Core Competencies

Core competencies represent the unique capabilities, knowledgebase, and resources that an organization can offer to its members and their constituents. They combine thought leadership, expertise, and skill sets that play a crucial role in driving personal and professional success, performing effectively in a role, and achieving strategic goals.

At ITGA, our dedication to building community, transforming partnerships, well-being, and resilience forms the cornerstone of our mission and our core competencies. We are a leading resource for policies, programs, and best practices that create opportunities, navigate challenges, and recognize emerging issues within higher education institutions and their surrounding communities. Our organizational work promotes the vitality of both municipal and institutional environments and grounds our focus on professional development for our members. The hallmark of the ITGA experience is to apply skills, grow relationships, and practice experiences that are deeply rooted in our core competencies,

ITGA provides targeted learning strategies and combines multiple methods to strengthen member competencies. Through formal education, self-directed learning, mentorship, and coaching, members can utilize collaborative conferences, seminars, presentations, certifications, webinars, books, research articles, affinity groups, and consulting services. By gaining guidance from experienced professionals, members create meaningful learning opportunities that impact their work and advance our mission. Leveraging our distinct strengths, we embrace shared responsibility and actively engage as champions of positive town-gown relations. The four core competencies below promote ITGA's vision of being a premiere resource that intrinsically links people, anchor institutions, host communities, and their intermingled natural and manmade environments.

core competencies

Building Community

Building Community: Strengthening, adding, and growing opportunities for connections, participation, and belonging

Skillsets that contribute to Building Community are:

  • Leading and managing stakeholder engagement
  • Assessing connectivity and accessibility in the physical environment
  • Recognizing experiences that differ across a community and collaboratively leveraging assets that bridge differences and support town-and-gown understanding.
  • Facilitating placemaking and recognizing heritage with design and events
  • Promoting civil speech, civic engagement, and community spirit
  • Honoring the full range of community demographics and practices

Transforming Partnerships

Transforming Partnerships: Creating collaborative relationships that foster economic growth and success.

Skillsets that contribute to Transforming Partnerships are: 

  • Promoting community-engaged and applied academic programs, curricula, learning environments, apprenticeships, and research.
  • Defining development frameworks and best practices
  • Fostering fiscal management, budgeting, and capital planning policies that encourage collaboration.
  • Shaping policies, programs, and spaces for entrepreneurship and innovation
  • Developing partnership goals, objectives, and key performance indicators
  • Crafting compelling requests for proposals, partner qualification criteria, and selection/implementation processes

Wellbeing

Wellbeing: Creating a balanced approach to the health, safety, and welfare of our faculty, staff, students, and community members

Skillsets that contribute to Wellbeing are:

  • Identifying best practices and programs for intergenerational support
  • Managing campus/community open space and shared access to nature for physical and mental health
  • Developing strategies to address food, housing, transportation scarcities
  • Integrating on- and off-campus housing policies that improve culture, civility, and supply. 
  • Employing best practices to identify and address the differing needs of students and town-and-gown partners in shared spaces.
  • Defining the components of Live, Learn, Work, Play Neighborhoods and Health Districts

Resilience

Resilience: Mitigating risks. Responding to unforeseen environmental, economic, and educational challenges

Skillsets that  contribute to Resilience are:

  • Facilitating shared support networks for economic disruption
  • Developing shared responses to environmental degradation and disasters
  • Crafting “future-proof” strategies for aging facilities, infrastructure, and utilities
  • Identifying evolving best practices and piloting incremental strategies.
  • Practicing skills in real-world scenarios and challenges: taking on cross-functional role-playing in simulations, and problem-solving exercises.
  • Developing digital tools to simulate and track scenario costs and strategies.