East Hill Notes: The Town-Gown Awards, and holiday cheer

Happy holidays!

Cornell’s Office of Community Relations is fortunate that key moments in the holiday season are found in the annual Town-Gown Awards. a.k.a. The TOGOs, held earlier this month.

Per a previous East Hill Notes column that listed recipients, The TOGOs reflect key components of the holidays, including community, gratitude, compassion, and good cheer.

Beth Bagwell, executive director of the International Town-Gown Association (ITGA) attended TOGO Weekend in Ithaca, where she met with community leaders Friday and made remarks at Saturday’s TOGOs, excerpts here. (As an aside, I am both honored and fortunate to serve on the ITGA Board of Directors.) Bagwell, in her own words:

Cornell President Martha Pollack, thanks to you and Cornell for hosting this special event every year.

Increasingly, town-gown colleagues from across the nation are familiar with this success story.

I, along, with many others are champions of the great work you do here with the annual TOGO awards and the regional conferences that Cornell has had for three years now.

As economies in some U.S. communities continue to struggle or reinvent themselves, the ITGA is calling for new collaborations that reflect shared interest and immediate needs.

Successful town-gown strategies are needed to stabilize and enhance town-gown economies and quality of life.

In addition to the great work you are doing in Ithaca, a snapshot of recent examples of progressive partnerships led by ITGA members include:

• Otterbein University has partnered with leading organizations from the private and public sectors in central Ohio to create the Point at Otterbein University a new science, technology, engineering, arts, and math innovation center that combines academics with the business and manufacturing needs of the community. Otterbein hosted a mobile session at the ITGA Conference in Columbus, and our attendees were very impressed with their presentation and relationship with one of their startups, Nikola Labs.
• The Oregon Regional Accelerator & Innovation Network (RAIN) is an economic development partnership among entrepreneurs. The University of Oregon, Oregon State University, their host cities, and other jurisdictions in the four-county area comprising the South Willamette Valley help them turn ideas into high-impact, innovative, traded-sector companies that can grow and thrive locally. RAIN gives local and regional visibility to the process of new venture creation, and the accelerators draw applicant companies created both in the community and universities.
• Finally, the College Park City-University Partnership Homeownership Program in College Park, MD is working to implement University District 2020, which calls for a sustainable, vibrant university community where people who work in College Park can also live in College Park. In its third year, 15 homes were purchased through this program resulting in 37 new residents and four homes converted from former rental properties into owner-occupied.

These and other partnerships have helped to shape a new era of successful connections that have proven essential, cost-effective and efficient.
Thank you again for inviting me to be here!
—–
And thank you, readers, for checking out East Hill Notes! Gary Stewart is associate vice president in the Office of Community Relations at Cornell University. East Hill Notes are published the second and fourth Mondays of each month.