The University of Vermont's Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships is featured as a national leader in community outreach in a January 31 story that appeared in the Hechinger Report and aired on Vermont Public.

"UVM has branched into a multitude of projects through the Leahy Institute, which is named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy and being funded by the same four-year federal grant that is paying for the outreach in Wisconsin and work at Auburn University in Alabama," the story states.

The story takes readers to several sites where UVM experts are working with local partners on problems like flood resilience. We visit with Kelly Hamshaw, a UVM research lecturer, who is working with Chris Ouellette, property manager for Addison County, to make mobile homes more resistant to severe weather. We meet Taylor Welch-Plante, director of a teen center called the Hub in Bristol, where UVM students studied the services Vermont towns provide to their young people, and Lisa Mitchell, executive director of the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, who received help from UVM with planning for an expansion project.

“A certain amount of humility is absolutely required in almost any of those situations, and universities haven’t been terribly good at humility in the past,” said Kirk Dombrowski, vice president for research and economic development at UVM, who oversees the Leahy Institute and other community engagement projects at UVM.

That perception of a university as a remote, inward-looking institution is unfortunately sometimes deserved, Dombrowski said, but he reminds us that universities like UVM were started largely to train teachers for local schools, or instruct farmers how to use new and more effective techniques.

The Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships demonstrates how land-grant universities can harness knowledge and resources to engage in contemporary challenges rural people face, from internet connectivity, to workforce training, to local transportation, to access to health care and affordable housing.