cityLAB-UCLA
Gustavo Leclerc of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design (center) and students, who conducted research with community partners Maya Vision and Heart of Los Angeles on the Indigenous heritage of the Westlake MacArthur Park neighborhood. The department is among the 2024 grant recipients.
In 2024, the UCLA Center for Community Engagement announced funding for 40 projects that highlight the first goal of UCLA’s Strategic Plan — deepening the university’s collaborations and connections with Los Angeles.
The funds will create new opportunities and help build relationships between faculty and students from UCLA and community partners, said Shalom Staub, assistant dean and executive director of the Center for Community Engagement.
“We are looking to develop partnerships across Los Angeles that recognize complementary knowledge and expertise to expand the range of community-engaged courses and to spark new community-engaged research,” Staub said.
The grants fall into three categories: social impact collaboratives, course development and departmental capacity-building.
Social Impact Collaboratives
Twenty-three exploratory grants were awarded to projects led by interdisciplinary co-principal investigators aiming to tackle issues of social inequity, including addressing homelessness, diversifying language-development research, advancing LGBTQ+ vision health and building urban soil networks.
Among the grantees is “Adaptation of STRIVE: Integrating racial-ethnic socialization to build family resilience against racism,” led by Bo-Kyung Elizabeth Kim of the department of community health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health, and Norweeta Milburn of department of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine. Partnering with community organizations Homeboy Industries, Arming Minorities Against Addiction and Diseases, and Healing Urban Barrios, the project will design a study to prevent racism-related stress.
Next year, the Center for Community Engagement plans to offer additional grants for projects that have successfully built foundational partnerships and are ready for the next step, in addition to offering new exploratory grants.
Course Development
Ten course-development grants were awarded to faculty from across campus exploring a variety of topics, from neurodiversity, community dentistry and public engagement to writing for nonprofits and language exchange activities for Japanese- and English-language immersion programs.
Among those new grantees is Asma Sayeed, program director for Islamic studies in the UCLA Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her proposed course, “Muslims and Civic Engagement: Case Studies from Greater Los Angeles,” will explore the challenges and stereotypes Muslims face around religious participation in a secular democracy and focus on organizations working in the areas of civil rights, public policy, health services, urban reform, racism, educational services, and gender and women’s rights.
Each grantee will work with their department chair to schedule their new courses during the 2025–26 or 2026–27 academic years.
Department Capacity-Building
Five capacity-building grants were given to support community-engaged teaching and learning in various academic departments, among them world arts and cultures/dance, and architecture and urban design at the School of the Arts and Architecture; community health sciences at the Fielding School of Public Health; civil and environmental engineering at the Samueli School of Engineering; and UCLA Writing Programs. Two additional grants funded through deans’ support were given to Islamic studies and the internal medicine residency program.
The architecture and urban design department, for example, will use the funding to assist in its movement toward a public architecture emphasis, hiring personnel to facilitate community and faculty partnerships while also creating curricular community engagement tied to housing issues facing downtown Los Angeles.
The opportunity to fund projects like these that further help fulfill the public mission of UCLA is one of the most gratifying aspects of the role the Center for Community Engagement can play, Staub said.
“Knowing that the opportunities we can create for faculty, students and community partners to join together to do all of the transformative work that they do is tremendously satisfying,” he said. “We are proud to help set things in motion that will flourish and evolve for years to come, changing lives at UCLA, in Los Angeles and beyond.”
cityLAB-UCLA
Gustavo Leclerc of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design (center) and students, who conducted research with community partners Maya Vision and Heart of Los Angeles on the Indigenous heritage of the Westlake MacArthur Park neighborhood. The department is among the 2024 grant recipients.
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