History of the UVM/Burlington COPC
About COPC | Partners | History | Project Staff
The UVM/Burlington Community Outreach Partnership Center proposal was fifteen months in the making and involved over 60 individuals, 25 city and community organizations, the Old North End Enterprise Community Steering Committee, and numerous schools, centers, departments and programs at UVM.
The COPC planning process began in March 1998. The COPC application started as a series of conversations with then President of the University of Vermont (Judith Ramaley), Chair of UVM’s Department of Community Development and Applied Economics (Catherine Halbrendt), and then Director of the City of Burlington’s Community and Economic Development Office (Diana Carminati).
CEDO helped to arrange an initial brainstorming session that included CEDO staff, several residents of the Old North End neighborhood, several AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers working in the Old North End, and members of the Old North End Enterprise Community Steering Committee. This meeting identified a list of nearly twenty projects that we hoped might interest UVM faculty and might lead, eventually, to partnerships among the university, the municipality, and the community.
Next, a meeting was arranged at UVM to discuss the idea of a COPC and to review this list of potential projects and partnerships. About seventy faculty, students, and staff from UVM were invited; the guest-list was developed by CDAE, CEDO staff, and ONE residents who had participated in the brainstorming described above. Twenty-five UVM personnel attended that first meeting on campus. They developed a list of faculty, student and staff interests, building on the list of possible projects generated by the municipality and the community. This group attempted to match interests and resources at the university with interests and needs identified by the municipality and the community.
The ONE EC Steering Committee, at its regular monthly meeting, was asked to prioritize the community’s needs, with regard to a possible COPC application, and to review the list of project possibilities that was beginning to emerge. After expressing their preferences on a number of possible projects and partnerships, the EC Steering Committee voted unanimously to support the participatory process that was being followed in defining what the COPC’s major activities should be.
The next meeting at UVM was structured to allow UVM faculty, students, and staff to meet in small working groups with City officials, ONE residents, and representatives of neighborhood-based non-profits serving the ONE. Each working group was asked to refine the list of possible COPC projects that remained. They were asked, in particular, to identify people at the university and the community who were missing but who should be added to the COPC planning process.
Tentative, rough-hewn descriptions of fourteen (14) possible COPC projects were drafted and distributed to dozens of individuals and organizations at UVM, at City Hall, and in the community, along with a list of Project Selection Criteria. Anyone interested in any of these projects was invited to add suggestions or to make changes. Everyone was invited to attend the next COPC meeting, held off-campus in an accessible, community building in the Old North End. Again about thirty (30) people attended this meeting, representing the three major stakeholders: UVM, city government, and residents and organizations from the Old North End. The primary purpose of this meeting was to reach consensus on a shorter list of projects. The groups did, indeed, narrow the list of possible projects to seven and established seven working groups to refine them further.
These seven working groups, each of which included representatives from the university, the municipality, and the community, met several times. Each group labored to focus its project, identify major tasks, broaden its constituency, and to secure commitments from UVM personnel (and resources) on the one hand, and municipal, non-profit, and/or community personnel (and resources) on the other. Once these seven projects had been refined as much as they could be by their working groups, they were submitted for review, comment, and prioritization to a joint committee of university and municipal officials and to the May meeting of the EC Steering Committee.
After the EC Steering Committee discussion, a four-person subcommittee of the EC Steering Committee was given formal authority (through a unanimous vote) to review and to approve, on behalf of the entire Steering Committee, the final Statement of Work, the governance structure, and the budget for the COPC application. Voting on behalf of the entire EC Steering Committee, this subcommittee reviewed the proposal, gave its unanimous approval to all three of these elements and endorsed UVM’s submission of the COPC application to HUD.
When HUD did not fund the original UVM COPC proposal (September 1998), UVM and CEDO began a series of meetings to discuss community outreach partnerships, and to engage UVM, city government, and community people in the process of reapplying for COPC funding for September, 1999. The reapplication process built on the strong UVM-city-community relationships developed in the original COPC process, the list of projects that the EC Steering Committee had indicated earlier as high priority, and the priorities encompassed in the Champlain Connections EZ application. Meetings around the previous project areas, with the addition of an Affordable Housing project, began in March, 1999.
In April 1999, representatives of UVM and the City met with the EC Steering Committee to discuss project areas to include in the new proposal. Several meetings to discuss the COPC projects were also held with the new Neighborhood Governance Task Force and the Public Safety Project Steering Committee. At its May 13, 1999 meeting, the EC Steering Committee reviewed the COPC projects and voted to endorse the projects as "clearly addressing three high priority areas of need in the community."
HUD awarded the COPC grant to the University of Vermont in September 1999. The project was up and running within a few months, testament, perhaps, to the synergy of the partnership work that the group had begun during the planning process.
You can find updated information on the various UVM/Burlington COPC projects by clicking on the links below:
UVM Economic Impacts | Community Leadership | Fair Housing | CD Network
