City Alliance Year Information

Could this be Your Community?

What is City Alliance?

City Alliance is a partnership between UT and one city in Southern Utah. There will be a new partner city each year 2021-2025.

There are three-phases to the City Alliance partnership:
1

Planning Phase

2

Implementation Phase

the focal point of the program is the year-long implementation phase
when several city projects will be completed by UT departments, students, and faculty.

3

Celebration/Reporting Phase

The concept is simple.

The partner city identifies three to four projects that would benefit from UT’s expertise. Departments from across the City Alliance incorporate these projects into their programs and courses, and City Alliance staff provide administrative support to ensure a successful collaboration.

The results are powerful. Partners receive big ideas and feasible recommendations that spark momentum towards a more economically strong, socially vibrant, and physically healthy future.

What does City Alliance bring to communities?

Our departments, faculty and students are eager to help local governments think creatively about issues happening in cities, agencies and local industry. City Alliance has the capacity to match three to four issues with UT departments for hundreds of hours of supervised student time. Our partners could choose to address broad issues facing their communities.

Types of projects include:
  • Academic & Social Impact
  • Research
  • Data Collection & Analytics
  • Career Development & Internships
  • Civic & Political Involvement
  • Community & University Spirit
  • Economic Development
  • The Arts
  • Feasibility Studies
  • Computer Automated Design, 3-D Printing, Advanced Prototyping
  • Technical Writing

City Alliance staff will guide the partnership every step of the way. We will work with you to write a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between City Alliance and your municipality, define the scope, engage in quality control, coordinate media relations, troubleshoot, and generally take care of the logistics associated with setting up, running, promoting, and evaluating the effort. We are here to make the partnership as successful and as easy as possible.

What’s expected of communities?

A successful City Alliance partnership requires the local government partner to identify a partnership lead—usually a senior staff person directly accountable to the local government’s executive—who supervises and coordinates the partner’s participation in the program. This person also oversees the process of identifying the issue-area clusters and assigns government staff to support individual projects. The project leads will work with UT faculty and departments to develop the projects in detail for a city’s proposal.

EPIC-N

The Community and Global Engagement City Alliance is a member of the Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities – Network (EPIC-N), a growing network of educational institutions across the globe using the EPIC Model to partner existing course work and university human capital with the needs of local governments, and communities, to improve quality of life.

Learn more about other network programs