When Jenny Mayer-Glenn retires this summer after seven years leading University Neighborhood Partners (UNP), she will leave behind a simple idea that has shaped her entire career: That communities know best how to solve the challenges they face.
She began bringing community members to the table as a teacher and administrator in historically underserved schools on Salt Lake City’s west side. She would sometimes hear colleagues say the parents didn’t care about their kids’ education.
“But I knew they did,” she says, because she came from that community. So she organized roundtable discussions in the cafeteria, where teachers and families could get to know one another and better support students.
Mayer-Glenn is retiring after 30 years in Utah’s public education system. Colleagues and partners say the culture of trust and partnership she fostered at UNP will endure long after her retirement.
“Jenny’s leadership at UNP has centered on the idea that communities already possess the wisdom and leadership needed to solve their own challenges,” says University of Utah President Taylor Randall. “She has built partnerships rooted in trust, and those relationships will continue to shape the future of UNP and the university’s work with its neighbors.”
With family roots in both Utah’s Mexican American and LDS communities, Mayer-Glenn has always pictured herself as a bridge between worlds. Her father, Edward Heriberto Mayer, was a languages and literature professor at the U who established the Chicano Scholarship and Ethnic Studies program in the 1970s. Tagging along with her father at Orson Spencer Hall and playing in the Library Plaza fountain, she developed an early sense of belonging at the university. She also heard her father question why the U had so little presence in west-side neighborhoods such as Glendale and Rose Park. That concern, echoed by other community advocates, eventually inspired the creation of UNP.
Her community advocacy work with Robert “Archie” Archuleta, a prominent Utah civil rights activist, reinforced the importance of institutional accountability.
“He taught me that public institutions have a mission and a duty to support all people in the community,” she says.
By the time Mayer-Glenn became UNP director in 2019, she had spent more than two decades working with families in Salt Lake City schools and serving on boards and commissions including the Salt Lake City Human Rights Commission and the Utah Governor’s Multicultural Commission. She immediately connected with UNP’s mission and approach.
“It’s never top down, going into communities and saying, ‘This is what we think should happen,’” she says. “There is a lot of incredible knowledge and creativity and entrepreneurship that is untapped in our communities.”
She points to the nonprofits that have grown with support from UNP’s Westside Leadership Institute. Mayra Sanchez, a doula and mother of nine who felt disempowered during the births of her children, is helping other Spanish-speaking women access prenatal care and have better birth experiences through her nonprofit, Comunidad Materna en Utah. Jacky’s Recovery Support Services was launched by a group of women who saw their children struggling with substance abuse and wished for a behavioral health center in their community.
UNP’s reputation for community partnership has led institutions like the Salt Lake County Health Department to come knocking—especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, when agencies were struggling to convey information to the public. Mayer-Glenn led the creation of UNP’s partnership curriculum, which Director of Community Praxis Kimberly Schmit has now taught to more than 50 institutions.
“It has had a ripple effect,” Mayer-Glenn says. “More people are accessing the resources available to them, and those institutions and systems are learning from the community about how to improve.”
When university leaders were first considering a hospital in West Valley City, they turned to UNP for help engaging the community in a thoughtful way. Dr. Teresa Molina, UNP associate director, says Mayer-Glenn was up to the task of expanding UNP’s service area to the second-largest city in the state.
“It was a tremendous challenge, because we kind of quadrupled the area we were covering,” Molina says.
UNP applied its resident committee model, bringing together West Valley City residents and university leaders to shape community priorities during planning of the University of Utah Eccles Health Campus & Eccles Hospital. Now called Westside Community United, the resident group continues to meet regularly with university and U of U Health leaders. UNP also formed the West Valley Steering Committee, creating a trusted space for residents, university leaders, government agencies, and nonprofits to discuss shared interests and community needs.
For example, community members raised concerns about the abundance of fast-food restaurants along 5600 West, the major corridor where the health campus is being built. As a result, the health campus’s cafeteria will offer healthy meals residents can purchase to go.
“We were able to share this partnership model with the university, and it has been adopted in other ways across the institution,” says Mayer-Glenn.
UNP partners like Kevin Nguyen, director of outreach and partnerships at Proxima, say she herself has set an example.
“The way we work with community partners is really modeled after Jenny’s values and how she interacts with people,” he says. Nguyen often returns to one lesson he learned from her: “We move at the speed of trust.”
Mayer-Glenn’s colleagues see her legacy as a continuation of a mission.
“She comes from a lineage of leaders of community organizers, and she will continue that work,” says Dr. Molina, who will serve as interim director of UNP, with support from RyLee Curtis, Senior Director of Community Collaboration at University of Utah Health.
“In her heart is community,” says Kimberly Schmit. “She has committed to the work of community leaders who have come before, and she has brought that spirit and vision to the University of Utah.”