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In spring 2006 Cal Corps launched it East Bay Neighborhood Initiative. Through a deliberate planning process involving community and campus stakeholders, Cal Corps is developing ten-year intensive community-campus partnerships with residents of South Berkeley and Lower San Antonio-Fruitvale in Oakland.
We will engage the campus community in these neighborhoods through paid and academic internships, volunteers, and research. Cal Corps aims to develop and implement programs – designed in collaboration with students, faculty, and community members – by acknowledging community assets in an effort to meet neighborhood needs.
The East Bay Neighborhood Initiative will provide higher quality educational experiences for students, helping them to integrate their academic and service pursuits. The partnership also seeks to streamline local communities’ access to the University, and lay the groundwork for partnership between the identified neighborhoods and the entire University. With the advice and input of the community, the initiative will create long-term partnerships, potentially around existing community projects.
For members of the UC Berkeley faculty, this project will create long-term projects, allowing the campus to better research and document the extensive impact that the University can have on the local community. For students, this ten-year initiative will teach them about needs and assets of local communities, and about the need to understand the connections between community issues in order to improve their effectiveness as future researchers and community leaders.
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