Northeastern University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

The mission of the Green Ribbon Commission is to convene leaders from Boston’s key sectors to support the outcomes of the City’s Climate Action Plan. https://www.greenribboncommission.org/work/higher-education-working-group/

Funded through the Global Resilience Institute, Northeastern University’s Center on Crime and Community Resilience supports multi-disciplinary research in eight strategic focus areas that exist across GRI and Northeastern. The center is focused on collaborating with the City of Boston to understand and address persistent public safety problems. The establishment of this research infrastructure better positions Northeastern to acquire the necessary external funding to support action-oriented research on crime and community resilience issues in other cities across the U.S. and internationally. The GRI also addresses social networks: how they’re used, that they are central to the question of resilience, and that they are often measured using surveys which can be both costly and time consuming, therefore greatly limiting the ability to track them over time or to observe the activation during disruptive events. This project seeks to develop a set of methods that leverage social media data — specifically Twitter activity —to quantify the social networks and processes of geographically-based communities.The project will provide a novel vantage point on social resilience that is cheaper and potentially capable of observing the social dynamics of communities in real time. The objective is to enable original research and policies that seek to understand and support communities under both long-term and acute duress. The interdisciplinary project team, which features representatives from the Colleges of Social Sciences and Humanities, Engineering, and Computer and Information Science, combines ways of thinking about the social organization of urban neighborhoods, networks and resilience, the proper use and interpretation of modern digital data, and computer-scientific gathering and processing of such information.

The agreement builds upon a letter of intent signed in May 2016 by Northeastern and the University of Havana’s School of Communication, in which both institutions agreed to create joint research collaborations and global experiential learning opportunities for Northeastern students. The new agreement significantly expands the scope of the institutions’ partnership to include Northeastern’s research across disciplines and students across its colleges. Also in May 2016, Northeastern signed a memorandum of understanding with the Fundación Antonio Núñez Jiménez, or FANJ, an environmental research non-governmental organization that primarily engages in studying the impacts of climate change on Cuba and promoting the environmental-consciousness of the Cuban people. That agreement called for FANJ to accept co-op students and work with Northeastern faculty to establish joint marine science, environmental sustainability, and social science-related research projects. https://news.northeastern.edu/2017/02/27/northeastern-signs-historic-agreement-with-univ-of-havana/

Boston Area Research Institute: https://cssh.northeastern.edu/bari/ BARI supports research-policy collaborations, BARI projects provide insights into daily life in greater Boston, help policymakers and practitioners to better serve their constituencies, and increase our understanding of human behavior. Northeastern University Environmental Justice Research Collaborative: https://web.northeastern.edu/nejrc/who-we-are/about/ The Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative (NEJRC) is a multidisciplinary research collaborative made up of scholars engaged in political ecology and environmental justice initiatives.Based at Northeastern University in Boston, the collaborative works on a wide range of local, regional, national, and international topics and issues. https://bouve.northeastern.edu/nu-pel/about-nu-pel/ NU-PEL is an interdisciplinary lab comprised of faculty and student teams conducting evaluation research on what is or is not successful in various community programs that leads to healthier communities and enhances the lives of those living within them. The lab is a collaboration of the Institute on Health Equity and Social Justice Research in Bouvé College of Health Sciences and the Institute on Race and Justice in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. The overall vision of NU-PEL is to build a community-academic partnership to improve our communities and the well-being of the people living in them through the use of evaluation research. This is accomplished by bringing together expertise and resources to advance the theory, practice, and utilization of evaluation through research, education, and service.