Between 2000 and 2013, the suburbs in the country's largest metro areas saw their low-income population grow twice as fast as primary urban cities. In 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that poverty increased more sharply in suburbs than in urban and rural counties (Parker et al., 2018). The rise in suburban poverty coincides with an…

In this article we offer a discussion around our academic-practitioner involvements with one another and with a targeted community, in relation to a particular project. In the title of the article, we have hyphenated the term "academic-practitioner" to render fuzzy the distinction between "academic" roles (associated with…

Decorah, Iowa (pop. 8,172 in 2000), is, in many ways, a typical small Midwestern community facing many of the same issues as most other areas such as a brain drain and a continuing struggle to find ways to stimulate the local economy. Perhaps the strengths and successes of the approaches used in Decorah can be attributed to its ability to identify…

In December 1980, the world's largest beef processing plant opened 10 miles west of Garden City, KS. Three years later another beef plant opened on Garden City's eastern edge. Full employment in the surrounding region meant that most of the 4000 workers needed to run these plants had to come from elsewhere--and they did. Garden City grew by…

Higher education-community partnerships can lead to fruitful rewards that are difficult to realize any other way. However, efforts to create, maintain, and sustain collaborative working relationships include inevitable tensions, the "politics of engagement." Lessons learned about the politics of engagement are presented in this paper.…

The maximization of productivity and labor efficiency has been a hallmark of the American agriculture and food system. The result of these twin processes is an industrial, concentrated, and consolidated provisioning system that produces cheap and plentiful food. Many view this model as a panacea for providing food to a modern industrial workforce,…