Restoring Rundberg: A Community-Research Partnership
Springer, Lauderdale, Fitzgerald & Baker
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Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin School of Social Work and the Austin Police Department (APD) have partnered with community leaders and stakeholders to Restore Rundberg, which aims to “improve the quality of life, health, safety, education, and well-being of individuals living and working in the Rundberg neighborhood.” Sustainable and innovative community engagement is at the core of this effort.

Resident Feedback on the Restore Rundberg Community Survey
Castro, Casstevens, Garcia & Springer
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A major goal of the Restore Rundberg project is to increase collective efficacy and community engagement, and community-level interventions are currently being implemented in this vein. In order to assess the effect of these interventions on collective efficacy and community engagement of Rundberg residents, researchers complied a community survey that measures residents’ of perceptions of these factors before and after implementation of interventions.

Restore Rundberg: Targeting Hot Spots
Whitt
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Crime is, typically, tightly clustered around specific locations in urban neighborhoods. The disproportionate aggregation of neighborhood disorder into ‘hot spots’ was a conspicuous point of agreement among the many perspectives shared within the Restore Rundberg team of neighbors, law enforcement officials, social science researchers, social workers, and community engagement professionals from the inception. The more challenging compromise between stakeholders of the notoriously disadvantaged Austin, TX neighborhood has been developing the best intervention to reduce violations in the most problematic areas while also limiting the displacement of crime into others.

University and Community Engagement-Classes to Promote Youth Leadership
Davis
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There are over 300 colleges and universities that compete in the top division of the NCAA, and over 120 the mirror the size of The University of Texas’s athletic program as members of the upper echelon of football at the collegiate level. Similarly, the impact of those schools AND their respective student athletes on the local community can be as significant. The leadership developed among those student athletes cannot and does not happen in a vacuum: their potential impact on local communities, particularly those in socio-economic disadvantaged neighborhoods and schools can be immense.

Restore Rundberg: Developing an Asset Inventory
Pitzer
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The Restore Rundberg Project was designed to address crime and revitalize the neighborhoods within the Rundberg area. As a component of this project, an asset inventory was created to document the resources, services, programs, and initiatives currently present in the community.

LaunchPad Photovoice Project: Rundberg Through the Eyes of Middle School Students
Streeter
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Photovoice is a community-based participatory action research method that combines photography with grassroots mobilization to help members of the community gain a greater understanding of their environment and experiences and to share them with others. The pictures, along with captions or narration by the photographers, can be used to document the reality of life in the community through the eyes of the photographer and can drive home that reality to the public and to policy makers to help spur change and improve conditions in the community.

Aspects of Organized Drug Trade Affecting Austin
Taraba, Lauderdale & Inman
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