ANN ARBOR—Students, faculty, and community organizations across the United States, and potentially around the world, will benefit from a new $5 million grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to the University of Michigan School of Information. The four-year grant will allow the School to build an educational model for practical learning and service that will directly benefit non-profit community organizations and agencies, some of which could have international affiliations.

With a long history of assisting community organizations, the School looks forward to doing even more, said Daniel E. Atkins, the School’s dean. “A steadily growing stream of inquiries from organizations requesting help makes it clear that the need is huge. This should not surprise us. Information is the life blood of most community organizations. Professional help for community organizations in the design, creation, dissemination, and use of information resources can have profound value in aiding communities to become better fed, healthier, better housed, and better informed.”

All the projects the School could undertake will further its teaching and research role while benefiting each community directly, Atkins noted. Projects could include creating a publicly accessible online system for maintaining city council minutes and other records; analyzing computer training needs of a countywide consortium of small, non- profit organizations; training community librarians to provide citizens with online data via the World Wide Web; and deploying and evaluating digital library technologies in middle schools, high schools, and public libraries to support education, science and the arts and to general public literacy in science and cultural heritage.

The grant will allow the School to co-invest with client organizations. Of the total $5 million, $2 million is designated for a one-to-one challenge grant to other foundations, corporations, and individuals. When fully matched, the School will have a $4 million endowment for continuing support of practical engagement and outreach activities.

“Our aim is for each of our students to have meaningful experiences in applying their expertise to practice,” Atkins said. “The organizations we most want to work with, especially organizations serving economically under-developed communities, have severely limited capacity to absorb such costs. Furthermore, community organizations often have limited visions of what is possible because they have not had the opportunity to see truly innovative solutions.”

The grant creates a number of opportunities for the School, including a visiting professorship; a program to bring mid-career community organization personnel to the School for follow-up training; a minority undergraduate internship program to introduce students from underrepresented groups to the nature of the School’s work; and a summer training institute for faculty and doctoral students from other institutions. The School will also work closely with other U-M schools, colleges, and departments to act as a catalyst for exploring mutual community engagement opportunities.

The Kellogg Foundation is continuing its substantial support for the School. In 1994, the Foundation awarded $4.3 million to the forerunner of the School of Information (the School of Information and Library Studies) to enable it to redefine the curriculum to meet the needs of information professionals. The new School’s curriculum fuses elements from technology, behavioral sciences, and social sciences to meet present and future needs of the information professions.

“The School is committed to a professional curriculum and to doctoral preparation that integrates classroom training, advanced technology, and actual practice in real organizational settings,” said Atkins. “This fundamental integration of practice and theory is unprecedented in both what we want to teach and how we want to teach it. It is what we want our professional students to embody and our doctoral students to propagate.”