Campus + Community
Commitment – Collaboration – Creation
Campus + Community is a center dedicated to supporting ethical and mutually beneficial community-engaged scholarship at UC Santa Cruz. 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.
Banner image features UCSC students Paulina Gonzalez, Diana Padilla Legaspi, Hannah Gomez, and Robin Gabriel participating in We Belong: Collaborative for Community-Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice. Photo credit: Kimroop Bhatti
Project Spotlights
Check out how UCSC is partnering to address key issues in our community.

The Blum Center & Second Harvest Food Bank Partner to Address Food Security in Santa Cruz County
Since 2018, UCSC’s Blum Center and Professor of Psychology Heather Bullock has collaborated with their long-standing partner Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, to better understand food insecurity across the region. Through engaged research involving Second Harvest staff along with UCSC faculty and graduate students, this partnership has found new ways to understand, track, and address food insecurity in Santa Cruz County.
To read more, download the full Campus + Community Spotlight issue below.

Watsonville is in the Heart
Watsonville is in the Heart (WIITH) is an initiative organized by Assistant Professor of History Kathleen Gutierrez and Associate Professor of Sociology Steve McKay in collaboration with Roy Recio, founder of the Tobera Project aiming to preserve and uplift the history and heritage of Filipino families in Watsonville and the Pajaro Valley. In April 2022, the initiative launched a digital archive, directed by History graduate student Meleia Simon-Reynolds and HAVC graduate student Christina Ayson Plankdocumenting the stories of the “manong” generation (Ilokano/Tagalog for “older brother”) of Filipino migrant farmworkers who first settled in the Pajaro Valley in the early to mid-twentieth century.
To read more, download the full Campus + Community Spotlight issue below.

Making an Exoneree
In fall 2021, Sharon Daniel, Professor of Film and Digital Media launched a two-quarter course titled “Reasonable Doubts: Making an Exoneree” co-taught with Georgetown professors Marc Howard and Marty Tankleff. The course reinvestigated questionable cases, produced short documentaries that made the case for wrongful conviction, and created social media campaigns calling for exoneration.
To read more, download the full Campus + Community Spotlight issue below.
News
What rights do US children have? None.
June, 2022
UC Santa Cruz Joins Imagining America
May 3, 2022
New study examines ethics of community-engaged research from the perspective of community partners
April 20, 2022
Events
Dissertation Dish
Evaluating Engaged Research in Promotion and Tenure: Not Everything that Counts Can Be Counted Lauren Wendling, Director of Institutional Success at Collaboratory This study investigated how school- and department-level promotion …
Find out more »Fruits of Labor Film Screening
An award-winning and nationally-televised film, which was filmed in Watsonville and follows Ashley, a Mexican-American teenager, who dreams of graduating high school and going to college. But when ICE raids threaten her family, Ashley is forced to become the breadwinner, working days in the strawberry fields and nights at a food processing company.
Find out more »All-In: Co-Creating Knowledge for Justice Conference
A national conference that focuses on sharing strategies to expand and deepen collaborative approaches for the truly equitable co-production of knowledge. We will explore the dynamic links between campus-community partnerships, hands-on research, and student-community engagement. Together we can build partnerships for change.
Find out more »Publications
Check out the latest Campus + Community publications
People
Meet the Campus + Community Team