Worcester Receives Grant for Creative Solutions on Transportation

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Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Ben Schwartz, GoLocalProv Contributor

Worcester has received a grant from the National Science Foundation to pursue creative, cross-disciplinary solutions to the city's transportation problems.

Worcester is one of three cities to receive an award, along with Chicago and San Diego. The three cities will share a $2.6 million Art of Science Learning grant from the National Science Foundation to create "incubators"--laboratories of one hundred people from different ages and walks of life across the region

Each city represents a different region of the country and each will use the money to tackle a different problem facing that city. In Chicago, the money will be used to grapple with the problem of urban nutrition. In San Diego, the grant will help the city deal with problems related to water usage. In Worcester, the monies will go towards modernizing and improving ways to get around the city--an issue that spokesman for the Worcester program Joyce Kressler characterized as instrumental to the city's future.

The Worcester Incubator will be an unique forum for generating collaborative solutions. It will feature one hundred participants divided into ten teams of ten individuals. Each team will be composed of people from a plethora of professions and ages. Applications to be part of a team are still open, with slots still available. "There is an amazingly rich, diverse set of applicants," said Kressler, who said that so far the teams consisted of high school students, architects, artists, businesspeople, and educators, to name just a few.

All of the teams will work with a distinguished national faculty as well as local experts, artists, and corporate officers. The participants will how to creatively consider the issues at hand, using "arts-based learning, combined with the best corporate practices," as Kressler put it. The Incubator will be at work from March 1st of this year through January 2015, and will include events and forums in which the general public is invited to participate.

Worcester was chosen as a site partially because of the city's ability to collaborate from the beginning of the application process. Additionally, Worcester plays home to the EcoTarium, which serves as a partner with the Incubator.

Transportation selected as the umbrella issue around which to center the Incubator for several reasons. "If you want to get from Point A to Point B in Worcester, you can't--it's a zig-zag," said Kressler. Many parts of the city are separated by Route 290. The transportation work will also seek to create links between Worcester's rich network of ethnic groups, as well as its many colleges, universities, and cultural institutions.

The end result, says Kressler, is a series of changes that will catalyze Worcester's economy, and which will come through integrating artistic thinking with business practices and public policy. "This is very much a workforce development grant. Business leaders say the three things they don't see in the workforce are creativity, collaboration, and communication, and those are the key tenets of the arts."

For more information, including how to apply, visit the website here. 

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