By Jo McCulty

Bill Cody of the Ohio Department of Transportation clears a section of the Olentangy riverbank June 14 in preparation for the restoration of 12.6 acres of woods to a forested wetland at Ohio State's Olentangy River Wetland Research Park. The 4.5 acres of wetlands lost as a result of construction of the Spring-Sandusky interchange are being replaced by 18 wetland acres at the research park and two other sites. The project involves cutting four notches into the levee that separates the research park from the river.

College helps improve nearby neighborhood from inside out

Outreach effort targets Weinland Park area

A sense of anxiety settled over the classroom when Golden Jackson unveiled a community outreach project to the students in her human ecology class spring quarter.

Students enrolled in "Family Resource Management 611: Consumer Housing Problems"were to venture into the nearby Weinland Park community in pairs, knock on doors, survey hundreds of residents and pass out literature.

For Jackson, associate professor of consumer and textile sciences, Weinland Park is an area ripe for community development and rich in assets. For some students, the community bordering main campus was unfamiliar terrain. All they knew about the area was its vague reputation for poverty, run-down buildings and crime.

David Blatter, a senior family resource management major, said the experience was an eye-opener.

"When class started, some students were a little reluctant to go into the neighborhood,"Blatter said. "Once you get out there and start talking to people, your whole outlook changes."

The class project is part of a larger community outreach program. Jackson is director of the Family/Housing Stability Team within Ohio State's Community Outreach Partnership Center, funded by a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) grant. She said HUD has awarded a number of the grants across the country to help universities extend their resources out into the community and work collaboratively with community groups.

In this case, the College of Human Ecology is working with Godman Guild, which has a 101-year history in the neighborhood, and the Weinland Park Collaborative, a community-based association that helped students design the survey.

The survey sought information on job skills and interests of residents as well as priority needs of the community in general, such as child care, summer programs for children, cleaning up the area and job-training opportunities. Data will be used to generate community-driven projects that will lead residents to embrace the neighborhood bordered by Chittenden Avenue on the north, Fifth Avenue on the south, High Street on the west, and railroad tracks to the east.

Lynn Michaels, a community resident, member of the Board of Trustees of the Weinland Park Community Collaborative and an Ohio State alumna, said past efforts to improve the neighborhood have failed because they didn't consult the community first.

"I think it is important to get the input of the neighborhood. Any programs that come into the neighborhood have to be internally generated to be successful,"Michaels said.

Already, a community garden and annual community festival have been established to nurture pride in the neighborhood and to thank residents for being neighbors, she said.

Also, activities are being developed to encourage children -- and eventually their parents -- to become involved. Jackson said an ice cream breakfast was held recently at Weinland Park Elementary School for students who had been detention-free and had achieved honor roll status at least once during the school year. Project leaders also are starting a double-Dutch jump-rope team for fourth- and fifth-grade students. "We think it will be a great activity,"Jackson said. "These young people will build a skill and learn confidence, and it will help draw in their parents."

For three years, Jackson has added community activism to the consumer housing problems course, which is designed for human ecology students interested in working in a nonprofit agency after graduation. She said the course explores the relationship between an agency and the neighborhood it serves, and the importance of housing and how it fits into the whole plan for community development.

"By virtue of where we live, there is a whole set of attributes that deal with the quality of our life. These are all determined by where we live,"Jackson said. Those attributes are: The schools people have access to, neighborhood safety, the level of public services and access to health care, she said.

In preparation for their community work, students increased their understanding of the role and importance of housing in family well-being and compared alternative solutions to housing problems. They studied an approach to community development presented in Streets of Hope: The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood, which explored how residents raised the Dudley Street community in the Boston area from ruin.

"The difference is they had funds to the tune of $22 million and it took 10 years,"Jackson said. The HUD grant she received provides $400,000 for a project running from January 1997 through June 2001.

Jackson's classes were held at the new Human Ecology House, 1621 N. Fourth St., a center for activities designed to strengthen the University's bordering neighborhoods through faculty and student partnerships with community members. A physical presence in the neighborhood facilitates the ability of the University to collaborate with community partners to address the most pressing family and human needs of the area.

Michaels hopes the attention will inspire residents, especially homeowners, to remain in the Weinland Park community, which is known for high transiency. Homeowners make up 11 percent of the neighborhood. "We can't afford to lose any of our owner-occupied housing in this area. They basically are our anchors."

Federal grant will help study link between aging and sense of control

Two sociologists at Ohio State have received a four-year, $1 million federal grant to continue their research on how people's sense of control affects their health as they age.

The grant, from the National Institute on Aging, will allow the researchers and their colleagues to re-interview more than 1,300 Americans who participated in the first two waves of the survey in 1995 and 1998. The grant is led by sociology professors John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross.

Mirowsky said sense of control is the perception that people have of being able to direct the events and outcomes in their lives. It can range from a deep sense of powerlessness and fatalism to a firm sense of mastery and self efficacy.

The sense of control has profound impacts on the quality of life, according to Mirowsky.

"Americans with a firm sense of personal control have lower levels of depression, anxiety, distrust and demoralization. Some research has shown that a low sense of personal control even predicts lower rates of survival in older adults,"he said.

"Our research aims to find out what affects people's sense of control and what we can do to improve it."

From the first two waves of interviews, Mirowsky and Ross have already learned a great deal -- and published several scholarly articles and book chapters -- about how sense of control changes over the lifespan. While young adults generally have relatively high levels of perceived control, the levels decline more and more rapidly in successively older adults, particularly from age 55 and up. In general, men and people with higher levels of education have lesser declines during aging. But why are there declines linked to age?

One theory has been that older people feel less sense of control because they generally have poorer economic conditions, Mirowsky said. But research thus far by Mirowsky and Ross suggests that older adults actually deal with their economic restrictions quite well. Another theory has been that older adults feel less control simply because they know they have fewer years left to accomplish their goals. But again, Mirowsky said their early research has not borne this out.

Results so far suggest a rising level of physical impairment is a key cause of declining sense of control in older adults.

"It's not just having chronic diseases, or even a loss of energy,"Mirowsky said. "It is things like not being able to carry a bag of groceries, or not being able to get up and down stairs. These are the everyday problems that can destroy people's sense of control over their own lives."

With the new grant, Mirowsky and Ross will be able to explore this and other issues further. They will continue to analyze the earlier interviews, and also begin a third wave this winter.

The first two waves of interviews were also funded by the National Institute of Aging with a $604,000 grant. The 1995 interviews involved about 2,500 adults. In 1998, the researchers were able to re-interview about 1,400 of the original participants. In this third wave, they hope to not only re-interview as many people as possible from the second wave, but also relocate people who dropped out after 1995.

Mirowsky said many practical benefits could come from this research. "Some studies have suggested that people can actually reverse many of the old-age impairments that contribute to a declining sense of control. We're trying to find what makes the difference in whether people deal effectively with those impairments and don't let them take control of their lives,"he said.

"We believe some of our findings may suggest things people can do in their own lives to make personal outcomes better, and some may suggest things policy- makers can do to improve the health of Americans."

next page...