Janet Maddox Jones needed physical therapy for sciatica and scoliosis, and her insurance was tapped out.
Her doctor referred her to Widener University’s free clinic, set up and run by graduate students.
“They took care of you like you were an individual person, not a number,” said Jones, 77, a lifelong Chester resident and one of the first black cheerleaders at its high school in the 1950s.
That experience and others have made Jones, a retired customer relations manager, a Widener fan.
While a simple tale, it symbolizes the kind of relationship that the 6,240-student private university has been striving to build with its struggling host city, especially over the last decade under president James T. Harris III.
Widener started a charter school, opened a free nursing clinic, linked students’ community service to scholarship money, fostered community-based work by its professors, and established a civic engagement committee of the board of trustees.
It created a police substation in partnership with Crozer-Chester Medical Center, started a college access center with other local colleges, and brought in a hotel and retail complex.
Chester last year was named one of six cities under President Obama’s “Strong Cities, Strong Communities” plan aimed at spurring economic development. The program doesn’t include funding, but does offer federal expertise coordinated through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and help in fostering relations and researching solutions.
“Widener University was key in how we looked at the opportunities and what we can really do to help reinvent and build the economy,” said Mark Linton, executive director of the White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities. Linton participated in a daylong forum last week at Widener on the role of “anchor institutions” in sustaining community economic development…
