$5.1-Million Grant from Kellogg Foundation Affirms and Supports Trinity’s Plans for "Extended Community of Learning"

HARTFORD, Conn., June 4, 1998 -- The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has awarded Trinity a $5,150,585 grant to support the College’s plans to build College-community connections that emphasize civic responsibility and educational innovation. A grant of this magnitude from the Kellogg Foundation, which is committed to supporting stronger relationships between the needs of community and the contributions of higher education institutions, is welcomed as powerful validation of the new strategic plan unveiled just last month on the College’s 175th anniversary.

"The experience of recent years convinces us that Trinity and its neighbors, working together, can build a better future," said Trinity President Evan S. Dobelle in announcing the grant, the largest ever received by Trinity from a corporation or foundation. "We envision the College and the neighborhood as a single entity that is to be transformed into an extended community of learning."

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation stresses the importance of partnerships in getting work done. "In the social arena, it is vitally important for business, government, and nonprofit organizations to work together for social improvement. No one sector can do it alone, nor does any one sector have sole responsibility for society’s well-being," said Foundation president and CEO William C. Richardson.

"Trinity College, under Evan Dobelle’s leadership, has demonstrated the power and potential of public-private partnerships," said Richardson. "Through a bold, community-based initiative to revitalize its neighborhood, Trinity has forcefully asserted a leadership role in the urban policy debate. Now the College is leading the way in linking neighborhood renewal with academic change. The Kellogg Foundation fully expects this will be a win-win proposition for the College and the City of Hartford. We are very pleased to be able to support Trinity in its quest to make a difference both on campus and off."

The three-year grant will support a five-year project that will link Trinity and its neighborhood in ways that benefit both. Trinity will create a number of sustainable educational connections that respond to the needs of its neighbors in the surrounding area and throughout Hartford. At the same time, these connections will provide Trinity undergraduates expanded and enriching opportunities to integrate theory and practice through firsthand involvement with urgent city and international realities beyond the edge of campus.

"A dramatic possibility now exists to establish common ground between the many neighborhood residents who look to education and knowledge as part of the solution to the dilemmas they face and the many members of the Trinity community who view learning in an urban context as integral to the College’s educational purpose," said Dobelle.

The key components of the Kellogg-supported project include:

• a Community Forum process that will bring together members of the Trinity community with the broadest possible spectrum of stakeholders -- residents, business owners, teachers, public safety officers, social workers, board of education members, other municipal officials -- to identify opportunities and implement programs to strengthen collaboration between the College and community;

• a Professorship of Comparative Urban Studies to lead Trinity’s urban curricular initiatives and take charge of the College’s efforts to forge creative educational linkages with the community;

• a "Smart Neighborhood" which mobilizes the advanced information technology of the area’s major institutions to support educational programs in the community, provide access to this advanced learning and communications technology, and establish a base for expanded local entrepreneurial activity;

• support for educational management and programming for an early childhood center, three new schools, and community facilities under construction adjacent to Trinity’s campus on The Learning Corridor, the centerpiece of the College’s $175-million neighborhood revitalization initiative; and

• a Cities Data Center that will assemble an extensive collection of data and studies on the Hartford region and eventually other urban sites in order to serve as both a repository of information and as the research link to the community for the existing Trinity Center for Neighborhoods.

"We must develop stronger, more inventive means of educating our students in the values of civic responsibility," said Dobelle. "We must assist our neighbors as they struggle to acquire knowledge, skills, and habits they need in order to rebuild and strengthen their communities from within." In describing this as a "two-way street" strategy, Dobelle explained that "a neighborhood with a college in its midst possesses a powerful resource for positive change. At the same time, a college surrounded by a city has considerable advantages as it rethinks liberal arts education for the next century."

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