University of California, Santa Barbara
EN-13: Community Stakeholder Engagement

In 2010, UCSB reached a cooperative agreement with Sustainable University Now (SUN) that ensures that community stakeholder engagement is applied systemically and regularly across the institution’s activities. SUN is a coalition made up of community groups, including Citizen's Planning Association (CPA), the Coalition for Sustainable Transportation (COAST), the Santa Barbara League of Women Voters, the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SBCAN), the SBCAN Action Fund, and the Santa Barbara Audubon Society. The agreement sets forth methods for active engagement of SUN in the Campus's planning and development efforts, capital investment projects, and other decisions that affect the larger community through the following forms of support/representation: a. The appointment of a SUN-designated community organization (ex officio) representative to the Campus Sustainability Committee; b. The appointment of SUN-designated community organization (ex officio) representatives to Campus-Wide Sustainability Change Agent committees; c. The appointment of a SUN-designated community organization representative to serve as an ex-officio member of TAB; and d. The appointment of a SUN-designated community organization representative to serve as an ex-officio member of the Parking Ratepayers Board. UCSB does not have any established policies with which to identify stakeholders; however, any community group can join SUN if they feel that they are not being engaged and or are under-represented.

UCSB’s is very active in engaging our stakeholders, especially within Housing & Residential services. We engage them in our planning in almost every area, but particularly in the area of student housing and dining facilities. For example, we have held many design charrettes over the past 4 years, engaging students in our efforts to fine tune programming needs before we build the San Joaquin Apartments on the Santa Catalina site. Also, we are currently running an MTD/Housing partnership survey of students to find ways to improve bus service to existing residents, as well as to prepare for over 1500 new students coming with the Sierra Madre (515) and San Joaquin (1000) projects. Here is the draft site underway for the bus survey – https://info.housing.ucsb.edu/mtd_bus_survey.aspx We are also engaged with homeowners associations and the City of Goleta. Our Director of Residential & Community Living, Jill Hurd, along with our Community Housing officer Roane Akchurin, has been attending the IV Homeowners Association to talk about the campus's housing projects. The Storke Ranch Homeowners Association has been invited via their property management company Bartlein as well as by individual postcard invitations to our various design charrettes in the past and has had a strong presence for the past few years in the process. The local homeowners (at Storke Ranch and north of the Sierra Madre project) are currently engaged in our San Joaquin EIR review with the Coastal Commission, coordinated by the Planning office. As part of many daylong meetings with our architects and consultants, the City of Goleta has been engaged in the same process; in fact, this group often has had their lunch meetings in the Santa Catalina conference rooms, along with the county and COAST safe routes to school groups, as well as the principal of IV school.

City of Goleta, IV homeowners Association, Stork Ranch Home Owners Association, The coastal Commission, COAST safe routes to school groups, and Sustainable University Now (SUN)