SINA Neighborhood Initiative. Direct, bilingual marketing appears to be a particularly successful approach.
· There is a need for greater coordination and planning among the various organizations and institutions which provide services to the residents of the surrounding neighborhood
· The most sustainable College-community connections are those that benefit both sides. Many projects and activities begun during the Kellogg Project are advancing the core academic mission of the College and the teaching and research interests of faculty on the one side and the interests of community organizations and residents on the other. Because of this reciprocity, enlightened self-interest on both sides will sustain some of the successful aspects of the project. Aspects of the project that are not in the self-interest of both sides of the College-community connection are unlikely to be sustained beyond the life of the Kellogg Project.
·
Planning must begin early on how to financially sustain those
aspects of the project that are
successful.