September 14, 11:30 am-1 pm, Minnetonka Community Center.
The City of Minnetonka will host the kickoff for the 2012-2013 Resilient Communities Project. City of Minnetonka public officials and city staff; community leaders; and University of Minnesota faculty will celebrate the launch of an ambitious new effort in Minnesota to shape resilient communities for the future.
As the first Resilient Communities Project partner community, the City of Minnetonka and its staff identified priority issues related to the long-term resilience of the city’s neighborhoods and ecosystems. RCP professors and students will work in Minnetonka to help address these urgent issues. This fall over 150 students from ten courses will participate in RCP projects. Students will bring creativity and a breadth of disciplines to bear on the projects, including architecture, landscape architecture, law, public policy, urban planning, social work, bioproducts and biosystems engineering, and program evaluation.
RCP is modeled on the Sustainable Cities Year Program at the University of Oregon, a highly successful cross-disciplinary program that supports one-year partnerships between a selected city and the university. Like SCI, the Resilient Communities Project facilitates faculty-supervised course-based projects that meet city-identified sustainability needs.