At the Northern Illinois Center for Community Sustainability, our mission is to address the challenges of environmental change, shifting demographics and sociopolitical inequity that are impacting our region and the world.
To accomplish this, NICCS connects research and innovation to advance sustainability in food systems, water resources and environmental adaptation while also promoting science-based policies and practices for communities.
NICCS is part of NIU’s broader vision for sustainability.
NIU will advance 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. As of February of 2021, 11 NICCS research projects are underway, all of which involve 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.
NICCS is part of the Illinois Innovation Network (IIN) – a group of public universities and community colleges that work together to improve the state's economy through innovation, research, and education. NICCS researchers have won a number of IIN seed grants to pursue research that contributes to “sustaining 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.
The NICCS facility is still in the planning phases, but research is already taking place on the NICCS site just north of the NIU Convocation Center, including groundwater monitoring wells and the preparation of prairie restoration test plots. In February of 2020, the state of Illinois announced $15 million in funding for the NICCS facility, allowing NIU to begin the formal facility planning and design process. In spite of the inevitable difficulties and delays of COVID, NICCS is moving forward steadily. Learn more on our facility webpage, and watch this website for periodic updates.