June 23, 2005
Perfect partners: UW, Heritage collaborate in Yakima
For people from the Seattle area, a trip to the Yakima Valley means encountering an environment very different from the one they’re used to.
The valley, once home to one of the largest agricultural areas in the country, has been hit hard by globalization, which has made its traditional crops less competitive. The wine industry is growing, as is the population of migrant workers, estimated at between 220,000 and 300,000. The region suffers from poverty, low educational attainment and uneven access to health care, as well as high crime. The future of the valley must lie in a creative combination of indigenous skills and interests combined with outside ideas and expertise.
That’s where the UW comes in. The UW has been involved in the Yakima valley for many years, particularly in the area of health. In 1997, with the founding of the UW Yakima Valley Community Partnership at Heritage University, the University made a commitment to maintaining and building upon this involvement.
In recent ceremonies at Heritage University in Toppenish, the UW rededicated itself to a long-term involvement with Heritage and the people of the valley. UW participants also helped to dedicate a tangible symbol of the partnerships, a Community Business and Training Center on the Heritage campus.
“Heritage University, the University of Washington and the community have come together to address real world problems and aspirations,” said Louis Fox, UW vice provost for educational partnerships and learning technologies. “In doing so, our education, our research and our institutions have been made better.”
A recent inventory shows that between 30 and 40 projects are under way that link UW and Heritage University teaching and research projects to community needs in the valley.
“In building this partnership we thought hard about how to establish a permanent presence for the UW in the Yakima Valley,” says Chris Goodheart, executive director of university-community partnerships. “We created a UW faculty advisory committee, created a local office at Heritage University and recruited a local leader.”
This led to the hiring of Robert Ozuna, the director of the UW-Yakima Valley Community Partnership who has deep roots in the area. He assembled a local advisory council, composed of representatives from major segments of the community in both the public and private sectors. They help to identify opportunities for the pooling of resources among local institutions, Heritage University and the UW.
A case study by Ken Symes illuminates the value of cooperation. “These communities want independence,” he said. “And they need additional knowledge for that. They want to improve the quality of their lives through education and economic opportunities, while maintaining their cultural heritage. For the UW students, there is great value in experiencing the valley’s multicultural setting. Through its work in the valley, the UW has made a lasting impact on these communities, by helping to solve local problems with new strategies, enhancing student learning and recruitment, and bringing new financial resources to the community.”
Surveys show that the UW’s continued presence in the valley has changed people’s views. “It used to be that people would think the UW comes here and takes,” says Enrique Morales, UW senior associate vice president for minority affairs. “The UW used to have a reputation for coming to the valley, doing a grant-funded study and then departing, leaving nothing behind. But with these new, long-term partnerships that’s no longer true.”
One of the major funding sources for the UW’s presence in the valley has been the federal department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). HUD money was responsible for the new building at Heritage. Another HUD grant funded a multitude of community development activities: a UW survey of the business community, an effort to jump-start neighborhood revitalization projects, a project to use information technologies for community betterment, a home ownership program, the creation of a consumer credit counseling service and the establishment of a digital archive of programming for the valley’s community radio station, KDNA.
The HUD grant has been instrumental in bringing UW expertise to bear on helping local businesses, according to Michael Verchot, director of the Business School’s Business and Economic Development Program. About a dozen UW faculty members have been offering classes, both in Spanish and English, to help small businesses. These classes deal with very practical subjects, such as reading financial statements. They are all geared around making management decisions,” Verchot said. He also has helped to bring retail management students to the town of Grandview to provide some ideas about revitalizing downtown businesses.
The HUD grant also has helped the town of Toppenish to broaden citizen involvement by reaching out to a Latino community. Jim Diers, adjunct professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, worked with school children and others to recreate a city park as a focus for community pride and activism. (Read the full story at http://admin.urel.washington.edu/uweek/archives/issue/uweek_story_small.asp?id=2338)
Besides the beautifully equipped park, one of the legacies of the successful partnership is the creation of a neighborhood matching grant program in Toppenish. “We’re working to teach people to empower themselves and to take control of the neighborhood,” says Toppenish City Manager Scott Staples.
Patricia Kelley, a business faculty member at UW Bothell, taught a semester-long course on benchmarking for small businesses in the Valley last spring. When she was approached by the city of Perugia, Italy, which is trying to develop its wine industry, to analyze the region’s effectiveness in economic development and marketing efforts, she saw a way to continue her involvement in the Valley. This summer, she will be leading a group of students to Italy to benchmark Italian practices, and to see if some of those ideas can help the wine industry in the Yakima Valley. “The wine industry needs an infrastructure,” she said, “to develop wine tourism, and to engage in markets around the world. This project gives us an unusual opportunity to further the education of UW Bothell students and also to provide support for one of our state’s communities.”
One of the important ways out of the valley’s persistent poverty (average income is just a little over half of that in King County) is through increased access and involvement in higher education, most people believe. Creating pathways to higher education for the valley’s young people requires special consideration and attention to detail. “Communication means learning to listen,” said Rusty Barceló, UW vice president for minority affairs and diversity. “Collaboration means including the community in the process. It means creating something that’s sustainable on which you follow through. And you need to assess continually how well you are doing.”
Successful outreach requires that approaches are personalized, says Kathleen Ross, president of Heritage University. “You can’t wait until someone is danger of dropping out. You need to be proactive and head off potential problems by using the results of research into what makes for a successful experience.”
While many speakers pointed with pride to the partnerships that spanned nearly a decade, they acknowledged that the issues which brought the partners together were going to require decades more of working together.
“By contributing to the Yakima Valley’s successful transition from a local, agricultural community to a global, market-driven one,” Morales said, “we create value for the entire state of Washington.”
To request a copy of the case study on the UW-Yakima Valley Community Partnership, please contact Sherry Edwards in Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies at sherrye@u.washington.edu, or 206-616-2181.
