Greet­ings!

And wel­come to the inau­gural sit­ing of the Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s new Cen­ter for Local Strate­gies Research. Please check out the Project Overview to get some idea of why we cre­ated the Cen­ter and what we hope to achieve. Then be sure to check out the Project Per­son­nel pages, Files from the Field, and Lessons Learned. The Per­son­nel pages will intro­duce you to the stel­lar group of schol­ars, young and old, work­ing through­out the world, who are study­ing peo­ple in dif­fi­cult and hope­ful sit­u­a­tions, try­ing to learn about the prob­lems they expe­ri­ence in their com­mu­ni­ties, and their ways of respond­ing to those prob­lems. Look at the Files from the Field and Lessons Learned pages to see our first entry in each of these sec­tions, one from Prof. Jay Leighter, work­ing in small towns in Nebraska, and one from Prof. Tamar Katriel in Haifa pro­vid­ing a per­spec­tive from a long and dis­tin­guished career of inno­v­a­tive field research in sev­eral parts of the globe.

As you read here about our pur­pose, our Center-based projects, the work of our Asso­ciate Schol­ars, the back­grounds of Senior Exter­nal Advis­ers, and our ini­tial File from the Field and Lessons Learned columns we hope you will catch some of the enthu­si­asm we feel for the work the Cen­ter is now doing.

We plan to pub­lish a new set of mate­ri­als some­time in Octo­ber 2010: a progress report on our work on our major Cen­ter goals, a new File from the Field and Lessons Learned columns (all columns will be archived on this site), and an intro­duc­tory com­men­tary on local strate­gies research by Gerry Philipsen in the Director’s Page. But the news right now is that we have begun.

If you would like to con­tact us about the work of the Cen­ter, we would be delighted to here from you.

Gerry Philipsen                           Lisa Coutu
Direc­tor                                        Asso­ciate Direc­tor
uwclsr@uw.edu .….….….…    uwclsr@uw.edu
www.gerryphilipsen.com

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