Above: Students enrolled in Sustainable Land Use Planning and Policy (ESPM 5245) in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota visit a site in Jordan, MN. Students in the course will be working on a project with Scott County to revise the County's Conservation Financial Assistance Program to promote planting of perennial crops as a way to reduce chemical runoff and fossil fuel usage, and to diversify the local agricultural economy.
RCP's partnerships with Scott and Ramsey Counties are off to a strong start this semester. Students from across the University are enrolled in RCP-affiliated courses and meeting with staff leads and community stakeholders on a range of projects to advance community sustainability and resilience.
This fall, RCP is partnering for the first time with a freshman undergraduate seminar in the Department of Political Science. Professor Scott Abernathy’s seminar, Generation Now: Young Adult Political Action in America, is the perfect match for Ramsey County’s Empowering Citizens to Vote project. Abernathy’s students will be focusing on how to motivate potential voters aged 18–24 to vote in local, state, and national elections.
For the second year in a row, RCP is partnering with Professor Fernando Burga’s Land Use Planning course at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. This year, Burga’s class is focused on autonomous vehicles, and students will examine the land use and other challenges and implications of deploying autonomous vehicle technology in communities along the urban-suburban-rural transect, with case studies in Scott County and Minneapolis. Five groups of students in the class are matched with Scott County traffic engineer Mark Callahan to examine the implications of autonomous vehicles for Canterbury Commons, the new Renaissance Festival site, ports and freight, pedestrian crossings, and rideshare opportunities. Students’ work will be presented at an end-of-semester poster fair on December 7 at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
RCP is thrilled to be working this year with individual students in both the Law School and School of Public Health. Two law students are conducting independent research projects with Scott County through RCP. Sarah Leneave is examining access to and use of early childhood data to improve educational and other outcomes for children, and Stephanie Gruba is exploring potential changes to eminent domain law. Public health students Jenna Yeakle and Kristine Mcintyre have each chosen to focus their culminating experience for the master of public health degree on Scott County’s Creating an Edible Landscape project, and are teaming up with Jamie Bachaus, Scott County’s Statewide Health Improvement Partnership (SHIP) coordinator, who is leading the project with RCP.
Stay tuned for more project updates throughout the semester. And remember, if you're teaching a course a the U of MN this spring, there is still time to partner with RCP for the spring semester! Just contact us to get started.