Goal 1: Deepen our engagement
with Los Angeles

Purpose

We aim to create the conditions that will allow UCLA to better serve, learn from and connect with Los Angeles.

While UCLA has been entwined with the city since our university’s founding, we have the opportunity to more meaningfully impact the lives of Angelenos, tap into the contributions and expertise of our region’s communities, and partner with those communities to improve quality of life in the city. Furthermore, as the only major public research university in a global megacity, UCLA has a special opportunity to capitalize on connections to the city in our research projects and to educate students who are prepared to fully engage in the communities in which they live and work.

First-year priorities

Some of the near-term priorities for this goal include:

• Plan UCLA Downtown programming 
  • Read about initial programs selected for the space
• Raise seed funding for Social Impact Labs 
• Provide community-engaged course incentives 
• Develop a “Quarter in L.A.”
• Recruit a Special Advisor to the EVCP on Community-engaged Scholarship
• Develop an L.A. Community Engagement Council
• Form a campuswide network of community engagement liaisons
• Increase student access to community-engaged courses and internships
• Collect data on community-engaged research and teaching
• Develop faculty working groups to evaluate excellence and impact of community-engaged scholarship
• Foster increased communication and collaboration between units

Expected Outcomes

Deepening our engagement with Los Angeles will:

• enrich scholarship, research, and creative activity; 
• enhance curriculum, teaching, and learning; 
• prepare an educated, engaged public; 
• strengthen democratic values and civic responsibility; 
• address critical societal issues; and
• contribute to the public good.

Measures of success

Ways that we will define progress against this goal include: 

• An engaged faculty network
• Interdisciplinary teams with community partnerships
• Shifts in academic culture to value community-engaged research and teaching
• Reduction of barriers to community-engaged research and teaching
• Number of community-engaged research/creative activity and teaching partnerships
• Evidence of incentivization, recognition and reward for community-engaged research/creative activity and teaching

Stories of impact

Implementation Planning Group

Lead: Shalom Staub, Director, UCLA Center for Community Engagement

Corinne Bendersky, Professor of Management and Area Chair, UCLA Anderson School of Management

Neal Halfon, Founding Director, UCLA Center for Healthier Children, Families and Communities and Professor of Pediatrics, Public Policy, and Health Policy and Management

Casandra Rauser, Executive Director, UCLA Sustainable L.A. Grand Challenge

D’Artagnan Scorza, Executive Director for Racial Equity, County of Los Angeles 

Veronica Terriquez, Director, Chicano Studies Research Center and Professor of Chicana/o and Central American Studies and Urban Planning

Lauryn Wang, UCLA Student 

Pete White, Founder and Director, L.A. Community Action Network