By OLIVER MACK
University of Maryland (UMD) students have been working to preserve the history of College Park’s Lakeland community and help city-based organizations through their senior capstone projects.
Several capstone classes—project-based courses that seniors complete before they graduate—have collaborated with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project to enhance the organization’s digital archives and have helped other city groups develop websites and environmental plans.
“It is helpful for us to see what [the students are] thinking about, and … it’s helpful for them to see how the things that they learned about in a classroom actually work with real-life projects,” Maxine Gross, chair of the heritage project, said.
The heritage project aims to collect, preserve, interpret and honor the history of African Americans who contributed to, lived in or were connected to the Lakeland community in College Park, according to its website.
Gross said students have helped organize the digital archive and present different parts of it in new ways, such as building a genealogy database for the community.
She also worked with a capstone class of graduate students to create proposals for restorative justice for the community to present to the city. Lakeland lost 104 of its 150 homes to urban renewal during the 1960s and ’70s.
The projects benefit both the students and the community organizations they support, Gross said.
“The community organization gets the benefit of hearing what the current thought is on a particular subject,” Gross said. “Then, we try to look at what the community’s needs are and how those needs could be met.”
Students in capstone classes have also collaborated with Explorations on Aging, an organization that engages senior citizens with classes, events and resources, according to organizer Mary Anne Hakes.
The students are creating an easy-to-use website that will consolidate information on events, restaurants, attractions and other local information into a simple platform for the city’s senior population.
Students worked on the website over three semesters to prepare it for the seniors’ group to populate with information and then launch for the community, Hakes said.
“The intergenerational experience, I think, for both of us, was just wonderful,” Hakes said. “We met with them about once a week and stuck to business, but they respected our opinions. We certainly appreciated what they had done, and we were able to supply them with information that I think they welcomed.”
Hakes has also been working with a group of students from the university’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to design plans for making College Park a “15-minute city,” part of a nationwide effort to ensure all residents can access essential services, like grocery stores, within a 15-minute walk or bike ride.
Hakes said the students will present their final plan to the College Park City Council in May.
Student capstone partnerships between UMD and the city have expanded significantly over the past decade.
Andrew Fellows, a senior faculty specialist at the university and a former mayor of College Park, has led many of these initiatives.
“It’s about making sure that students have the opportunity to get engaged in the community that they live in,” Fellows said.
Fellows, who served as mayor from 2009 to 2015, said he has consistently worked to increase collaboration between the city and the university.
“When students come to the University of Maryland, they’re mostly on campus, and they typically don’t know that much about the area around them,” Fellows said. “So from a College Park perspective, [it’s about] making sure that students have opportunities to get engaged in the community that they live in.”
Many of the projects involve students from the university’s College of Information, specifically the iConsultancy Experiential Learning Program. The program partners with public- and private- sector organizations to deliver solutions tailored to clients’ needs while giving students real-world experience, preparing them for the workforce, TJ Rainsford, director of the iConsultancy program and a lecturer in the College of Information, said.
“We’re not here trying to research some sort of issue or problem and looking for the city to participate in that,” Rainsford said. “It’s actually the other way around. We’re a service provider. We’re not telling the city or local organizations what projects we’re going to do for them. We’re asking them, ‘What are your problems? Let us help you address those problems.’”
College Park Mayor Fazlul Kabir said the city works closely with the university to come up with ideas for capstone projects across the government and private sector.
Students have also contributed to several sustainability-related projects with the city in recent years, including researching ways to reduce stormwater pollution, planning and proposing a new park, surveying food resource accessibility during COVID and conducting a data analysis of how firefighter shortages affect the community.
The goal for both the city and the university is to continue expanding collaborative programs for the benefit of students, local businesses and College Park residents, participants said.
“We are so grateful to have the university within the city boundary,” Kabir said. “We call ourselves the home of the University of Maryland because we consider them as an asset, contributing in many ways to the College Park community.”
