Summer Project Incubator (SPIn) is an intensive summer program that connects faculty, students, and community organizations in multi-year participatory action research projects. SPIn starts with the assumption that our region's most entrenched problems should be addressed through interdisciplinary and collective impact processes and that meaningful change requires a long-term approach.

PROGRAM BENEFITS
  • Paid Summer Research 
  • Interdisciplinary community engaged research with faculty and local nonprofit organizations

2023 Current RESEARCH PROJECTS

Summer Meals

Making Summer Meals Fun, Engaging and Educationally Impactful! Build and strengthen collaborations between summer meals sites and local youth programming organizations to increase access to food over the summer and decrease summer learning loss. Partner: United Way (in collaboration with SICM, CAPTAIN and Hunger Solutions NY)

Care-A-Van

The goal of the Care-A-Van is to bring services normally offered by Unity House to remote or underserved areas in Albany and Rensselaer County. For this 3-year SPIn project/partnership, year one’s aim was to determine key locations for the Care-AVan to visit, based on a community needs assessment and publicly available data.

Radix

The team began learning about the Radix space and surrounding South End neighborhood in June. They focused specifically on the complex social and environmental dynamics there and how we could be of service to the local community. Days were spent with activities such as gardening, composting, and street tree watering, with the last hour of the day spent doing discussions organized around relevant scholarly articles.