Concurrent Masters’ student, Jennifer Self, to present at the UO’s 5th annual Graduate Student Research Forum – Engagement: Community, Creativity, and Connections.
The Graduate Student Research Forum is a one-day conference held annually at the University of Oregon to showcase research and creative expressions being done by graduate students at UO.
The Research Forum is intended to provide a platform for graduate students to engage with peers across disciplines and community professionals, as well as foster collaboration and professional development. Graduate students apply to participate in the Research Forum in one of four ways: paper presentation, facilitated panel discussion, poster presentation, or presentation of creative works such as exhibits or performances.
Jennifer Self was selected by the Graduate School to present her terminal project, “Collaborative Partnerships for Rural Preservation Planning”, as part of the mid-day conference reception and poster presentations. Jennifer is a concurrent Masters’ student in Historic Preservation and Community and Regional Planning. The project Collaborative Partnerships will combine a more practical program evaluation with academic research of the partnership between the RARE AmeriCorps Program- Resource Assistance for Rural Environments, housed within University of Oregon’s Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, Community Service Center, and rural communities throughout the State of Oregon.
According to the RARE AmeriCorps Program there are three top challenges facing rural Oregon today: depressed rural down towns, general capacity, and hunger and food insecurities. Although the RARE AmeriCorps Program has program partnerships in place to address all three issues, this project will be looking specifically at the inventions the RARE AmeriCorps Program uses to address the first challenge – depressed rural down towns. This focus will fuse Jennifer’s academic background in the fields of “sense of place” community planning and historic preservation.
These places matter – Downtown centers across Oregon not only provide retail and employment hubs, but also contain the vast majority of local historic resources and can be a sense of pride for a community. To help revitalize these important spaces the RARE AmeriCorps Program uses two vehicles for community change – AmeriCorps volunteer placement and the Main Street Approach®, a proven, comprehensive method for preservation-based downtown commercial revitalization. Since 2010, RARE AmeriCorps participants have worked with nine communities to assist with revitalization strategies such as economic restructuring, organization, volunteer recruitment, streetscape design, and downtown promotion.
From the exterior, the RARE AmeriCorps Program-Main Street partnership may appear to be a win-win; however, the creation of the partnership only began four years ago and could still be considered to be in a new, or trial, stage. Additionally, there is currently no evaluation mechanism in place to assess if the partnerships are meeting program goals.
The Collaborative Partnerships project will: (1) develop and implement an evaluation tool to measure the effectiveness and impact of RARE-Main Street partnerships, (2) determine the most effective strategies for RARE to have a positive, long-term impact with rural Main Streets through the use of community-defined indicators, and (3) determine if the partnerships could serve as a model for other rural communities in the Western United States. Findings and recommendations generated through the project will be largely dependent on feedback gathered through literature review and interaction with partnership participants in the form of interviews, surveys, and focus group meetings. A selected representative sample of RARE AmeriCorps Program-Main Street communities be used for the partnership evaluation – Astoria, Coos Bay, La Grande, and Milton-Freewater.
To learn more about Jennifer’s project and other exciting graduate student work, attend the 5th annual Graduate Student Research Forum on Friday, March 7th (mid-day conference reception and poster session to be held in the EMU Ballroom from 12:00 to 1:30pm). The forum event is open to UO students, faculty and staff, and general public. [campus map]
More for information on the event and the entire full-day conference agenda please visit: http://blogs.uoregon.edu/gradforum/agenda/.