51. Better Together: Coeur d'Alene Reservation Communities and the University of Idaho
- Author
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Salant, Priscilla and Laumatia, Laura
- Abstract
The Coeur d'Alene Reservation spans 345,000 acres of mountains and farmland in northern Idaho. Most people on the reservation live in the communities of Worley, Plummer, Tensed, and Desmet. Roughly 50 miles south of Plummer is the University of Idaho's main campus in Moscow. The university is Idaho's land-grant institution, with a statewide mission of teaching, research, and outreach. Through its strategic plan, the university is committed to partnerships like Better Together, a university-community partnership in which university faculty members and students work across disciplines to address critical issues, side by side with communities. Better Together brought together two university programs--Horizons and the Building Sustainable Communities Initiative (BSCI)--with people in communities on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation. The communities partnered with the university through University of Idaho Extension's Horizons program to expand leadership capacity and reduce poverty. For its part, the university partnered with the communities first as part of its outreach mission (through Horizons), and then, building from the Horizons relationship, to give its students real-world learning experiences. From 2006 through 2009, local residents interacted with University of Idaho faculty members and students in a variety of settings--community leadership training, broad-based community visioning, activities to reduce poverty, land use planning sessions, and social events. Two years after the main programs ended, there are positive outcomes for the communities as well as the university. This article describes the University of Idaho's partnership with the Coeur d'Alene Reservation Communities, which was awarded a 2010 Outreach Scholarship/W. K. Kellogg Foundation Engagement Award for the Western Region. (Contains 1 figure.)
- Published
- 2011