November 4, 2005

Voorhees Gift Expands Community Research

The University of Illinois at Chicago has received a $100,000 gift from Alan Voorhees to support the Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement.

The gift will expand programs and facilities at the center, which is housed in the UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs.

Voorhees helped start the center with a major gift in 1979, when he served as dean of the UIC College of Architecture, Arts, and Urban Science. The center is named in honor of his wife, who died in 2000.

"The Voorhees Center was the model for UIC's Great Cities Institute," said Robin Hambleton, dean of the UIC College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. "As it expands its work, it embodies the university's Great Cities commitment to improve the quality of urban life through engaged research in the community."

The center helps revitalize Chicago-area neighborhoods through applied research and technical assistance to community, civic, and government agencies. It specializes in affordable housing, including public housing policy and housing finance.

With the new funding, the Voorhees Center will keep its focus on affordable housing and will expand into housing-related issues such as transportation, job access, and economic development in collaboration with other UIC entities.

The center's co-directors also plan to upgrade technology while their space is remodeled later this year. Eventually, the staff of faculty and graduate students will be expanded.

Voorhees said his support for the center has always stemmed from his concern about "economic colonization," which he defined as clusters of poor people in neighborhoods that have little access to adequate housing and transportation.

"It's a nationwide problem," Voorhees said. "I saw it around the university some time ago, and I felt UIC should get involved."

He noted the center's advantages in working with city government and credited a city professional for steering him toward the position of dean in the 1970s.

Voorhees, who holds a degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a successful consultant, investor, and a past president of the American Institute of Planners (now the American Planning Association) before serving as dean.

"Academia was a big step," he said. "I went into it because I loved Chicago, and my wife and I enjoyed it."

For information about the Voorhees Center, visit
www.uic.edu/cuppa/voorheesctr/

UIC ranks among the nation's top 50 universities in federal research funding and is Chicago's largest university with 25,000 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state's major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.

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