Dear Friends and Colleagues,

February is a busy month for all of us at the Great Cities Institute and for engaged research throughout the UIC campus. We began the month with our active participation in the UIC Faculty Senate-sponsored meeting on "The Engaged University: Evaluating and Rewarding Engaged Scholarship." With over 200 attendees, the meeting took the notion of the engaged university to a whole new level on campus. We will close the month with Peer Review Panel sessions evaluating submissions to Great Cities Faculty Seed Fund and the Great Cities Faculty Scholar Competition. All three of these activities are meant to advance the very highest levels of academic excellence in engaged research at UIC.

If you have timely information that you would like to share with others in the GCI community, please drop us a line at gcities@uic.edu or 312.996.8700. All the best to you.

David Perry Professor and Director	Lauri Alpern Associate Director

Eliminating the Digital Divide Gains Momentum with New Funding
Addressing the digital divide and bringing technology applications to community development are two key priorities of the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative. With funding from the State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs, Instituto Progreso del Latino (IPL) and the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative will begin a one-year program to: 1) use Internet and computer technology to enhance and expand the network of education, training and employment services at IPL, 2) establish a family computer literacy program, 3) use computer and internet-based software to enhance instruction and 4) expand resident access to internet-based educational and employment information.

Contact: Atanacio "Nacho" Gonzalez, Coordinator, UIC Neighborhoods Initiative, 312-996-7194, nacho@uic.edu.


Registration Open for Online CNM Spring Courses
Online Certificate in Nonprofit Management (CNM) Spring Registration - CNM is accepting registration for spring courses, which begin March 21st (registration must be received by March 14th). Class offerings for this session are Operations Management for Nonprofit Organizations and Strategic Management for Nonprofit Organizations.

Contact: John Mudd, Program Coordinator, 312-996-5167, jmudd1@uic.edu.

Calendar
Scaling Down: Fiscal Enclaves in the Entrepreneurial City
Thursday, February 21, 2002
This Great Cities Institute lecture series for February will feature Rachel Weber, Assistant Professor, Urban Planning and Policy. The lecture will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Great Cities Institute, 412 South Peoria, Suite 400.

Voorhees/UICUED Presentations
All of the presentations will be held in the UICUED/Voorhees conference room, 2nd floor, 400 South Peoria from 12:30 to 1:30pm. The discussion topics and dates are as follows:

Wednesday, March 6
Gentrification in West Town: Contested Ground

Wednesday, March 20
Chicago's Undocumented Immigrants: An Analysis of Wages, Working Conditions and Economic Contributions

Wednesday, April 3
Discussion of essay: "How to Win the War of Ideas: Lessons from the Gramscian Right", by Susan George

People
We are pleased to welcome to UIC new Visiting Assistant Director of the Great Cities Urban Data Visualization Lab, Dr. Laxmi Ramasubramanian. Prof. Ramasubramanian has a background in public participation GIS, architecture, visualization, community development and community information technology. Among other projects, Dr. Ramasubramanian will be working with the UIC Neighborhoods Initiatives on technology applications for community planning.

We also want to welcome to UIC two new, nationally regarded researchers and academic leaders in interdisciplinary policy scholarship, Dr. Susan Curry, Professor of Health Policy Administration and newly named Director of the UIC Health Research and Policy Centers and Dr. Thomas Theis, Professor of Civil Engineering and the new director of the Institute of Environmental Science and Policy. Both directors will visit GCI this month and we hope to build strong new linkages with these important centers of research.

GCI Associate Director Lauri Alpern, UIC Neighborhoods Initiative Director Cynthia Barnes-Boyd and West Side Future Executive Director Angela Ellison, led a workshop at the January conference of the American Association of Higher Education. The workshop, "Partnerships and Partnership Agreements in Engaged Research and Scholarship," was highly interactive and provided practical applications for university-community partnerships.

GCI's Marilyn Ruiz provided conference planning guidance and oversight for the February 8th Engaged Scholarship conference held at UIC's Chicago Circle Center.

A Brookings Institution report by GCI Fellow Michael A. Pagano, and Ann M. O'Bowman, was abstracted in a recent issue of Housing Facts & Findings, a publication of the Fannie Mae Foundation. The one-page article titled, "Vacant Land Presents Problems and Opportunities" can be viewed at http://www.fanniemaefoundation.org/programs/hff/v3i1-sidebar1.shtml.

On February 1st, GCI Fellow Davis Jenkins led a panel discussion, at the Work, Welfare and Families conference co-sponsored by Women Employed Institute and the Great Cities Institute. The conference was a meeting of educators and policy makers working on improving access to higher education for low-income adult students in Illinois. The discussion led by Jenkins was about creating pathways for advancement of disadvantaged adult learners.

GCI Graduate Research Assistant, Anupam Rath, was featured in the January 14, 2002 edition of Crain's Chicago Business. Rath was both pictured and quoted in an article regarding the high technology workforce and job-hunting in technology fields.

GCI Faculty Scholar Spotlight
Each month we are pleased to introduce you to one of the GCI faculty scholars spending the year with us.

An Assistant Professor of Art History at UIC, Deborah Fausch is an architect with eight years of practice experience that focused on HUD housing and commercial buildings. While working on her doctorate at Princeton, Dr. Fausch became interested in the ideas of Venturi and Scott Brown, "one of the few contemporary architectural firms with a developed theory of meaning in architecture, as a result of trying to understand how ordinary people relate to architectural and urban forms." Her current work on Venturi and Scott Brown involves understanding how urban environments are formed and how those forms can be altered. As an architect and designer, Dr. Fausch worked for Edwin Schlossberg, Inc. and the Project for Public Spaces in New York, and Ritter Suppes Plautz Architects in Minneapolis. She taught urban and architectural, urban and landscape design as part of a cultural matrix. Among her publications include articles in the Encyclopedia of Modern Architecture and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Dr. Fausch holds a Master's in Liberal Studies from the New School for Social Research and a Ph.D. in History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture from Princeton University, in addition to an undergraduate architecture degree from the University of Minnesota, an undergraduate physics degree from Carleton College and further graduate study in physics at Brown University.