The Santa Cruz, CA node is centered within the Institute for Social Transformation and Campus + Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and builds on the University of California Office of the President multi-campus research initiative (2009-2015), the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California. We have an extensive history of collaborative research with community organizations and agencies in multiple fields, including education, labor, health, and immigration. The Santa Cruz node uses a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) model that immerses first-generation, BIPOC, and/or low-income undergraduate students in equity-oriented community-based research in ways that both serve the community and provide meaningful experiences and skills to enhance students’ educational experience.
Engaged scholars in the Santa Cruz node draw on a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, as well as the physical and biological sciences, computer engineering, data science and other inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches to solving the ‘wicked’ problems that plague the least advantaged communities and undermine possibilities for a just and democratic society.
The University of California, Santa Cruz and United Way of Santa Cruz County were awarded a William T. Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge Grant for their project Youth and Undergraduate Transformation to Harness Community Change (YOUTH-C2). Working closely with UCSC faculty and undergraduates, local youth will conduct youth participatory action research and share findings with policymakers to improve their communities. This project works in close alignment with United Way’s Youth Action Network, which is supporting youth and adult allies to enhance youth leadership and voice countywide. The funds will also support the creation of UCSC’s first community-engaged research center, Campus + Community. Rebecca London (grant PI) will be the inaugural center faculty director. Other faculty involved include Regina Langhout (co-PI and research fellow), Steve McKay (research fellow), Saskias Casanova (research fellow), and Jessica Taft (research fellow).
Faculty members Steve McKay and Miriam Greenberg engage with community partners and UC Santa Cruz students through CISER projects such as No Place Like Home: the Affordable Housing Crisis Study of Santa Cruz County. The project, conducted over 3 years, involved teaching six courses across the social sciences and humanities linked by the theme of affordable housing, and training over 250 undergraduates, many of whom were native Spanish speakers and first-generation college students. We collaborated with 3 of the largest local anti-poverty organizations to develop and collect nearly 2,000 valid surveys and 80 in-depth interviews with local renters about living conditions and the difficulties they faced. Students also disseminated “Know Your Rights as Renters” information (in English and Spanish), reaching over 5,000 people—on their porches; in their homes; in public plazas; and at local events. To make the findings accessible, we developed the bi-lingual No Place Like Home website, and organized a series of small neighborhood and large public events.
Ronald David Glass, an historico-cultural-political-psychoanalyst and Professor of Philosophy of Education, directed a system-wide research initiative of the University of California, the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC) from 2009-2015, and he has served in the national leadership of URBAN since its early days. CCREC seeded multiple equity-oriented collaborative community-based projects, and convened community leaders and activist scholars to articulate the possibilities and limits of digital technologies in research for justice as well as to identify the full range and depth of issues in the ethics of research. Professor Glass’s leadership of the study of ethical issues in research helped shape the the first three URBAN national conferences and the collaborative production of multiple videos (e.g., this dialogue about a visualization of the discussion of ethics at the second national conference) and journal special issues, including an issue of Urban Education entitled, Research Confronts Equity and Social Justice-Building the Emerging Field of Collaborative, Community Engaged Education Research, and an issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives, Collaborative Research for Justice and Multi-Issue Movement Building.
The Center for Labor Studies has been a primary sponsor of community-engaged research and action. Directed by Prof. Steve McKay, the Center has been involved in multiple projects, including the original CISER study, Working for Dignity: The Low-Wage Worker Study of Santa Cruz County. The project was initiated by our community partner, California Rural Legal Assistance, which noticed a shift of county workers from agriculture into low-wage services but found no reliable data on the trend and nothing on the experiences of workers. The goal was to conduct a “census of the invisible” – or a survey of low-wage workers across the county about work and workplace issues. We trained over 100 undergraduates, a majority native Spanish speakers, to collect over 1200 surveys and open-ended interviews. With a grant from the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the project was extended to include a “public humanities” component – the Working for Dignity website – that showcases the survey data and final report, the narratives and images of low wage workers, and provides resources for community members, organizations, scholars and policy makers interested in the issues facing low wage workers.
The Everett Program for Technology and Social Change at UCSC, directed by faculty member Chris Benner, develops young leaders who use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, empowering people to develop practical solutions to persistent problems. The program empowers undergraduate students to use the technical, educational, and research resources of the university to work directly with communities, helping people to design practical solutions to persistent problems. Its aim is to pursue social change through proactive solutions that make an immediate and enduring impact.
Faculty member Rebecca London has worked for more than a decade with the national non-profit organization Playworks, which aims to support safe, inclusive and healthy recess for low-income elementary students nationwide. Through long-term partnership development and multiple research projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the community-engaged research has led to pivotal changes in Playworks’ theory of change as well as contributed to the scholarship on recess through London’s recently published book Rethinking Recess: Creating Safe and Inclusive Recess for All Children in School. London expanded this work with a community-engaged research project involving local school districts focused on middle school breaktime, engaging in a CISER project that trained 25 undergraduates and a high school intern to conduct field observations at schools and code and analyze observational data.
Faculty member Regina Day Langhout partnered with a local elementary school and community center for a 12 year-long youth participatory action research (yPAR) after-school program. The yPAR program, run by Langhout, her graduate students and undergraduates, enabled 9-14 year old youth to develop a focus area of interest to them, collect systematic information about that focus area, develop and take a social action to address the focus area, and evaluate the action they had taken to create change. Youth focused on collecting community stories to design and paint murals on the school grounds in order to ensure students and their families felt represented at the school, as well as creating traveling artwork and a documentary to change the narrative about immigration raids that happened in their community.
We Belong: Collaboration for Community Engaged Research and Immigrant Justice is the third CISER project, led by Dr. Leslie López and Prof. Steve McKay. We Belong connects a broad coalition of local community activist and social service agencies—the Thriving Immigrants Collaborative, with university researchers and students to conduct a qualitative study of immigrant and mixed-status families to document their experiences, their contributions, and the obstacles they face. The goal of the project is to elevate immigrant voices, strengthen local community coalitions, and generate actionable knowledge to improve social services and inform policies to ensure ALL community members belong and thrive. The project has trained over 100 undergraduate students—many of whom are themselves members of immigrant and mixed-status families—who worked directly with a group of a local community youth connected with Jovenes SANOS program. Together, UCSC students and local youth conducted 100 in-depth interviews with families, facilitated focus groups with immigrant service providers, and participated in community mapping and photo-voice projects. The project will hold several bi-lingual community report-back events involving students, researchers, local youth, and local immigrant service providers.
The Colleges at UCSC are a place of active community engagement. Dr. Linnea Beckett is Co-Founder and Director of (H)ACER, the Apprenticeship in Community Engaged Research program, in College 10 at UCSC. The (H)ACER program provides academic and experiential learning for undergraduate students to grapple with the politics of knowledge production and ethics of community-engagement. Dr. Beckett is the Co-PI on a Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability International NSF funded study and PI on a Spencer Small Grants Funded research project designed to study STEM learning in a School-Based Community Garden. Beckett brings both undergraduate and graduate students into these two feminist-oriented community-engaged research projects through (H)ACER’s research methods classes and internships to study at the intersections of educational equity and environmental justice.
The Community-based Action Research and Advocacy (CARA) Program in Oakes College undergraduate students a variety of opportunities to engage with the communities and social justice issues that matter most to them, through experiential learning in fields like education, legal aid, and assisting organizations with outreach and community-development work through their courses. Dr. Leslie López has focused her CARA work on regional networks for immigrant justice through the Puentes Program for Legal Aid.