Campus + Community

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Campus + Community is a center dedicated to supporting ethical and mutually beneficial community-engaged scholarship at UC Santa Cruz. Community-engaged scholarship includes research and teaching that is conducted in partnership with non-academic agencies and organizations in our local community, across the country, and even internationally. These can include public agencies, non-profit organizations, multi-sector collaboratives, and other community entities. Community engagement is a core component of UCSC’s mission and vision, which include values of social and environmental responsibility and a commitment to community engagement, as well as dedication to diversity, social responsibility, and environmental stewardship. Campus + Community supports our campus to effectively demonstrate what we accomplish with our community partners and how these partnerships are transformational for all involved.

Many colleagues across the university engage with community partners in various ways as part of their scholarship and/or service, and Campus + Community provides support for a campus-wide set of values and support systems to ensure best practices for this community engagement: mutually beneficial, long-term relationships built on mutual trust and strong communication. A main goal of the center is to improve coordination and centralize administrative tasks associated with community-engaged scholarship, freeing investigators to focus more on their research and incentivizing engagement more broadly across the campus. Campus + Community is committed to partnerships with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research, collaboration across departments and colleges, and the intentional inclusion of students, faculty, staff, and community members who share the desire to engage in community knowledge production for community mobilization. Involvement in work such as this supports students of color and first-generation college students, the two groups who make up the majority of UCSC undergraduates. Graduate students also benefit by gaining research knowledge, practical application, project management, and supervision experience. Both students and community members bring culturally relevant strengths to bear in identifying, analyzing, and posing approaches to and solutions for problems that might otherwise go unaddressed. Community-engaged scholarship can lead to evidence-based policy and/or practice solutions with lasting impacts, and, through backbone infrastructure, establish long-term ties between communities and the university.

Launching in the 2021-22 school year, Campus + Community aims to link campus units, better connect campus and community, provide capacity building for campus and community partners, track partnership outcomes, and communicate the results. We will create a centralized physical and intellectual space to facilitate synergistic processes and outcomes benefitting the campus, community, and academic literatures. It will be a distinctive hub that supports scholarship across the entire campus, as we strategically and publicly fulfill our mission and vision.

For information on Campus + Community, please contact Rebecca London at rlondon@ucsc.edu.

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