The University of Pennsylvania has received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to link Penn's intellectual resources with community needs in West Philadelphia.

Through the Kellogg grant, Penn will use academically-based community service -- a concept that links student learning in the classroom with actual practice in solving community problems -- to investigate questions in cultural and community studies, environmental studies and health, and nutrition and health.

"The three subject areas of the grant both respond to community needs and represent strengths at Penn," said Ira Harkavy, associate vice president and director of the Center for Community Partnerships. "All three areas encourage the kind of interdisciplinary work that is needed to solve community problems." Harkavy and Robert Rescorla, professor of psychology and associate dean for undergraduate education in SAS, will serve as the grant's principal investigators.

Over the past several years, a number of Penn faculty have put the concept into action by offering service-learning courses linked to community schools run by the West Philadelphia Improvement Corps (WEPIC). Students participating in these courses have tackled problems ranging from the nutritional habits of low-income children to removing lead from West Philadelphia houses while collecting data for faculty research in a number of subjects, including history, anthropology, English and geology.

At Penn, the Kellogg grant will fund graduate and undergraduate fellows engaged in academically-based community service. It will also allow University faculty to develop new courses that combine research with cooperative community projects; many of the undergraduate fellows will work with the courses created under this grant. Penn's ultimate goal is to expand these courses so that eventually any undergraduate who wanted to could participate.

"We are eager to have all of our undergraduates become involved in knowledge-creating research enterprises," said Penny Gordon-Larsen, who will serve as the administrative academic coordinator for the grant.

The grant will also fund seminars and training for community members participating in partnerships with Penn students and faculty.

At the outset, the grant will team the principal investigators with three SAS faculty who have already taken leadership roles in the subject areas in question: Peter Conn, professor of English , in the area of cultural and community studies; Robert Giegengack, professor of geology and director of the Center for Environmental Studies, in the area of environmental studies and health; and Francis Johnston, professor of anthropology, in the area of nutrition and health. While most of the participants will come from SAS, the investigators expect undergraduate and graduate students and faculty throughout the University will participate.

The grant is part of a Kellogg Foundation effort to improve undergraduate education by promoting innovative teaching and research practices. A similar grant to the University of Michigan is aimed at expanding an undergraduate research program there from its current focus on the hard sciences into community-based research of the kind underway here. Similarly, the foundation hopes that Penn can increase the participation of students outside the social sciences in its research programs. Under the terms of the grant, Penn and Michigan will exchange information on the development of their respective programs and jointly evaluate their progress.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 to "help people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future generations." Its programming activities center around the common visions of a world in which each person has a sense of worth; accepts responsibility for self, family, community, and societal well-being; and has the capacity to be productive, and to help create nurturing families, responsive institutions and healthy communities.

To achieve the greatest impact, the Foundation targets its grants toward specific focal points or areas. These include: health; food systems and rural development; youth and education, and higher education; and philanthropy and volunteerism. When woven throughout these areas, funding also is provided for leadership; information systems and technology; efforts to capitalize on diversity; and family, neighborhood, and community development programming. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and southern Africa.

Return to Compass Features for September 17, 1996