UCSC Community-engaged experiential learning for all students through a scalable community consultancy for public interest technology

During the grant period, we significantly advanced progress towards a course-based community consultancy that provides scalable, experiential,community-engaged PIT learning opportunities for all students and that demonstrates how one can model learning after the workplace so that a large class of students are organized around delivering large community consultancy projects that provide sustainable value to local non-profit clients. We successfully served 500+ students and delivered projects to two non-profit partners that have had a lasting impact beyond the course. Importantly, we made significant iterations to improve the course-based consultancy model and significant extensions to expand its impact, including: 1) improving the process and structure for organizing many students around one large project, 2) adding new project components for no-code / low-code projects, 3) connecting the project to supporting a second course and projects within research labs, and 4) integrating our project model to support the broader Santa Cruz CORE investments program for non-profit grantmaking in the county. This last item was particularly exciting because it was a key “puzzle piece” we discovered to align incentives in our model and to create strong connections between student learning, non-profit needs, and local community funder collective impact goals. Details on these and other aspects are described in later sections and in our written case study. We’ve also organized and shared our curricula for others to learn from, use, and adapt. Besides the direct impact and development of our program model, we also established a strong reputation in the community. We ran several events open to the entire community (through our project fairs and a luncheon) and had articles written about our students in the campus-wide newsletter and in local Santa Cruz venues. We received attention from campus leadership including the dean and chancellor, as well as from community leaders including umbrella organizations such as the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County, Santa Cruz Works, and the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership. Several non-profits have expressed interest in participating in future years, and we were invited to present our work in the “All-In Conference” on community-engaged research and learning.