Community Outreach

Students and faculty in the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design are actively engaged in research and in applied projects that address important community issues. Graduate courses often feature real-world projects in which students apply classroom lessons to problems facing local communities. For example, students studying environmental economics have used economic models to analyze the impacts of industrial odors on local property values. Students in urban design have helped to write successful grant proposals requesting state funds to ease traffic on neighborhood streets. In the MURP studio course, all students work as a team to tackle a significant local planning issue. Studio projects have ranged from downtown design in historic San Clemente, to developing measures to evaluate community health in Orange County, to planning for the reuse of a nearby decommissioned Marine base. Students learn to harness the skills and knowledge of multiple disciplines to address these complex problems.

Many faculty members and Ph.D. students are directly engaged with communities as part of collaborative research strategies. For example, Professor Raul Lejano and a team of UCI researchers work with NGOs and local governments in Laguna, Philippines, on the collaborative design of community-based service delivery systems to bring solid waste management to informal lakeside settlements. Through the ACCT Project (Achieving Cancer Control Together), Professor Ross Conner works with the Chinese and Korean communities in Orange County to address cancer detection and control within their communities in culturally sensitive ways.

Community Outreach Partnership Center

The UCI Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) is an initiative in the School of Social Ecology that seeks to build bridges between UCI and the local community and to leverage the resources of UCI --faculty, student, and institutional -- to help address community issues. COPC supports faculty and student research, teaching, and outreach projects that address the social impacts of demographic change. COPC projects emphasize collaborative approaches to community problem solving. COPC's focus is the Westside of Costa Mesa, an area that is home to more than 370,000 residents. The Westside community is experiencing rapid demographic change. It offers an opportunity to better understand how communities negotiate such change. Lessons learned from the Westside can provide a model for communities across California that are undergoing similar changes.