Robin Bachin, founder of the Office of Civic and Community Engagement, was awarded Florida Campus Compact’s 2013 Community Engagement Educator Award for her involvement within the greater Miami community on Nov. 7.
“I was pleasantly surprised when my name was announced,” she said. “I had shown up to the ceremony without knowing I had won.”
The award recognizes individuals who encourage campus-community partnership initiatives for faculty and students. Not just a founder, Bachin is the assistant provost of Civic and Community Engagement and has worked on several projects throughout her 17-year tenure at the University of Miami.
She aims to “bridge the gap between the academy and the public by making academic research more available to the general masses.”
Bachin has always been interested in urban design and urban culture because of their sustaining applicability to current problems many community organizations are now facing. Her work focuses on “sustainability and urban design, as it relates to the intersections of urban and environmental history.”
She has created programs such as the Civic Scholars and the Southridge High School Partnership to encourage students to link service with their academic interests.
Classes offer credits labeled “civic” in the same way there are “writing-intensive” credits.
Bachin is a strong proponent of shared, collective knowledge, and is working with the library and other professors on a massive digitization process where manuscripts and books are reformatted for the web.
According to Bachin, local communities can learn many things from the numerous articles and information stored in archives, such as Richter’s Special Collections in the 8th floor of Richter Library. She believes that the community can benefit from the past, learning from previous mistakes and capitalizing on great past ideas.
Bachin has served on the Board of Directors of the Urban History Association, the Good Government Initiative, the Coral Gables Museum and the Urban Environment League of Greater Miami. She was also a past president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, an organization focused on merging scholarship with urban planning.
For more information on Civic and Community Engagement programs, email civicengagement@miami.edu or call 305-284-6636.