Skip to content

About Us

Our Commitment to Inclusivity

The students and staff within the Community Engagement Center (CEC) at UC Merced work to create an inclusive environment for all and prioritize creating opportunities to promote positive systemic change by collaborating with community organizations, students, and faculty.

We, the CEC Team, recognize:

  • The struggle and lived experience of under resourced communities in Merced.
  • The importance of UC Merced students, faculty, and staff being engaged in the Merced community as a community member, not as a guests
  • The need to acknowledge biases and challenge them through practices of inclusion and acceptance

We, the CEC Team, strive to:

  • Promote fairness and provide empowerment and advocacy for each individual and community to ensure that everyone has the right to civil liberties, equal opportunity, and a sense of safety and security.
  • Challenge existing frameworks of oppression including racism, heterosexism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, ageism, sexism, transphobia, microaggressions, and all other forms of discrimination
  • Maintain an environment in which all individuals receive respect and acceptance.

The Community Engagement Center embraces the following definition of Community/Civic Engagement:

"Working to make a difference in the civic life of our communities and developing the combination of knowledge, skills, values, and motivation to make that difference. It means promoting the quality of life in a community, through both political and non-political processes.”

Thomas Ehrlich Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Our Purpose and Mission

Community engagement is core to the purpose of higher education and essential to the student experience, teaching, and empowering students to become active and responsible civic participants, and central to the theme of UC Merced's Principles of Community.

The Community Engagement Center brings together UC Merced students, staff, faculty, and Merced community members, agencies, and organizations to create and develop reciprocal partnerships that generate student learning, build capacity, and solve problems through service, scholarship, and leadership. These actions contribute to building a healthy and sustainable community (local to global) and creating positive change. 


  • Community Engagement Center Goals

    • Facilitate: equitable, effective, and reciprocal partnerships and opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners in educational and co-curricular service and research experiences.
    • Provide: opportunities to, and facilitate connections between, campus and community entities.
    • Support: positive community engagement outcomes through educational workshops, trainings, and program implementation.

  • Learning Outcomes

    • Civic Responsibility:  Capacity to express an understanding of issues within the community and the responsibility to participate in democratic processes to work toward positive changes.
    • Consciousness of Self: Ability to identify individual values and interests, to gain the confidence to act consistently with values, and to respect and appreciate the perspectives, values, and life situations of others. 
    • Academic Success: Ability to apply academic concepts to community issues and concepts of community issues to academic learning, alongside the development of professional skills. 

  • Strategic Plans

    • GOAL 1: Engage Our World and Region Through Discovery and the Advancement of Knowledge
      We are a young campus already recognized for the unparalleled trajectory and quality of our research. As we move toward joining the select number of campuses at the very high research classification (R1), we will continue to establish ourselves as a national hub for interdisciplinary and transformational research that supports equity and prosperity globally and locally, with particular sensitivity for the San Joaquin Valley. Research experiences, a hallmark of our educational programs, will provide fertile ground for our undergraduate and graduate students to develop the 21st century skills and knowledge essential to creating and leading positive change at global, national, and local levels.

    • GOAL 2: Develop Future Scholars and Leaders
      As our campus continues to grow, we will provide our students with the personal and academic support to succeed through world-class educational experiences delivered by outstanding educators and researchers. Honoring our students’ experiences as strengths upon which to build, our offerings will develop lifelong learners empowered by the habits of mind and tools of a researcher and address whole-student development, lead to career readiness, and encourage and enable civic engagement. Through a supportive community and educational experiences that are inclusive, high-impact, experiential, and research-based, we will foster the intellectual and personal development of diverse scholars and leaders. Our students will leave our campus recognizing the importance of global and local community and having contributed to the San Joaquin Valley. They will be prepared to be the next generation of diverse scholars, leaders, and agents of change.

    • GOAL 3: Cultivate a Culture of Dignity and Respect for All
      Bold scholarship requires us to dismantle long-standing exclusionary practices in higher education. We aim to adopt research-grounded practices that drive our campus toward inclusive excellence. To do so, we will invest in the resources, and cultivate the skills, knowledge, and comprehensively inclusive and anti-racist attitudes necessary to ensure that each unit, department, division, and stakeholder clearly demonstrates their contribution to our Principles of Community.

     

    Click HERE to learn more!