Santa Clara University
EN-10: Community Partnerships

Bronco Urban Gardens (BUG) services two marginalized elementary schools and their communities in the San Jose area as well as a local women’s shelter community garden. Utilizing urban gardening as a medium, BUG supports campus wide community-based learning initiatives by providing undergraduates with service learning opportunities, project-based learning experiences, and supporting coursework seeking to fulling ELSJ requirements. BUG builds inclusive learning models that use urban gardens to engage shared-learning spaces and inclusive garden-based curriculum for school aged children in underserved neighborhoods and marginalized communities of Santa Clara County, incorporating SCU student engagement and scholarship.
Explore Food Justice at the Community Level: BUG builds on local partnerships and works in solidarity with surrounding neighborhoods, in order to create mutual learning experiences that promote inquiry and dialog for a more humane, just, and sustainable food system.

Find out more here: https://www.scu.edu/sustainability/programs/bug/

The Thriving Neighbors Initiative is an engaged scholarship, teaching, and sustainable development initiative facilitated by SCU’s Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education. Our initial focus is on the five, predominantly Latino neighborhoods that make up the Greater Washington community in San Jose. Collectively, these communities have both extraordinary assets and significant challenges. Greater Washington is home to a driven and dedicated populace with a large immigrant population, strong community organizations, and seasoned community leaders. Conversely, it is also one of the most socioeconomically challenged regions of Santa Clara County, where families face significant barriers that impede their ability to live healthy and productive lives. The Thriving Neighbors Initiative links the University and community in projects that yield mutually beneficial outcomes. Together, we seek to encourage high-impact, community-engaged practice that enhances research and learning for the common good.

Thriving Neighbors Goals:
Build local capacity for expanded educational choice in Greater Washington such that children enter kindergarten healthy and ready to learn, that students are supported and successful throughout elementary, middle and high school, and that they graduate from high school ready for college and careers.
Improve pathways to prosperity for community members by engaging with community partners to address health, legal and economic disparities with the intention of supporting children in their learning process.
Engage the University’s students, faculty, and staff in partnership with Greater Washington residents, businesses, community leaders, and organizations to promote mutual learning, critical dialogue and transformational relationships through collaborative teaching, participatory action-research-based scholarship, and sustainable program development innovation.

https://www.scu.edu/ic/programs/thriving-neighbors/about/

Faculty in the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative conduct research and provide training, resources, and networking to support community-driven research partnerships for environmental justice among community organizations, SCU faculty and students, and other academic institutions in Northern California and Jesuit higher education.

The Initiative is uniquely positioned to contribute research, training, and networking to:
Strengthen environmental justice in the Silicon Valley and South Bay.
Build stronger links between Catholic social ministry and grassroots environmental justice organizations.
Spread a community-driven, participatory approach to environmental justice research among Jesuit higher education institutions in the United States and globally.

SCU faculty and students conduct research on a range of environmental justice issues. Much of it is community-based, produced in collaboration with community organizations and government agencies. Research topics include: food justice, water justice, justice in the electronics industry, environmental justice law and policy, community-based research for environmental justice.

The Initiative has developed formal partnerships with local organizations in Santa Clara County that work on issues of food justice, as well as occupational safety and health in the electronics industry.

https://www.scu.edu/ej/