About Campus + Community

---

Mission

Campus + Community is a hub for coordinating and facilitating partnerships between UC Santa Cruz and community groups. We support action-oriented scholarship that advances social justice and engages the priorities, assets, and aspirations of local communities.

Values

Campus + Community’s leaders and affiliated members recognize that social justice and social change require a critical approach to community engagement. This approach values the knowledge held in the histories, lived experiences, and expertise of those from marginalized and oppressed communities. In our community engagements, we aim to: create and sustain authentic, equitable, and reciprocal collaboration; jointly produce, curate, and disseminate knowledge and understandings; and share resources in support of engaged scholarship.  

Impact

Campus + Community links campus units, better connects campus and community, provides capacity building for campus and community partners, tracks partnership outcomes, and communicates the results. We are creating a centralized intellectual space to facilitate synergistic processes and outcomes benefitting the campus, community, and academic literatures. C + C is a distinctive hub that supports critical social change focused scholarship across the entire campus, as we strategically and publicly fulfill our mission and vision.

We also aim to shift UCSC institutional policies and practices to better support community engagement and community-engaged scholarship so that more partnerships can develop. Through working groups, presentations, workshops, and consultations, we are engaged in supporting revisions to tenure and promotion guidelines for engaged scholars and in supporting new approaches to ethical review of community-engaged research.