Iowa State University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

Iowa State University has several community partnerships, including a shared Director of Sustainability position with the City of Ames. This includes collaboration between university and City staff, including partial funding from the City for the position.

Iowa State University’s partnership with the Mary Greeley Medical Center, is advancing the profession of nursing in both the community and the state of Iowa. Through a cohort agreement, Mary Greeley Medical Center annually provides tuition for eight of its registered nurses to complete their bachelor of science in nursing (BSN) at Iowa State. The program is specifically designed to be completed in one year, in two semesters (full-time) or four semesters (part-time), to help working nurses make an immediate difference in their places of practice. Students are encouraged to build upon their academic credits and licensures by exploring health and wellness with an interdisciplinary team, concentrating on a specific area of interest for electives and incorporating nutrition and wellness, advocacy and professional development into practicum experience. Additionally, unique to Iowa State’s RN-to-BSN program are the immersion opportunities for clinical practice that expand the worldview of nursing to provide more culturally congruent care to patients.
https://tinyurl.com/yc4uy25s

CyRide is the city bus system for Ames, Iowa and also serves the Iowa State University (ISU) campus. CyRide is a collaboration between the City of Ames, Iowa State University, and ISU Student Government. CyRide operates 13 fixed routes with stops on the Iowa State campus and throughout Ames, and provides a Dial-A-Ride service for persons with special needs, as well as a late-night service called Moonlight Express. The fixed routes and Dial-A-Ride operate every day of the year except Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day. Moonlight Express operates from 10:30 pm - 3:00 am on Friday and Saturday nights, during fall and spring semesters. All fixed route trips are wheelchair accessible, provide bike transportation racks and accommodate service animals.
https://www.cyride.com/about-us

Rummage Rampage
The ISU Office of Sustainability and the City of Ames collaborate on an initiative to reduce the amount of waste generated as students move to/from Ames during lease turnover. The city provides use of the intermodal facility parking garage adjacent to campus and the Campustown commercial/residential area to offer a nine-day community garage sale for items determined unneeded, but useful, during the moving process. Several ISU student clubs and community non-profit organizations volunteer time to inventory, sort, arrange and sell a myriad of donated items. All proceeds are distributed to the organizations volunteering their time - based on the percentage of total donated volunteer hours. The 2022 event saw the diversion of 70 tons of items and nearly $50,000 raised to support volunteering organizations.

Earth Month
An annual awareness campaign that includes events both on campus and within the Ames community is Earth Week. Events are open to everyone. Past events include community volunteer projects, public lectures, documentary screenings, book swaps and drives and hands-on opportunities (gardening, bee hotels, seed bombs).

Stash the Trash
ISU Stash the Trash is an annual community beautification event bringing together Iowa State students, faculty and staff, and Ames organizations, businesses and community members, for a day of clean-up and litter removal throughout the community.

College Creek Clean-Up
The Office of Sustainability hosts an annual creek clean-up event - focused on a local waterway flowing through campus and the Ames community. ISU students, faculty and staff, and Ames community members remove litter from approximately 3 miles of waterway, during the event and local businesses provide support in the form of refreshments and thank you giveaways.

Research to Make Spraying Apple Orchards Cost-Effective and Sustainable
A professor of plant pathology and microbiology and their team of researchers at Iowa State University partnered with researchers at The Ohio State University and the USDA-Agricultural Research Service (ARS) to find ways to decrease the amount of chemicals applied to an orchard while maintaining the orchard’s health. The researchers worked with six orchards among the two states, including ones near Cambridge and Jefferson, Iowa, as well as at the ISU Horticulture Research Station north of Ames, to conduct research and host on-farm demonstration trials. Monthly meetings take place via Zoom to keep the entire team of researchers, students and orchard owners updated. The team has also been creative in sharing their research progress through a website, blog posts, podcasts and short videos.

Iowa State Dining and Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services (IVRS)
Iowa State Dining collaborates with IVRS to bring individuals with various disabilities into Dining locations and provide employment opportunities. The program’s goal is to employ, through temporary positions, six individuals in two on-campus locations. Upon their recommendation by IVRS, these individuals will be hired on a temporary basis - with the hope of preparing them to apply for available full-time positions in the future.

Iowa State University and US State Department
Through a one-of-a-kind partnership with the U.S. Department of State, Iowa State students are working on historic preservation projects at U.S. diplomatic properties around the world. There are more than 200 historic U.S. diplomatic properties around the world. However, records about the history of these buildings are few and far between. The State Department gets much-needed documentation of the historic and culturally important elements of its properties abroad; faculty get to share their expertise with students and expand upon their research; students get to learn the intricacies of historic preservation work with real sites, and the public gets to see inside U.S. embassies and ambassador’s residences that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see. Students and faculty have been to seven countries so far, with a class traveling abroad nearly every semester.

Ames Worksite Wellbeing Collaboration
Through the Healthiest Ames Initiative (founded in 2011), Iowa State University is a charter member of the Ames Worksite Wellbeing Collaboration (AWWC), which seeks to cultivate a community of health and wellbeing through Ames employers. They provide a forum for professionals to share ideas and best practices in supporting employee health and wellbeing and education, tools, and resources to encourage healthy lifestyles. The Healthiest Ames Initiative has four main areas of focus: healthy food choices, physical activity, health condition awareness, and community connectedness. Each year, Healthiest Ames partners with Mary Greeley Medical Foundation and Skunk River Cycles (a local bike shop) to provide area third graders with free helmets to encourage safety while engaging in healthy activities like bicycling, scootering, and roller skating.

Egg Industry Center + Egg industry LCA
A national-level life cycle assessment of the US Egg Industry is underway through Iowa State’s Egg Industry Center. The Center’s outreach activities include annual educational event that moves around the country discussing research and industry issues, educational presentations as requested by university colleagues, national and international organizations, and allied industry companies, funding of egg research through the Egg Industry Center grant program, which has currently funded 14 universities throughout North America, and infusion of scientific information into egg farming and allied industry companies decision processes (e.g. environmental monitoring, quantification of changes in technology, financial analysis, etc.). After the analysis is completed, the Egg Industry Center will work with the United Egg Producers and the American Egg Board to communicate the results of the sustainability assessment with the farmers that assisted in providing data.

Sustainable Cities Team Partnership with City of Des Moines
The Sustainable Cities Team was founded in 2015 and funded by an ISU Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research (PIIR) grant. In 2019, the team received a $2.5 million grant in 2019 from the National Science Foundation to develop a framework for analysis of food, energy and water systems for greater Des Moines, which includes the city and the surrounding six-county area, and to formulate scenarios that could result in a more sustainable city. The team includes scientists from a wide range of disciplines at Iowa State University, the University of Northern Iowa and University of Texas at Arlington. The group intends for its results to inform decisions about food production, energy use, environmental outcomes and related policies that would apply to a large number of cities in rain-fed climates similar to Des Moines, Iowa. Their innovative approach could help cities conserve building and transportation energy, reduce environmental impacts and improve city sustainability.

3D-Printed Housing for Rural Iowa
The College of Design’s 3D Affordable Innovative Technologies (3D AIT) Housing Project, received a $1.4 million Strategic Infrastructure Program (SIP) grant in 2021 to aid the response to high housing demand in rural communities fueled by ex-urban migration, growing acceptance of remote work, and rising costs of urban living. The team’s focus is on a partnership with Hamburg, Iowa to complete a demonstration build as part of a 40-unit 3D concrete construction development to aid the community’s recovery efforts from 2019 flooding.

Iowa’s Living Roadways Community Visioning
The Community Visioning Program integrates landscape planning and design with sustainable action to empower community leaders and volunteers in making sound, meaningful decisions about the local landscape. Anchored by a committee of local residents, communities work closely with technical experts from Trees Forever, a private-sector landscape architect, and the Iowa State University Department of Landscape Architecture to create transportation enhancement plans, reflecting the values and identity of the community. Throughout the planning process, the committee identifies and investigates the physical and cultural dimensions of landscape issues, sets goals for change, and develops implementation strategies for meeting community goals. Successful completion of the visioning process results in a transportation enhancement plan and implementation strategies that empower communities to build meaningful townscapes, step by step, as resources become available. Iowa State University project staff conducts assessments of the local bioregion for each community. Project staff and design interns facilitate focus groups and photo mapping with different transportation user groups to identify community assets and barriers. Larger communities are surveyed to learn about transportation-related needs and behaviors.

Alternative Breaks
The Iowa State University Alternative Breaks program partners with communities across the United States to place teams of students in community service opportunities during fall and spring semester breaks. Students perform short-term projects for community agencies and learn about various social issues. In Spring 2022, students worked on Hurricane Ida relief in Louisiana, environmental stewardship in Georgia’s Cloudland Canyon State Park, and partnered with Serve901 to engage in community service activities across the Memphis metro area.

ASSET
The ASSET (Analysis of Social Services Evaluation Team) process has existed in Story County since 1985. It brings together four major funders of human services programs in a collaborative, volunteer-led effort to coordinate local planning, assess needs, evaluate the capabilities of agencies to provide programs and recommend funding for programs. It is funded by The City of Ames, ISU Student Government, Story County, and United Way of Story County. Each group determines their own funding priorities that guide ASSET in the decision-making process.

Ames Climate Action Plan
As part of the inaugural City of Ames Climate Action Plan, members of the ISU community (one faculty, one staff and four students), are serving on the 27-member Supplemental Input Committee (SIC). The SIC is charged with assisting in the carbon reduction goal setting and development of the plan by providing input and feedback from the sectors they represent, as well as determining outreach strategies to engage others within their community sector.

https://www.cityofames.org/living/rummage-rampage
https://www.livegreen.iastate.edu/take-action/live-green-calendar/2022-earth-month-calendar
https://www.cityofames.org/Home/Components/Calendar/Event/10066/31?curm=4&cury=2022
https://www.livegreen.iastate.edu/take-action/green-events/college-creek-cleanup
https://www.cals.iastate.edu/news/releases/researchers-work-make-spray-application-more-cost-effective-sustainable-apple-growers
https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2022/02/09/historic-preservation
https://www.healthiestames.org/copy-of-about-us
https://www.eggindustrycenter.org/about-us
https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2016/10/26/bigdata-passe
https://www.news.iastate.edu/news/2021/12/20/3dhomes
https://www.communityvisioning.org/about/
https://tinyurl.com/yex79k8b
https://www.storycountyasset.org/
https://confluence.mysocialpinpoint.com/ames-climate-action-plan