Co-authored by Gabriella Alvarez (UCSC), Rebecca London (UCSC), Dario Leon (UCSC) and Ned Leblond (UCSC)
November 2024
Over the summer of 2023, Campus + Community (C+C) surveyed community-engaged scholarship and research collaborations across the UC Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus. A key takeaway is that centering community partnerships is happening in all divisions across campus and is conducted by faculty, students, and university staff.
Focused on the past five years, the survey brought to light 146 community-engaged projects with at least 236 unique community partners. Partners included local governments, native groups/tribal bands, food banks, health care providers, religious groups, as well as environmental preservation and restoration alliances. To make this work possible there were 54 unique funders, however, over 94% of faculty claimed to have received internal support for their projects in the form of funding and student support.
Particular themes emerged to help guide how community engagement may be better supported at UCSC. First, several projects noted that the institutional review board (IRB) process can better account for community partner’s needs and their leadership when guiding the research validity. Research ethics and the IRB are common issues with community-engaged research at many institutions of higher education. C+C is working with UCSC’s IRB to improve these processes. Second, faculty wanted to better incorporate community partners into their project lifecycle. While this need exists at the proposal, research, and dissemination phases, no other item was so clearly concerning as the delays in the payment of partners. C+C is working with the Institute for Social Transformation (IST), The Humanities Institute (THI), the Office of Research, and with the UC Community Engagement Network (UCCEN) to identify and address divisional, campus, and UC wide barriers. Third, researchers and scholars need resources to support their work. Survey respondents have identified a clear need for greater acknowledgment, alignment, and support of their work. In particular, the need for recognition of the hard work and social benefit that comes from this work needs to be internalized within UCSC department promotion and tenure processes. Luckily, UCSC is a leader in this work. In August 2023, UCSC announced new tenure and promotion guidelines for community-engaged scholars that address this issue.
Each of these issues identified by the survey will require continual and coordinated institutional capacity to effectively address. C+C is dedicated to spearheading these issues, among others, with community engagement practitioners across campus. Over the long term, we foresee a need for central commitment to empower these distributed campus relationships and improve administrative partnership processes.
Our survey provided a glimpse into decades of community engagement at UCSC. Thirty-one projects have been in ongoing collaborations for over ten years! We look forward helping our faculty, students and staff enhance centering community needs across campus to provide research and scholarship benefits to those who need it most.
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