Imagining America 2013

Imagining America 2013 Summit - Los Angeles

Jonathan London and the Center for Regional Change partnered with a diverse cohort of UC Davis faculty and affiliates (from left to right: jesikah maria ross, Department of Human Ecology, Ryan Galt, Department of Human Ecology, Robert Irwin, Department of Spanish/Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, Dan O'Connell, American Farmland Trust, Jesus Hernandez, Department of Sociology, and Brett Snyder, Department of Design) to participate in an Imaging America (http://imaginingamerica.org/) summit on applying community organizing and engaged scholarship frameworks to transforming higher education. The summit included faculty, students, administrators and community partners from a national network of colleges and universities all exploring how to enhance our practices of engaged scholarship as a means to extend the rigor, reach and social relevance of our scholarly work.  Imagining America, led by Nancy Cantor (Chancellor of Syracuse University) is a consortium of 90 colleges and universities -- including UC Davis -- dedicated to promoting higher education as an active agent for the public good. Chancellor Cantor was a key note speaker at a recent symposium on the engaged university as part of the UC Davis Provosts' initiative on the Public University and the Social Good, co-sponsored by the Center for Regional Change and the Department of Human Ecology: Community and Regional Development.

Community-Based Participatory Action Research (PAR) Workshop

Jonathan London and Rey León, Executive Director of the San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advancement Project, facilitated a workshop on community-based participatory

Ray Leon

action research (CBPAR) at the Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) Institute, "CBPR Institute for Health Equity: Building Effective and Sustainable Partnerships to Improve Community Health" held at San Francisco State University on June 24th. The workshop featured the CRC's collaborative research in the San Joaquin Valley as well as Leon's inspiring participatory research community organizing model. London and Leon are co-directors, along with Robin De Lugan, UC Merced, of the Participatory Action Research Resource Center, serving the San Joaquin Valley. The PARRC was established with seed funding from the Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California.

With several new initiatives underway, the CRC is excited to welcome new staff members to assist with program and operations management, research and tecnnical needs.

Beth Bourne is the program and operations manager for the Center for Regional Change. She assists in managing the Center's various programs and projects, as well as coordinating outreach, communications and events. She has over ten years work experience as a transportation planner and land use planner for several cities and regional planning agencies within California as well as Oregon. She has a BS in City and Regional Planning from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and an MS in Community Development from UC Davis.

Cassie Hartzog, a Sacramento native, is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at UC Davis. She studies  immigrant health disparities, focusing on how health behaviors change as immigrants are integrated into American society. Cassie is currently on the research team for the CRC-Rabobank Rural Opportunity Index project. She was also a member of the research team on the CRC's Healthy   Youth/Healthy Regions study and is participating on a project investigating the role that community-based organizations play in the educational and social outcomes of immigrant youth. Cassie studied mathematics at Pomona College, computer science at UC Berkeley, and worked as a software developer before starting graduate school, where she enjoys applying her research skills to the study of issues that impact community well-being.

Diane Godard joined the Center in 2013 as Project Associate for CRC's Rabobank Rural Opportunity Index, and brings over 14 years of experience in social and behavioral research to the project. She began her work in community development conducting social, health, and economic needs assessments, and has since developed expertise in survey methods, instrumentation, sampling strategies, and analysis. She earned her MA in Social Psychology from SFSU, where she also taught several methods courses for survey research and research in human sexuality