Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We are thrilled to report that this year's Winter Forum, the tenth such event to be held during the first week of December, ranks among the most successful ever. The Forum was opened by Chancellor Sylvia Manning who described the transformation of the Great Cities Initiative into a Commitment, thereby further emphasizing the place of Great Cities in the mission of UIC. She went on to introduce the founder of Great Cities, President James Stukel, who, early during his tenure as Chancellor of UIC set in motion a historic campus and city-wide process that culminated in the creation not only of the Great Cities Initiative, but the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, the joint (CUPPA and College of Art and Architecture) City Design Center and, of course, the Great Cities Institute. President Stukel described for over 500 attendees at the opening session the history of Great Cities and how it has become a national model for what is now termed "the engaged university."

This year's Forum attracted over 650 registrants. They are comprised of the most diverse academic and civic list ever and we look forward to sending on our summary of the Winter Forum to everyone who registered. A product of partnerships with the National League of Cities and WBEZ public radio, the Forum and its panels attracted local and national media attention-from two local public radio programs to columns in major urban newspapers across the country, including the Washington Times. But most importantly, the Forum lived up to its reputation as Chicago's "town hall meeting," where leaders, citizens, experts and scholars came together to address the question "Where We Stand?" In sessions covering topics ranging from public finance to homicide and immigration to regionalism, we discussed the state of cities relative to global forces and street level realities. The conversation was brisk, exciting and above all engaged-thereby embodying the very hallmark of Great Cities-the process of full engagement of the university with the city of Chicago and the other "great cities" of the world.

The Tenth Winter Forum closed with an address by former Mayor Wellington Webb of Denver and most recently of the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. Mayor Webb spoke about the challenges of urban leadership and what it takes to lead cities in an era of global change and new local developmental realities. His remarks were a fitting end to a truly exciting meeting-challenging in ways that one would expect from the immediate past President of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

In the upcoming weeks, we plan to disseminate the summary of the Winter Forum on our website and in the mail. Also, make sure you stay tuned for the many lectures and seminars coming this winter and spring at GCI. Our first event is Tuesday, January 13 at 3pm, when distinguished Great Cities Faculty Scholar Ann Feldman will report on the path breaking research she is conducting on "ordinary writing" as a means of learning and educational advancement for urban students. Come join us for a wonderful lecture, good conversation and tasty refreshments. We hope you will join us in starting the new year off in such a stimulating manner.

David Perry Professor and Director	Lauri Alpern Associate Director

News

Thomas Lyons, Ph.D. is a new Research Associate at the Great Cities Institute. He is working with Paul Goldstein on the Healthcare Needs of Addicted Criminal Offenders project. Tom will also be pursuing research on the relationship between HIV risk and recovery from drug and alcohol abuse with a small grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Tom holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He was an associate investigator at the Chicago VA and Northwestern University Medical School, and was most recently a post-doctoral fellow at the George Washington University. He has written about literary narrative in anthropology, HIV treatment in the hospital, and health literacy.

Calendar

Great Cities Institute Faculty Scholar Seminar Series
Tuesday, February 10, 2004, 3pm
Young Children's Bilingual, Metalinguistic and Communicative Development in a Chicago School
Irma Olmedo, Associate Professor
Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education

People

Tanya Anderson, Faculty Scholar, was awarded a grant by the Stanley McNeil Foundation to further the work that she had proposed as a part of her Great Cities Faculty Scholar year. The project, "PTSD in Urban Minority Youth," will compare several currently available assessment tools versus the gold standard of the clinical interview by a child and adolescent psychiatrist to compare the assessment tools' accuracy in diagnosing this disorder in urban minority children. The grant will fund the collection of a substantial amount of pilot data and its analysis in order to further the project.

Michael Pagano, Faculty Fellow, has been awarded an 18-month contract from the Pew Charitable Trusts to serve as a grading team leader for the Government Performance Project to assess the management capacity of the American states. The management capacity of states has been divided into four arenas, Information Management, Human Resource Management, Financial Management, and Infrastructure Management. Dr. Pagano is responsible for developing appropriate indicators to properly evaluate the management of physical assets in state governments. To assist in the project, five Research Assistants will begin work in early January to collect and analyze state documents on infrastructure management. This collaborative project includes other principal investigators at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, George Washington University, Georgia State University and Lynchburg College. In addition to the principal investigators, journalists from Governing magazine and a support staff in Washington, DC are responsible for developing a "grading" system for state management capacity. The results of the study will be published in the February 2005 issue of Governing.

Michael Pagano, Faculty Fellow and UPP Professor Rachel Weber finished a project for Policy Solutions, Ltd., which was sponsored by the city of Chicago, on "Green Infrastructure" and the applicability of a variety of financing schemes to environmentally friendly and sustainable infrastructures for the city.

Faculty Scholar Spotlight

Ann M. Feldman, associate professor of English, directs the first-year writing program at UIC. Her scholarly interests include writing in the disciplines, genre theory, service learning, higher education, and social theories of writing. As the director of the first-year writing program, she teaches the graduate seminar to train new teaching assistants, develops curricula, and assesses learning for the program's 2,500 students. She has written two textbooks that offer a conceptual framework for the writing program's required courses: Writing and Learning in the Disciplines (HarperCollins, 1996) and In Context: Participating in Cultural Conversations (with Nancy Downs and Ellen McManus, Addison-Wesley Longman, 2002). Currently, Ann Feldman is working on a book, Ordinary Writing in the Engaged University, that looks at how writing programs in metropolitan settings can recapture a sense of the ordinary - writing that has real consequences and that offers a way to participate effectively in civic society as well as in academic contexts.