LEWISTON – A graduate course in community development will be taught this summer at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College. Offered through the Muskie School of Public Service, the class will meet from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, May 18 to July 1.

The three-credit course will include an investigation of the nature and role of community development activities as a strategy to increase the assets a community has at its disposal to solve problems.

Students will examine local government and not-for-profit sector organizations with a focus on public/private partnerships and community development corporations as major vehicles for contemporary community development efforts. The continuing role of the federal Community Development Block Grant program will also be examined.

The course will be taught by Mark Lapping, PhD, professor of public policy and management at the Muskie School. The former provost of USM, Lapping is a planner by profession and was founding dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

Author of several books, he has also written more than 150 articles and monographs, and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Rural Studies, Agriculture and Human Value and Small Towns. He has been a consultant to governments and agencies throughout North America and in several other nations and is working on problems in Canada and Estonia, as well as Maine.

Lapping notes that community development fundamentally concerns itself with both how people live in the present and how they choose to live in the future. “It represents mastery over drift; that’s what community development is all about … providing options, plans and strategies which permit the flowering of civil society.”

The course, CPD 652 Community Economic Development, is open to undergraduate and graduate students. Registration is open and will continue through the first week of classes. Anyone who wishes to enroll may contact the LAC Business Office at 753-6530. For more information or advising assistance, contact Roger Philippon, assistant dean at the college, at 753-6560 or [email protected].