Image by Summer Rabold
The group will present their ideas at the Bringing the U to Community event on May 7.
A group of students from Carlson’s Impact Lab are creating a rebrand in hopes of bringing the community together.
Students in the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management are creating a plan to rebrand and revitalize Dinkytown in the hopes of highlighting the University’s deep ties to the neighborhood.
Through their work in Carlson’s Impact Lab, a class where students learn business skills and how to apply these skills to a problem with a client, the group started to work on creating a compelling identity for Dinkytown.
Tina Erazmus, director of Local Government and Community Relations for the University, works directly with students on the project.
On May 7, the group will present its work to community members at Bringing the U to Community, an event at the University of Minnesota Safety Center, which Erazmus organizes quarterly.
The event aims to bring in community members, neighborhood board members and executives and the University’s Good Neighbor Fund, which gives out grants to implement projects that better the neighborhood community.
Erazmus said she wanted to highlight the students’ work through the event because it affects neighborhoods, businesses and community members.
Group member Tejal Narkhede said one of the main goals for the project was to build a vibrant community and see Dinkytown flourish again, especially during the summer months. The group hopes to achieve this with the help of a website and social media, which they have been working on.
“We really want to see Dinkytown flourish and get back to where it was before,” Narkhede said. “We want to get more people into Dinkytown and just kind of bring back a lot of the culture and people, especially during the summertime.”
Ethan Mus, another group member, said he remembers Dinkytown as an exciting place to go before sport events, but the neighborhood just does not have the same “wow-factor” as it used to.
“Dinkytown really hasn’t had any sort of revitalization, any kind of like energy around it to bring the community together,” Mus said. “It’s been looked at in the last couple of years as kind of being not the best area, not attracting a lot of visitors.”
Narkhede said a lot of that has to do with rising crime rates, which gives the neighborhood a negative image.
Even as those factors have gotten better, those negative perceptions still exist, Narkhede said, but this project hopes to bring attention to the historical and atmospheric part of Dinkytown.
Through this project, the group hopes to bring people’s attention to the atmosphere, dining and nightlife of Dinkytown as well as highlight the historical charm of the neighborhood.
Eric Picha, another group member, said the project aims to highlight local businesses through its branding, logo and messaging, which group members created on the website Canva. The group used colors similar to the University’s and created simple logos that they believe would benefit Dinkytown, Picha said.
“We really wanted to just show the connection that Dinkytown could have with all students, even visitors, alumni, just everyone, making everyone feel welcome in Dinkytown,” Picha said.
