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NNIP PARTNER SPOTLIGHT
Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) Institutional Setting The Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota is an applied research and technology center that connects faculty and students with community organizations and public institutions working on local and state policy issues. CURA works across disciplinary lines and professional boundaries, creating new programs and supporting projects that meet needs that no one else is meeting. Its staff leverages resources by collaborating closely with the constituents that it serves: nonprofit organizations, ethnic and racial minority groups, businesses, rural towns, inner-city neighborhoods, suburban communities, local governments, and state agencies. In a typical year, CURA may work on as many as 125 projects that involve 25 or 30 faculty and 80 or 90 students from institutions of higher education throughout the Twin Cities. These faculty and student projects may involve as many as 10 state agencies, 12 to 15 local government agencies, and more than 80 community organizations. CURA experiments with and nurtures new ideas. If they grow and flourish, they can be "spun off" to find a new supportive home or to stand alone. CURA's Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization (NPCR) unit supports neighborhood organizations and community development corporations involved in neighborhood-based revitalization by providing student research assistants and faculty researchers to carry out neighborhood-initiated and neighborhood-guided projects. NPCR provides approximately 200 hours of student time to work on a project defined by the community (260 hours during the summer). CURA's GIS work includes the development of Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System (MNIS), a collaborative capacity-building effort intended to meet the needs of community-based organizations by providing access to a wide range of data that can inform community revitalization efforts and housing intervention and investment strategies. Participating neighborhood groups receive training, project assistance, GIS expertise, and access to property information, as well as opportunities to share ideas about GIS projects and housing strategies with other neighborhoods. This project partnered with the City of Minneapolis with the involvement of neighborhood organizations, to develop an web application to identify houses vulnerable to becoming boarded and vacant. This effort was funded in part by a major Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) grant at the U.S. Department of Commerce. CURA's current project, Minnesota 3-D is a dynamic, GIS-based Internet application that brings together labor market, housing, and development information and analysis for the Twin Cities metro area into one easy-to-use tool for economic and community developers. By combining labor market origin-destination data on Minnesota jobs and workers with housing and transportation data, this tool will increase the capacity of project partners to plan and develop housing and economic development programs that narrow the growing spatial mismatch between housing and employment in the Twin Cities region. The M3D project is a partnership between the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, the Minnesota Office of Revenue, the Metropolitan Council, Ramsey and Hennepin Counties, and various Twin Cities neighborhood organizations and community development corporations. The project is funded by a Technology Opportunities Program (TOP) grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce. CURA also provides technical GIS assistance to Twin Cities community organizations and to students working on projects for these organizations. PARTNER BIOGRAPHIES: Will Craig is Associate Director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Craig is past president of URISA (the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association) and of UCGIS (the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science). He is past chair of the Minnesota Governor's Council on Geographic Information and of the MetroGIS Coordinating Committee. He organized discussions about Public Participation GIS at early URISA conferences and is the lead editor of Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems (Taylor and Francis, 2002). Dr. Craig is a member of the Land Parcel Databases study committee at the National Research Council. He is a board member of NSGIC, the National States Geographic Information Council. He chaired the committee that developed the GIS Code of Ethics for the GIS Certification Institute. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Minnesota. Kris Nelson directs the Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization (NPCR) program at CURA and is responsible for assisting neighborhood organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul to develop applied research projects that can be carried out by university students and faculty from one of nine NPCR member-schools. Kris also works to support neighborhood use of geographic information systems (GIS) in Minneapolis and St. Paul, neighborhood involvement in the Hiawatha light-rail transit line in Minneapolis, and community-based computer networks to facilitate communication and information exchange among neighborhoods. He has an M.A. in public affairs from Indiana University, and more than 25 years of community planning and development experience. Jeff Matson has been an Associate Program Director at the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs since October of 2000. He coordinates two projects within CURA, the Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System (MNIS) and Minnesota 3D (M3D). Both projects are community-based GIS initiatives designed to increase the capacity of neighborhoods to make use of geographic information. In addition Jeff acts as CURA's GIS expert and assists students and researchers with gathering data, mapping and GIS project development. Jeff also creates maps, graphics, and charts for the CURA Reporter, a quarterly publication of CURA sponsored research activities. Jeff holds a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. in Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota where his research focused on environmental justice and community GIS. |