Initiative brought faculty, students into community

Partnerships formed between Montclair State University (MSU) and the Montclair community, and the documentary film series about The Township’s ongoing evolution, were recognized during a gathering at the Montclair Public Library this rest Monday, Oct. 25.

The event held by MSU's Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) celebrated the outcomes of a three-year effort funded by a $400,000 grant by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which MSU received in September 2001.

COPC Program Director Freyda Lazarus said that while there ad been previous community outreach efforts by MSU, the "stakes were higher" in tiffs particular initiative.

"This was not just a grant project, but the first formal, total university effort to foster civic education," Lazarus said. “It was our job to lead curricular, co-curricular and technical assistance initiatives into a holistic, integrated campus/community approach to social community issues.”

The program's focus was addressing issues in the Pine Street and Glenfield Park neighborhoods, and Lazarus said that the key to its success was in the partnerships that were formed with 11 community organizations in those areas of the township.

Beverly Riddick, executive director of HOMECorp, the township's community-based affordable housing agency, credited the COPC program with improving her organization's first-time home-buyer counseling program.

"For a homebuyer to take a course and get a HUD certificate, they can take that to the bank, literally," Riddick said.

The courses provided in the partnership between COPC and HOMECorp helped first-time homebuyers knowledgeably approach the mortgage application process, she said, increasing their credibility with lenders.

"COPC has taught us the benefits of working together,” said Roger Costa, executive director of the United Way of North Essex, .one of the other agencies working in the COPC partnership.

'The problems in any community are very complex,” Costa said. 'There is no one organization that can deal with all of them effectively."

In his remarks, Mayor Ed Remsen agreed with Costa's point.

"Townships are at their best when they are not trying to own everything and do everything, but instead try to offer a lot of services to its citizens in partnerships,” Remsen said.

Remsen, who had recently sent his first letter to Montclair residents as mayor that accompanied this year's tax bill, said that working with nonprofit organizations, including HOMECorp and the Montclair Economic Development Corp., help provide services to residents with economic efficiency.

Montclair Director of Planning and Community Development Karen Kadus, who assisted Lazarus in applying for the HUD grant, acknowledged some of the challenges the COPC program faced.
"The challenge here was to match the skills of the university to the urban problems we identified, with input from neighborhood residents,” Kadus said.

While Kadus said that the COPC experience gave her a deeper understanding of what the university has to offer the community, she noted that HUD's guidelines prohibited simply using the grant money for short-term solutions.

The grant funded the application of university knowledge to real community problems she said. "We could not purchase school buses and food for the homeless."

The guidelines identified four areas in which the grant was to be applied.

As part of meeting the requirement of improving housing, COPC held several workshops aimed at educating tenants and homebuyers about, their fights, as well as how to financially prepare to buy a home.

In the project's community-organizing effort, COPC embarked on a community-asset mapping project in 2002, which, when combined with geographical-information software, will display the locations in Montclair of community organization and associations.

After-school mentoring was part of the COPC Urban Education Initiative, in which middle school students received weekly academic advising from MSU students in the Emerging Leader Learning Community.

One of the most tangible outcomes of the COPC grant, the production of a documentary video, was part of the dissemination component of the project.

"Montclair: An Evolving Community,” premiered on Monday night before the more than 50 people at the event, and featured several familiar Montclair faces recalling the integrated past of the Pine Street and Glenfield Park neighborhoods.

The film is related to a three-part series on Montclair created by the "Carpe Diem" television show, videotaped at MSU, that will be broadcast on local cable access Channel 34 on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 11 p.m., and Saturday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday at 1 p.m. during the first three weeks of November.

To view the COPC video Click Here.

There was plenty of interest expressed in building upon the groundwork that had been laid by the COPC grant.