Photo Credit: University of Illinois at Chicago
Welcome to the new blog of the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU). We invite you to engage with us as we seek to advance our mission as anchor institutions in our cities.
What is USU?
USU is a network of presidents and chancellors of public research universities committed to escalate and advance urban university engagement in the city. We drive a common agenda that seeks to:
Strengthen our Communities through deep, collaborative engagement in local economic and community development.
Improve urban health by increasing the numbers, diversity and cultural competence of the urban health workforce.
Advance student performance by developing and disseminating efficient, effective and innovative models to foster student achievement and prepare the urban workforces. USU institutions are key stakeholders in their local P-16 education pipelines. The majority of students come from their local area, and currently live in the same metro area after graduation.
USU works in permanent partnership with the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.
What we do
Identify, expand, and replicate innovative models of university-community partnerships across U.S. cities. Check out these examples: Urban Universities for HEALTH, and the
Transformational Planning Grant Project. There are more in development.
Collect and analyze data across a network of public urban research institutions to create a reliable, evidence-based foundation for the universities’ work in cities. Check out our publications and our list of members.
Provide a toolset of evidence-based “best practices” within our priority targets. This blog is our newest effort in this area. Check out our searchable best practice database on our main website.
Enlist additional urban research universities and partners in our national effort.
Advocate federal policies to stimulate effective partnerships and deploy and build the capacity of public urban research universities to fuel the development of the nation’s cities and metro regions.
Our Blog
Photo credit: Portland State University
Across our initiatives, work plans, and activities, we are learning much about the role of anchor institutions, the transforming higher education landscape, and the state of city. And we still have more to learn. The blog is our way of sharing our collective knowledge and engaging with our peers, because we want to hear what you are doing. Please join us. Here’s how.
Join Us
There are so many ways we can work together.
Like what you read? See room for improvement? Please comment and share with your networks. We want to know what you think.
Have a project, idea, or report that you think would fit here? Send it to us. We’re happy to post guest blogs, videos, reports, etc.. We do reserve the right to edit or reject if we don’t feel the content is appropriate to our community.
Are you a public urban research university who would like to join our efforts? Become a USU. More information is available here.