The mission of NIU’s Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability is to build a regionally, nationally, and globally impactful program that mobilizes interdisciplinary research and community partnerships to deliver solutions to complex sustainability challenges in our region, advancing resilience and equity in northern Illinois and beyond..
To accomplish this, NICCS connects research and innovation to advance sustainability in food systems, water resources, energy and environmental adaptation while also promoting science-based policies and practices for communities.
NICCS is part of NIU’s broader vision for sustainability.
NIU advances sustainability by:
NICCS is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between academic disciplines to enable interdisciplinary research that brings all of NIU’s expertise to bear on the challenges facing our region and the world. We’re committed to building bridges between research and practice; public and private; university, community and business to enable innovation and put the latest research into practice to make a positive difference.
We’re also putting into action the vision and principles at the heart of Northern Illinois University. Curiosity and creativity, equity and inclusion, ethics and integrity, service and stewardship guide NICCS just as they guide NIU as a whole.
In August of 2018, NIU and the City of DeKalb presented a proposal to create a hub of the Illinois Innovation Network on the NIU Campus in DeKalb, IL. The hub – dubbed the Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability – would be dedicated to local sustainability of communities in response to environmental, demographic and technological change.
Since then, NIU faculty and staff have been meeting regularly to share research, plan for the future of NICCS and collaborate on research projects. Today, NICCS supports research and creation by students and faculty in almost all of NIU’s colleges, with opportunities expected to grow exponentially when the NICCS building comes online in 2028. Dozens of NICCS research projects have been completed or are underway, all involving collaboration across at least two disciplines or two universities. Faculty are developing relationships with research collaborators from the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other universities through the country, as well as local leaders and decision-makers.
Beyond NIU, NICCS is NIU’s hub of the Illinois Innovation Network (IIN), a group of public universities and community colleges across the state that work together to improve economic prosperity through innovation, research, and education. NICCS researchers have partnered with colleagues at other universities on a number of IIN seed grants to pursue research that contributes to sustainable solutions and social innovation Illinois, supporting the broad economic, health-related and social well-being of the state, as well as the environmental sustainability of its food and water systems.
While construction of the NICCS facility is still underway, research is already taking place on the site just north of the NIU Convocation Center, where prairie restoration plots demonstrate the value of long-term environmental study. NICCS is buoyed by partnering programs including Campus Sustainability and Edible Campus as well as the degree-granting Institute for the Study of Energy, Sustainability and the Environment, and the Center for Governmental Studies, in addition to numerous faculty research labs that advance water, food systems, energy and environmental adaptation.
Learn more on our facility webpage and visit the NICCS home page for news and updates.
Matthew Deitch, Ph.D.
Director, Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability
mdeitch@niu.edu