By Emily Huizenga, News Staff
As work on the university’s most recent Institutional Master Plan (IMP) winds down, local residents, city officials and Northeastern administrators focused on a new business initiative and outreach in Roxbury at the two-hour-long Community Task Force Meeting on Tuesday.
Since Northeastern filed its Institutional Master Plan Notification Form last December, members of both the administration and Task Force have met monthly to turn over details of the IMP, which directs the university’s goals and development for roughly the next decade. The Task Force will weigh in on an updated draft of the IMP early next month before it is finalized shortly afterward.
At the meeting Tuesday, Ronald Walker, president and managing partner of Next Street Financial, introduced a two-phase agreement the university and Next Street settled just last week.
Next Street is a merchant bank that seeks to grow small businesses by connecting them with larger institutions, providing access to capital and strategic advice to ensure both parties benefit from the partnership. During the next three to four months – phase one of the initiative – analysts at Next Street will assess Northeastern’s current procurement of local and minority vendors. In phase two, the bank will fill gaps in the university’s building plan with local vendors from their own network, effectively creating an ecosystem of small businesses recruited for Northeastern initiatives.
“Northeastern has a track record of doing business in the community,” Walker said. “We want to see where it’s working and where there’s an opportunity to make it better.”
Multiple Task Force members expressed approval of Next Street’s commitment to seek minority and women vendors in particular, as increasing the number of locally employed vendors and contractors has been a goal of the Task Force all year.
But Boston city councilor Tito Jackson said the current broad plan would not be enough.
“At the end of the day, we’re going to need numbers; we’re going to need a number for when we started and one for when we’re done,” he said. “We’re not going to be OK with, ‘we’re going to get better.’”
Walker said that at this point, Next Street intends to stay involved in Northeastern’s employment activities all the way through implementation, and will provide executive studies and specific numbers relative to goals as they materialize.
Discussion then shifted to Northeastern’s community outreach, particularly in Roxbury. In response to past requests from the Task Force for current university community initiatives, John Tobin, Northeastern’s vice president of city and community affairs, presented data detailing how many Boston residents Northeastern employs, instructs and aids financially.
Currently, Northeastern enrolls 471 undergraduates who are residents of Boston. Additionally, 949 Boston residents are enrolled in the part-time College of Professional Studies program, 544 study in the graduate school and 84 pursue degrees in the School of Law.
“Northeastern has more than 200 community programs and services,” Tobin said. “But if we don’t tell you about them, perhaps they’re not as effective as they should be, and we’re working to fix that.”
Tobin touted the success of Foundation Year, the university’s college preparatory program for first year students. The program is open only to graduates of Boston Public Schools and has yielded a college completion percentage of 87 – roughly 30 percent higher than the national average and the highest of any college in Boston, including Northeastern’s overall rate of 79 percent.
But discussion soon morphed again as certain Task Force and community members expressed disdain for what they perceived to be a flawed attitude in Northeastern administrators and students regarding the school’s role in the community.
“It shouldn’t be Northeastern helping the community, it should be, ‘how is the community helping Northeastern or being integrated here?” said Derek Lumpkins, a resident of Roxbury. “We need to create milestones – specific goals to change the language being used and the mindset that goes around this.”
Jackson said it “breaks [his] heart” to see “beautiful” flat screen televisions in International Village clearly visible to minority neighborhoods via the dining hall’s large glass windows. He urged administrators to do more to “cross-pollinate” campus and community.
Mission Hill resident and high school student Vickie Miranda said she lives steps away from Northeastern on Whittier Street but feels “uncomfortable” walking through campus.
“For me, I’ve just been trying to cross the street and been watched by police here,” Miranda said. “And other students who go on campus are being watched as well.”
She added that conversely, she’s spoken to Northeastern students who are scared to walk through her neighborhood. “How are you going to get Northeastern students to connect with other students in the community?”
For his part, Tobin said he “firmly” disagreed with Miranda, explaining that almost all the students he speaks to say they come to Northeastern because they want to be part of the Boston community and that includes spending time in nearby neighborhoods. He said he would be happy to arrange a meeting with Miranda, her schoolmates and campus police to further discuss the issue in detail.
Speaking for some of her neighbors, Jane Hartmann of Fenway said senior citizens would like more access to Northeastern facilities and events. She listed library cards, opportunities to audit courses and passes for concerts, theater performances and “little musical events” on campus as resources seniors want made available to them.
“It brings people to the campus and brings people to the students,” she said. “It’s not rocket science.”
Tobin said a proposed plan for a Northeastern Neighborhood Center could assuage these desires. The center, described as a “one-stop shop” for community members seeking information about opportunities for campus engagement, would join a proposed Neighborhood Council consisting of nominated members of the community. The council would meet regularly to address problems brought forth by the community and keep the lines of communication open between the university and its neighboring residents.
He added that meanwhile, Hartmann and her neighbors are always welcome to go directly to him for passes to Northeastern events.
To conclude the meeting, an independent researcher employed to conduct a housing impact study last month briefly reviewed her findings thus far.
In the 15 minutes she had to speak, Pam McKinney presented housing and population data from 1990 to 2010, describing a decline in family housing, increase in non-institutionalized bed space and upsurge of renter contracts.
McKinney urged attendees not to get “overwhelmed” by the vastness of the data and to focus on the broader goals of the study instead.
“The intention is to overlay the Northeastern student population on top of the greater Boston population data to see what influence the student population has both outside the neighborhoods and if we move it into the neighborhoods,” she said. “I’m going to be able to answer questions like, ‘What impact would it have if Northeastern were to house more of its population on campus versus in the neighborhood housing supply? In what kind of housing type is that influence most likely to be felt?’”
Additional study findings will be discussed at the next IMP Community Task Force meeting, tentatively scheduled for June 11.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the completion rate for Foundation Year students is 88.8 percent. The actual completion rate for the one-year program is 87 percent; 88.8 is the college completion are for all Boston Public Schools students at Northeastern.
