Community Engagement in Higher Ed
S
ystemic change is hard —
especially in education. In
2009, when Gensler began
working with Lynn University to
mesh their 2020 academic vision
with a new masterplan, we knew
our approach had to be different.
How could we plan for, support,
and enable growth with so many
diverse stakeholders at play? The
answer was a unique strategy of
community engagement. Here’s
how we got it done.
What Community
Engagement Means
The first step in engaging with the
community is identifying stakehold-
ers. Stakeholders are those people or
entities who have a role to play in the
success of your endeavor. Here, we
knew our community ranged from
long-tenured faculty and a growing
population of students, to local zoning,
traffic and neighborhood officials. Lynn
and Gensler decided to face these chal-
lenges head-on and seek stakeholder
input from the early stage of planning.
The next step was to begin the
visioning process, in which we identify
consistent messages, aspirations, and
our constraints. Success in this area re-
quires openness to other people’s ideas
and the strength to do what’s best for
the campus mission and community.
Some consistent themes that came
out of our visioning process for the
masterplan at Lynn included:
• Fundraising and building a new
student center at the heart of campus
• Building a new residence hall to
keep students on campus in a
pedestrian-centric environment
• Modernizing academic classrooms
• Creating a more sustainable campus
• Resolving parking and traffic issues
that were a concern to the city
Seeking stakeholder input can be
scary, but it made a world of differ-
ence in our effort. When your team is
heard it communicates that you care
about what they think. While every
verbalized concern, wish and dream
cannot be accommodated, your team
will be behind you if you have treated
their concerns with the highest level of
consideration.
Start with the board, the faculty,
and the staff — but don’t leave out the
students, the city, or the neighbors in the
master planning process. With Lynn, we
identified and met with 350 stakehold-
ers. We held 29 individual interviews and
involved hundreds of faculty, staff, and
students in visioning sessions held over a
period of many weeks. We made it clear
we were interested in hearing what was
important to them. We sought their buy-
in and made sure they felt heard.
This process resulted in markers
of success for our masterplan that
became our mission and goals:
• Foster chances for financial growth
• Develop physical character of the
campus
• Integrate sustainability
• Fortify relations with the community
• Enhance the academic environment
• Design to improve campus life
How Community Engagement
Supports Growth
This next step involved laying the
groundwork for the growth the master-
plan envisioned. We began immediate-
ly on an infrastructure and academic
curriculum assessment and established
sustainable goals:
1) Vehicle circulation
We had to come up with a plan to
gradually adjust vehicular traffic to
campus perimeter. This was key to re-
alizing the pedestrian-friendly campus
that all stakeholders desired.
2) Pedestrian circulation
Gensler’s research on walkable
cities tells us that a walkable distance is
considered about 1,300 feet —rough-
ly, a five-minute walk. To create the
walkable campus that was a goal of
the visioning process, the masterplan
located critical student services to the
center of the campus within a walkable
five minutes of each other.
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