Collaborative Learning Projects

Through CPCS sponsored field projects, students acquire and demonstrate technical skills, learn to analyze the political aspects of community development, and become aware of social values in professional processes. These projects directly benefit the community partners by providing research and technical assistance around identified needs. Over the course of our history, CPCS has developed a long list of successful, collaborative projects with under-funded community, grassroots community, labor and advocacy organizations serving the interest of low-income communities on issues defined by the community organization. Some examples of recent projects and partners include:

 

•  Healthy Initiative Collaborative: Community University Partnership (HIC CUP)

In this new project, coordinated by CPCS Professor Joan Arches, CPCS students will carried out a participatory action research project with youth and other residents at Harbor Point housing development (located next to the UMass campus). The project focused first on defining their health concerns and what makes a healthy community. Participants will expand their understanding of health to include psychological, social, spiritual, economic, political, as well as physical components of well-being. As they make the connection between their personal well-being with that of their community as a whole, they will identify projects and activities that will make their community a healthier one for them. To accomplish this the youth, in collaboration with the CPCS students, will learn a planning process that enables them to identify and document problems, prioritize their needs, and assess solutions for meeting those needs. They will select one solution and together work to implement and institutionalize it.

 

•  Literacy for Social Change

In the Spring 2002 and Fall 2002 semesters professor Lorna Rivera coordinated a "Literacy for Social Change" service-learning project with CPCS community planning students. The students worked with the Boston Adult Literacy Fund to increase access to adult basic education for Greater Boston residents and to increase public awareness about illiteracy. The students earned competencies in Community Needs & Resource Analysis, Service Action, Strategy & Proposal Development I and II. Throughout the year, they met with the Community Advisory Council, attended and participated in a statewide adult education conference, did research about adult literacy practices and policies, and wrote a newspaper article and professional planning report. In the Spring 2003, another group of students will continue working on adult literacy issues via a capstone project, "Access to College for GED Students".

•  Seniors’ Count Follow-up: Aging in Place at Harbor Point
Undergraduate and Certificate Gerontology students in the Spring 2004 Elder Action Research course of Professor Nina Silverstein are involved in a study entitled Seniors’ Count Follow-up: Aging in Place at Harbor Point. One purpose of the study, the result of a partnership between the Boston Commission on Affairs of the Elderly and the UMass Gerontology Institute, is to learn about the experiences of approximately 120 older adults living and aging in a private mixed-income housing complex. Another purpose is to follow-up on a Commission initiative implemented last Fall 2003 which had volunteers going door to door to communicate with older residents about services available to them through the City of Boston. Students have been involved in the research process, developing a questionnaire, pre-testing it, and then using it to conduct face-to-face interviews with Harbor Point residents who are 65 years and older. The process of data entry will begin before the Semester ends, but data analysis will take place this Summer. Students will have access to the final report.

Additional Examples of Field Projects

Some other examples from the last five years, include:

 

•  The Teen Girls Legal Rights Project: Through this Project, students researched and wrote a legal rights manual for teen girls in Massachusetts . The manual is being distributed throughout the state.

 

•  Immigrant Workers' Rights: Working with our CIRCLE/CPCS program, students surveyed immigrant workers in Boston to assess how much they knew about their rights on the job. A final report was submitted to the MA AFL-CIO.

 

•  Building Chinatown for Chinatown : Working with the Coalition to Protect Chinatown, students and faculty prepared impact assessments, developed organizing strategies, conducted community opinion surveys, and evaluated strategies of communities facing similar problems.

 

•  Organizing Health Care Workers: Working with SEIU Local 285, students participated in organizing initiatives by researching key issues, learning about and then doing house visits, phone banking to recruit members to pickets, etc.

 

•  Women's Leadership with Immigrant Workers: Working with the Immigrant Workers Resource Center , students observed and evaluated IWRC's women's leadership training program.

 

•  Harbor Point Project: In this project, students conducted an assessment of the social service needs of low-income residents and developed the "Columbia Point Directory of Services."

 

•  Adults and Youth Building Community Together: Students and faculty worked with a youth group to establish a youth council at Harbor Point and produced a "Youth Resource Book" for Harbor Point Youth. (Supported by a grant from Massachusetts Campus Compact.)

 

•  Partnership for Political Participation: Promoting Youth Leadership and Empowerment: Students produced reference books of services available to youth in greater Boston area for each of several agencies and pamphlet for parents/guardians of youth in immigrant and refugee communities to promote communication with Boston Public Schools.

 

•  Investigating, Engaging, Participating: Youth Change Agents Target School Culture: CPCS students working with the Student Government Youth Council and faculty at the Burke to develop youth leadership and voice in setting school policies.

 

•  Responding to Welfare Reform: Students worked with residents of the Dudley area of Roxbury to examine the effect of welfare reform and to advocate in the interests of the residents.