SALLYPORT
Sophomore Rachel Toole is a fellow for LISC Houston, a local office with the nation’s largest community development support organization.
EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
Hands for Houston
The Kinder Institute’s Community Bridges program pairs Rice students with local nonprofits to benefit the greater good. RICE SOPHOMORE Sarah Davidson was interested in urban planning and public spaces before her fellowship with Community Bridges, an experiential learning program within the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. After working with Buffalo Bayou Partnership last
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semester, she gained an entirely new perspective on just how much public parks can mean to a city. “I’ve never thought this much about parks in my life,” she says, chuckling. “But you really start to understand what it means to be a resident of a city when you talk to people about their public parks. This has opened my eyes to what it actually is like to be a Houston resident.” Through a fellowship with Buffalo Bayou Partnership, a nonprofit focused on revitalizing the 10-square-mile stretch of bayou that flows from Shepherd Drive to the Port of Houston Turning Basin, Davidson has explored ways to redevelop Houston’s public spaces and parks. The goal of her research project was to examine how Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s 10-year,
$310 million expansion plan into its east sector can be improved to make these spaces more user friendly and accessible. The partnership’s plan envisions integrating new and redeveloped parks, trails and recreational destinations into surrounding neighborhoods from Highway 59 to the Turning Basin. At the heart of the east sector is Tony Marron Park, a 19-acre space that will double in size by the end of the expansion. Davidson visited public spaces along the bayou — Buffalo Bayou Park, Tony Marron Park and Eleanor Tinsley Park — to survey community members, finding out what they like about, and would like to see added to, existing parks. “One of the questions was to describe their ideal park in three words. This
P HO T O S B Y G U S TAVO R A SKO SK Y
