EFS Profiles
Oberlin Design Initiative
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
Purpose: Community Involvement, Sustainability Research
Please note that the copyright for this profile is retained by the institution.
The Oberlin Design Initiative (ODI) is a not-for-profit program founded by recent Oberlin College graduates. By working within the Oberlin community to identify innovative solutions, bring the human resources of Oberlin College to the community, and promote intra-community dialogue, ODI serves as a catalyst for environmental, social and economic sustainability in Oberlin.
Strategy
The Oberlin Design Initiative is a catalyst for change. We perform our catalytic function by linking people to people and ideas to other ideas, while also "greasing the wheels" of change.
Through research, coordination and design, we link: the ideas and best practices of sustainability with the people who make change in this community; the energy and creativity of students and community members with necessary projects; complementary ideas and projects in the community to capitalize on synergies; and the assets and challenges of this community. We do this to develop creative, workable strategies to improve the environmental, social and economic sustainability of Oberlin, Ohio, that it may serve as an example for small town sustainability in America.
By "greasing the wheels of change" we mean doing the work to ease the difficulty of creating change. For example, many people want to implement smart growth principles in Oberlin, but it is a daunting task to do so, especially when there are so many more immediate concerns in most people's everyday lives. So ODI will do the research on other case studies and on best practices to provide possible solutions and necessary information to make the job of promoting smart growth easier.
ODI Center
The ODI office in downtown Oberlin will be a center of sustainability coordination, bringing together ideas from the Oberlin community and similar communities nation-wide to bridge the gap between innovative solutions and the challenges Oberlin faces. This will help students and the broader community to learn to think and design in ways that promote long-term broad benefits to the whole community over several generations.
Goals
A) Promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability in Oberlin
Work with City residents, employees, business people, design professionals, as well as College staff and students, to coordinate efforts and programs, build common visions, and design and implement solutions to improve sustainability. ODI will work to create a more vital, livable town center and promote a healthy social fabric and responsible regional land-use.
B) Bring human resources of College to the community
Bring student and recent graduate enthusiasm and creativity together with the experience and knowledge of City residents and College staff to provide a unique learning experience for Oberlin students. Educate students about the community to increase their appreciation of, connection to, and impact on the community. Coordinate student research projects with the City's needs to give students hands-on learning opportunities and provide the City with further helpful intellectual resources for understanding and solving problems.
C) Facilitate Intra-community dialogue
Promote the sharing of information and ideas between community members about local problems and solutions as well as issues of development and change. An informed community is necessary for the success of any movement toward sustainability because sustainability is rooted in local knowledge, local solutions and the actions and patterns of everyday life. Vision and action emerge from the dynamic interaction of community members. ODI will create the space for this interaction between ideas, individuals and groups.
Brief Project Descriptions
Oberlin Design Center
By becoming a subsidiary of EDIC, formalizing our relationships with City and College individuals, organizations, and departments, securing an office Downtown, formalizing our organizational structure, hiring staff, and recruiting volunteers, ODI aims to become the design center of Oberlin. The Oberlin Design Center will be a meeting, resource, and office space with a large round table for community meetings, desks and computers for office work, maps and a small library to aid in the various projects undertaken. This room will be the coordination center for various projects, will house community brainstorming sessions, and act as a resource for the Oberlin Community and ODI's partnering organizations.
Oberlin Market Study
The City of Oberlin Economic Restructuring Committee, Oberlin Chamber of Commerce and Main Street Program contracted First Avenues to conduct a comprehensive market study of the City of Oberlin. Phase I and II will each consist of 100 Shopper Intercept Surveys to be conducted by an Oberlin College Student Project Team as organized through The Oberlin Design Initiative with supervision and training by the Joint Center for Policy and Research out of Lorain County Community College. Phase III of the market study will be focused on informing the Oberlin community of the results of the study through a series of published articles researched and written by the ODI Student Project Team. A pamphlet describing taxes, incentives, accurate market demand and the unique character of Oberlin will be distributed to businesses in the region seeking to expand. In order to address issues of social adversity existing in Oberlin, the results of the market study will be cross-referenced with Oberlin demographics to produce a report for the Oberlin News Tribune.
Green Industry Initiative
Oberlin's industrial park recently lost two of its largest employers, dramatically decreasing both employment and tax revenues in the City of Oberlin. To bring jobs and increased tax base, the City would like to help someone buy the 54-acre, wooded Guess-Siegel property adjacent to the existing industrial park in order to develop it for light industrial use. It was recently rezoned for light industry.
ODI's goal is to encourage green industrial development in the City of Oberlin. To begin this process, ODI will research the theory and practice of developing green industrial parks and eco-industrial parks and give the results in a report to the Office of Community Affairs in the summer of 2002. To effectively promote green industry in the area we must produce baseline data on companies in Lorain County. ODI is working with Lorain County Chamber of Commerce to help companies in Lorain County complete self-reporting surveys on materials use. ODI will compile a database of material inputs and outputs for several companies in Lorain County, to be used by a team of experts to identify possible by-product exchange relationships between companies.
Energy Efficient Development in Downtown
Another, related movement has grown out of the meetings between ODI and the Lorain County Chamber of Commerce to promote energy efficient development in Oberlin's downtown. ODI is working with the Lorain County Chamber to build a coalition that may write grants to bring outside experts and financial resources, such as those available through the U.S. DOE's Rebuild America program, to Oberlin to promote such development. This initiative is fledgling, but is gathering momentum.
Smart Growth Project:
The greater Oberlin area is increasingly experiencing pressure to develop. These pressures have traditionally been framed in a "pro-growth/no-growth" debate, out of which comes poorly planned development. This project aims to provide an alternative to this polarized conversation, by applying a set of Smart Growth principles to local regulatory structures. Working closely with Municipal authorities in existing review processes, we will work with students and community members to draft documents that will help to inform authorities of the means by which communities around the countries are applying these alternative principles to their code and land-use policy. The project will produce documents that articulate how local ordinance can apply Smart Growth Principles in the City of Oberlin, Pittsfield Township, New Russia Township, and Lorain County.
Publication Project:
As students at Oberlin, and even as professors, we have a tendency to pass through our time on campus never leaving the library, the classroom, our dorms, or our homes. We spend years in a place, almost entirely unaware of the choices that are being made today that will affect the social, economic, and environmental vitality of tomorrow. Oberlin College sits in a quiet Ohio town, but this is changing. The Oberlin Review and the Oberlin Tribune need writers who will research the plans and policies that are being drafted right now.
The goal of this project is to keep the Oberlin community, both the college and the town, informed on the changes that could happen down the road. The best way to fight sprawl is to know your community and what's happening around it. We will research, write, design, and print articles and publications that educates its readership about Oberlin's position on the frontier of the outmigration of Cleveland Sprawl. The articles and publications will situate the changes and plans in and around the City of Oberlin within the trends of changes that are occurring in the greater-Cleveland area.
Winter Term Project: Sustainability Indicators for Oberlin
The goal of this project is to provide a tool for tracking both progress and decline in Oberlin's environmental, social and economic spheres. This tool will help organizations (such as ODI, Office of Community Affairs, or City Council) create and modify projects focused on improving this place.
We will research what other communities have done to develop, study and use sustainability indicators in order to decide on a few pertinent indicators for Oberlin to rate the sustainability of things like: pollution levels in Plum Creek, downtown economic health measured in storefront occupancy, quality low-income housing availability, etc. A report that details background and methodology, including time-line, for data collecting and reporting will be produced for each indicator. Finally, we will collect and analyze data in a report on at least one of the chosen indicators laying the groundwork for the rest to be completed in the future.
The Winter Term Project Team will be comprised of interested faculty, students and community members who aim through various methods to develop approximately seven comprehensive criteria by which to gauge the sustainability of the Oberlin community. It is our hope that these indicators will help guide the economic and policy development of Oberlin toward a sustainable future.
How is it Going?
ODI has approximately 28 Oberlin College students working, through individual private readings, in-class projects, and winter term projects, on their 5 main projects: Market Study, Green Industrial, Smart Growth, Publication, Sustainability Indicators. We are coordinating these projects with three different professors from three different departments, and are working to expand that net.
We are working with several organizations in the City of Oberlin, Lorain County, Oberlin College, and elsewhere in Ohio. Some of these organizations are: Oberlin College's Office of Community Affairs, the Oberlin Area Chamber of Commerce and Main Street Program, the Lorain County Chamber of Commerce, and First Avenues, Inc. We are looking to work with more people from City Council and Administration, as well as local community groups.
Our projects are rolling along very successfully, in terms of producing necessary research and beginning to form the partnerships needed to make change. Although, as of yet, nothing is actually different about the way the town is operating.
For additional information:
Co-Directors:
Morgan Williams, Oberlin College Senior
Annabeth Macy, Oberlin College Alumna
Casey Pickett, Oberlin College Alumnus
ohousing@oberlin.edu
(440)775-8747 ext. 8
This document was last modified on 02/20/2002 10:43:03 AM
© 2005 Second Nature, Inc.
