Engaged Research
COPC Community Scholars
2006-07 Scholars
COPC Community Scholars for 2006-07 are Anna Brendle, Fareeha Kibriya, and Cassandra Kifer. Ms Brendle is working on an evaluation project for the Neighborhood Housing Services of Orange County, while Ms. Kibriya and Ms. Kifer are conducting community need(s) assessment studies. Ms. Kibriya is working with a group of residents from the Pico-Lowell neighborhood in Santa Ana, who have started a consumer cooperative as an economic development strategy to achieve greater economic independence. Ms. Kifer is assisting MIKA Community Development Corporation, a Costa Mesa organization that is working to establish a new job center that will emphasize employment support activities including work place development training, English courses, and job placement.
Examples of these efforts include our grant writing course which began in 2003. This course teaches students about grant making by having them develop actual proposals for Orange County community agencies. In the past three years this class has produced several funded proposals which have provided important support to Save Our Youth (SOY), a teen after-school center, Share Our Selves (SOS), a community free clinic, and the Urban Land Institute of Orange County (ULI-OC).Funding for SOY helped support a program on teen obesity and nutrition, assisted efforts by SOS to expand their mental health services, and afforded ULI-OC the resources they needed for a project that will look at how design and development efforts can be used to improve health education campaigns.
Our Community Scholars Program also supports local organizations through research. Each year, top UCI graduate students in the Department of Planning, Policy, and Design, are selected to conduct "client-based professional reports" which address an informational need as identified by our community partners. Community Scholars then work with a faculty advisor and the client over a nine-month period to complete the project.