We, the staff of IISC--Travis Kraus, director, and Jennifer New, public engagement specialist--are passionate about community. Travis serves on multiple boards related to planning and community engagement and both are active in local nonprofits. Our work in the community informs IISC projects and partnerships.

Dubuque city officials say they are seeking ways to implement recommendations made in a recently completed affordable housing action plan. The plan was created over the course of the 2023-24 school year by four University of Iowa graduate students who recommended various strategies the city can employ to move toward goals of sustainability, alleviating residents’ housing-cost burden and maximizing land for various types of housing.

Jamie Weinfurter, a recent MFA graduate of the UI's School of Art and Art History, will install her new sculpture that she made for and with the students of Dubuque's Audubon Elementary School.

IISC gives six awards to acknowledge outstanding contributions by UI faculty, students, and Iowa communities.

A community parks and recreation master plan is “a document that provides an inclusive framework for orderly and consistent planning; acquisition; development; and administration of the parks and recreation resources, programs, and facilities of the agency that sponsors the master plan.” (Source: American Association for Leisure and Recreation.) Because Bondurant is a rapidly growing community, it looked to IISC to create a plan that includes policies and frameworks for aligning parks and recreation services to accommodate its youthful and and growing population. The student team embraced the opportunity to support health initiatives and preserve and expand spaces for pollinators and other sustainability projects.

Students in the Community Empowerment Law Project spent Spring 2024 working with a wide array of partners in Dubuque to analyze the high degree of absenteeism among K-12 Marshallese students.

As the 2023-24 partnerships between the UI's Initiative for Sustainable Communities and the City of Bondurant and the City of Dubuque come to a close, there will be events in both communities to showcase the work that has been completed. UI students from across colleges and departments and will share research and plans they have done in collaboration with representatives from the two cities. Events are free and open to all.

Students who are part of two IISC projects in Dubuque this year, one focused on affordable housing and the other on alternative transportation, led a community engagement event in the city to hear directly from citizens.

Four UI graduate students combine their interests in economic development, sustainability, and transportation to create a concise plan for affordable housing in Dubuque.

Lorin Ditzler received her MS in Urban and Regional Planning from the UI in 2011. She was part of one of the earliest IISC teams during Fall 2010, working on a project in Decorah. One of her current planning projects is in Bondurant. Today, Lorin serves as associate director of Keep Iowa Beautiful and as a planner with a Des Moines-based public art consulting firm.