UW-Madison bolsters community-relations efforts

The Chancellor’s Office is bolstering its outreach efforts to the city of Madison and campus neighbors with the addition of two new faces to its community-relations staff.

Dawn Crim and Leotha Stanley recently joined LaMarr Billups, special assistant to Chancellor John Wiley for community relations.

Billups manages the university’s wide-ranging relationship with the community, which encompasses issues such as downtown economic development, residence-hall expansion, east- and west-campus planning, relationships with campus-area neighborhoods and the Village of Shorewood Hills, high-risk drinking, and planning for major events such as Halloween and the Mifflin Street Block Party.

Community Relations also helps to direct the Campus-Community Partnership, such as the South Park Street redevelopment effort, and the university’s satellite office in the Villager Mall, which Billups has assigned to Lori Kay.

Stanley and Crim will help Billups manage the workload and meetings that accompany such a wide range of issues.

“In the eight years I’ve been the special assistant for community relations, our role in community development has grown tremendously,” says Billups, who was recently named to the city’s Alcohol License Review Commission.

Crim, who comes to the position from the Learning Innovations arm of University of Wisconsin Extension, will assist Billups by representing the university at city meetings and other functions.

From 1996-2000, Crim served as an assistant women’s basketball coach at UW–Madison. She continues to work as a color commentator on Wisconsin Public Television and UPN14 broadcasts of women’s basketball games.

Stanley, a well-known area musician, is primarily based at the Campus-Community Partnerships Office at Villager Mall, 2300 S. Park St. and will be involved with connecting grassroots community residents and organizations to the university.

A partnership of the Morgridge Center for Public Service and the Chancellor’s Office, the Villager Mall site is a base of operations for outreach programs in the South Park Street neighborhoods.

“I want to increase the UW–Madison presence around the community in which it resides,” Stanley says. “My current focus is to work with Madison’s southside schools to offer UW–Madison’s resources to help close the achievement gap. It is my hope that an increased university presence, along with our current partnerships with the Madison Metropolitan School District, will motivate more students to consider higher education.”