Showing Up for Communities

During these challenging times, it's more important than ever to engage and support our communities across LA. The Center for Community Engagement creates opportunities for UCLA undergraduate students to do just that. The Center’s work has helped create and support community-engaged courses offered by 44 departments across UCLA, empowering students to learn in the classroom while also obtaining real world experience with community partners, working in all areas from natural disaster relief to immigration rights. Through the Center’s Community Engagement and Social Change (CESC) minor, students gain practical career experience while carefully responding to the needs and priorities of our 150+ community partner organizations.

Help support the work of our students by funding transportation to community partner sites, scholarships for unpaid internships, and professional development opportunities. You will help students participate in community-engaged courses, community-based research projects, and internship experiences that address the immediate and long-term challenges that face our communities. Your support will help students learn how to apply a community-engaged and equity-minded lens to any career, whether they go into healthcare, law, or the nonprofit sector. 

Ways Students are Supporting Communities

 Students in the Center’s "Engaging Los Angeles" course are working with organizations that have pivoted to fire relief efforts, such as:

• At Search to Involve Pilipino Americans (SIPA), students helped create a Crisis Relief Fund and provided fire relief kits and counseling. 
• At Black in Mayberry, students helped organize a benefits concert to assist affected families in Altadena. 
• At Food Forward, students participated in distributing care packages for first responders and fresh produce to over 1,000 people impacted by the Eaton fire.

 As part of the CESC minor’s capstone course, seniors are conducting community-engaged research around immigration justice, foster youth reform, youth civic activism, gentrification, and climate justice. These efforts include teaming up with organizations such as the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, Los Angeles Regional Reentry Partnership, Changeist, and Little Tokyo Service Center.

An exciting aspect of my research study was the opportunity to build meaningful relationships over six months with the individuals surveyed through attending mental health events. By doing so, I was able to ensure that the research was bidirectional in nature and foster trust, which are two main pillars of community-engaged research. - Adina Marynowski ‘24 

A highlight of the capstone experience was the opportunity to interview so many knowledgeable dedicated people. The passion and commitment for supporting this community was tangible, and it feels very rewarding to know that my research will be used to directly inform my community partner’s work. - Zephania Hartojo ‘24

How You Can Support

Transportation to Community Partner Sites: To properly support, learn from, and collaborate with community partner organizations, students need to be physically in these spaces. However, many students are burdened by the cost of travel to community sites across the City and County, creating excessive financial strain or even preventing them from undertaking these impactful learning experiences. Your support can allow greater student access to these learning opportunities by providing money for fuel, bike rentals and public transit passes – enhancing community relationships in the process. 

Scholarships for Unpaid Internships: The prevalence of unpaid internships is a major factor that prevents students from securing career-enhancing internship opportunities. Roughly 70% of the students enrolled in the Center’s 195CE internship courses have unpaid internships. Your support would help reduce these economic barriers that often disproportionately affect lower income students by enabling the Center to offer more scholarships to students in unpaid internships. 

Professional Development Opportunities: Beyond the community-engaged and internship course opportunities, our students' career exploration would benefit from more opportunities to interact with leaders from multiple sectors: from nonprofits to governmental agencies to social enterprises. Your support would enable CCE to offer a guest speaker series and a mentoring program to further our students' exploration of social justice career pathways.

Please review UCLA and The UCLA Foundation’s Disclosure Statements for Prospective Donors https://mygiving.ucla.edu/faq#disclosure.

Should this fund reach the campus minimum required for the establishment of an endowment or quasi-endowment, The UCLA Foundation reserves the right to convert this fund to an endowment or quasi-endowment.