Trinity and Its Neighbors, Working Together

A $5.1-million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation helps the College
 connect teaching, learning, and the community

Ever since Trinity became the recipient of a $5.1-million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation three years ago, the College has been wrestling with some weighty questions:

• Can an elite liberal arts college, steeped in tradition, fundamentally recast its approach to liberal education?

• Can it simultaneously help the troubled urban neighborhood of which it has long been a part transform itself?

• Can it carry out these tasks not as two separate and distinct projects, but as one integrated, essentially seamless process?

    It is early to look for definitive answers, but depending on whom you talk with, the impression you are likely to come away with is that Trinity is certainly trying to answer the first question affirmatively. It has launched, and is continuing to unfold, a wide array of innovative projects to address the second question, and many of them have produced positive results in a short time. And there is unquestionably a strong institutional commitment to ensuring that the answer to the third question will also be "yes."

 A single entity
    Trinity received the Kellogg funding--the largest the College has ever received from either a corporation or foundation--in June 1998. And its magnitude was immediately seen as a ringing affirmation of the College's new strategic plan, which had been unveiled only a month earlier at ceremonies commemorating 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 President Evan Dobelle at the anniversary celebration. "We envision the College and the neighborhood as a single entity that is to be transformed into an extended community of learning."

   Carlos Espinosa, the son of Cuban immigrants who moved to Hartford from Florida, runs the café. A Trinity graduate, he grew up in Frog Hollow and experienced the community's deterioration during the 1980s. For the past year, he has spearheaded an outreach effort to all nonprofit organizations and small businesses within a one-mile radius of the campus, offering them free or at-cost connections to the Internet. Additionally, Espinosa's team has set up more than 50 new and refurbished computers in mini-labs where community residents can easily access the Internet. And thanks to the Smart Neighborhood Initiative, every residence within 15 square blocks of Trinity is eligible for a free Web connection.
(Place cursor on photo for caption).

 Sustained involvement with the community
   The Kellogg grant is not, however, simply about the neighborhood, asserts John Langeland, Trinity's director of information technology, who is intimately involved in efforts to wire the neighborhood. "It's incorrect to perceive this as only a neighborhood initiative," he says. "This isn't about making Trinity an urban education college. The liberal arts are still here. Kellogg isn't changing that and isn't supposed to. What we are committed to is making fundamental changes within the College in the ways we teach and learn. This project is about how to reinvent the inside of the College and explore ways for sustained involvement with the community--to think about the neighborhood and envision opportunities, across all of Trinity's curricula, that benefit the College and the community collaboratively."

   The Cities Data Center, part of the Trinity Center for Neighborhoods, is another product of the Kellogg grant, and it exemplifies Langeland's point. When Ivan Kuzyk joined Trinity last summer as director of the center, he instantly began looking for ways to collect information and data from the community and find ways to imbed that information in the classroom.

   At the same time, Kuzyk has extended the value of this enterprise for Trinity's neighbors by delivering an ongoing series of reports on various aspects of Hartford to area leaders who put it to use establishing community policy. To aid Trinity students in their efforts to discover the community and its resources, he is also preparing a field guide to greater Hartford.

   "Programs like the Cities Data Center work because they help ensure that the Kellogg grant funds a foundation for the future," says Dean of Faculty Miller Brown. "The key here is to find ways to anchor the projects being initiated with Kellogg funds to College programs so they endure beyond the lifetime of the grant. Our objective is not exploitative, but it does entail looking for opportunities where engaging the community and using its resources are appropriate and consonant with our curriculum. In one sense, greater Hartford becomes Trinity's laboratory. In another sense it becomes our partner."

Dramatic possibilities
The Cities Data Center and the Smart Neighborhood Initiative are only two examples of how Trinity's "extended community of learning" is taking form.

   When, for instance, Janice Perlman came to Trinity a year ago from Hunter College, it was to fill a professorship in comparative urban studies, a slot funded by Kellogg money. Her role, however, is to also function as a catalyst, synthesizing the productive consequences of the Kellogg-funded initiatives and giving the entire project meaning in the classroom. She has tackled that assignment by offering a series of courses--"Cities, Mega-cities, and the Global Future;"  "Life Histories and Trajectories: Overcoming Poverty in Hartford;" and "Social Sciences Approaches to the City"--that have been enthusiastically received by students. Those courses enhance and expand upon Trinity's existing Cities Program, one of four interdisciplinary programs offered to selected applicants in each year's incoming class.

   She also brought to Trinity the Mega-Cities Project, a global nonprofit network she founded 14 years ago. Mega-Cities links the 20 most populous cities in the world and promotes an ongoing dialogue through which innovative solutions to their shared problems surface.

   Perlman works closely with Elinor "Elly" Jacobson, coordinator of urban learning initiatives, another new position funded by Kellogg. With her support and widespread participation by faculty, Trinity's community learning initiative--a fledgling idea advanced by some faculty members five years ago--has grown to more than 100 courses taken by upwards of 800 students every year.

   The courses, which incorporate community service and other experiential learning opportunities, cover a wide intellectual geography. Last year, one group of arts students worked with students in a Hartford  elementary school to develop dances that expressed environmental awareness. Another group of economics students has been working with some of Hartford's largest corporations, including Aetna, Pratt & Whitney, and Colt, on a study of the evolution of capitalist firms. And a group of biology students has been attending classes at West Hartford's American School for the Deaf, studying how hearing-impaired students learn.

   Jacobson says these experiential courses share an idea that is central to all of the Kellogg-funded programs. "The idea is not to simply do something to the community or for the community," she says. "It is to engage the community with Trinity. The students who participate in experiential learning courses are learning from the people they work with just as they are learning from us. The spirit is always collaborative."

   "Kellogg has a commitment to what we call 'the engaged institution,'" says Dr. Betty Overton. "We have an abiding belief that higher education institutions should pay more attention to their communities. From the outset, we felt that Trinity's proposal fit well within this agenda. Over the past two years, as we have talked with community leaders in Hartford, we have consistently felt that Trinity is serious about using its intellectual resources to assist the greater community. There is a strong commitment to engagement with the community, a sense of the ability to leverage resources.

   What Trinity is doing through the 'Extended Community of Learning' project helps us to understand what it takes to make programs like this succeed. We feel this will become a model for the future."

   "Trinity's urban project has two important components," says Associate Academic Dean Ron Spencer. "First, there's an attempt to make more effective use of our Hartford location as an educational resource. Second, there's an attempt to provide our students with greater opportunities to make the study of cities and urban issues part of their liberal arts education.  The vast majority of our graduates will live and work in cities. If they are to become effective citizens, then we believe we have an obligation to provide resources that can help them."

   Stepping up to that obligation, this "elite liberal arts college, steeped in tradition" is clearly redefining itself. Only time will tell how successful that process will be, but one thing is clear. As Evan Dobelle said, when Trinity received the Kellogg funding, "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." 

-- Jim Smith