DUGC Urban Sustainability Cohort

At DU we believe that “sustainability” means working together to create a world where ecosystems and societies can thrive. DU Grand Challenges (DUGC) recognizes that communities thrive when each of has what we need to fully live, work, and participate in the social fabric that holds us all together. DUGC brings  faculty, staff, students and regional community leaders together to advance this vision through community-university conversations and partnerships for the public good.

The DUGC Urban Sustainability Cohort is one of DUGC’s four collective impact cohorts in which faculty, staff and students partner with community leaders from the public, private, and civic sectors to improve daily life, now and in the future.  Each cohort aims to increase the number of faculty, staff, and students engaged in community-based scholarship, increase the number of community partners actively engaged with DU, and increase the strength of existing community-university partnerships.

The Urban Sustainability Cohort builds on DU’s long history of building community partnerships to advance the public good with a focus on five key prototype initiatives, each intended to contribute to one unifying result:

The Denver region supports just, inclusive and thriving communities where people and nature flourish.

Metro Denver Nature Alliance (Metro DNA):

Collective Impact for Healthy People & Place

Metro DNA (metrodna.org) is a growing coalition of non-profit, government, research, and private sector partners seeking to align nature-based efforts to ensure more equitable access to nature and to promote healthy people, communities, and natural places. Long before Metro DNA’s official launch in 2018, DU Professor Susan Daggett and other faculty, staff and students have played a crucial role in the alliance's development.

Photovoice

Amplifying Community Voices in Public Policy

Achieving a just and sustainable future requires meaningful, inclusive participation in decision-making. The Center for Community Engagement to advance Scholarship and Learning (CCESL) has developed and facilitated three photovoice workshop series to amplify community voices in public policy formation. Photovoice is a process by which project participants document their lived experiences through photography revolving around a project topic or theme. By exhibiting their photographs at events attended by public officials and other community leaders, participants help decision-makers understand community issues through the eyes of the people who live there.

Measuring Human & Ecological Wellbeing (HEW)

The overwhelming dominance of GDP-based measurements as a proxy for economic success in public consciousness, media, and policy-making has perpetuated economic development focused on profit, too often at the expense of people and planet. As US Presidential Candidate Bobby Kennedy suggested in 1968, GDP “'measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile.” Urban Sustainability Cohort leaders are working with partners in the Denver region (and more broadly in Colorado) to develop a consensus set of measurable indicators of human and ecological wellbeing that can be used to support an economy in service of life and wellbeing for all.

Interdisciplinary Sustainability Clinic

Promoting sustainability in our community often requires collective action and collaboration from many disciplines.  Currently, the law school operates the Environmental Law Clinic and Community Economic Development Clinic, which meets some of the legal needs of community members and organizations working to advance environmental justice and sustainability.  However, faculty in these programs have identified needs from their community partners for expertise from many disciplines to help empower communities to improve their own sustainability and to advocate for their interests at the state and local level.

Institutional Hub for Just & Sustainable Futures

All of the pilot projects are designed to contribute to a just and sustainable future for the Denver region - but what are the institutional structures that can offer long-term support for reciprocal community-university partnerships that promote just, inclusive and thriving communities where people and nature flourish? Urban Sustainability Cohort leaders are working to expand the institutional infrastructure to support a knowledge hub for Interdisciplinary, collaborative, place-based,  research and curricula. The hub will support faculty and students while building long term relationships with community partners. As the backbone to these projects, this hub will provide an operating framework to develop and enhance interdisciplinary research and curricula for a just and sustainable future.

This work builds on the curricular and research strengths of the Colleges and Schools of DU, and is focused on addressing the unique sustainability challenges facing the Denver metro area and the Front Range.