Invitation for Community Members to Join UCLA Urban Planning Community Collaborative: Crenshaw Rising (January 4 - June 7, 2022)

We invite you to participate in the UCLA Urban Planning Community Collaborative: “Crenshaw Rising.” 

The UCLA Urban Planning Community Collaborative (formerly known as “Community Scholars”) is a six-month research and strategy-building project that will bring together activists from the community with master’s students from UCLA’s Urban Planning School to conduct research and produce a report on key Crenshaw community issues.  

For students, this serves as the “capstone” for their two-year master’s degree. For community members, it is a way to tap the labor, research and ideas of a dozen planning students committed to social justice to generate some serious community-serving and community-involved research.

The “Crenshaw Rising” project will tackle three themes:

1. Developing a People’s Plan for Racial Justice and Community-centered Development (focusing particularly on Hyde Park)
2. Beating Speculators/Investors to Preserve the Crenshaw Community’s Cultural Integrity and Economic Diversity (with a particular focus on affordable housing strategies)
3. Making Worker-Owned Cooperatives a Reality in South Central

The classes will meet weekly on Tuesday evenings from 6-9 pm from January 4 - June 7, 2022, either in-person with appropriate vaccination, testing and masking protocols at The Umoja Center in Leimert Park (3347 W. 43rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90008), or on Zoom if pandemic conditions dictate.

Community participants are expected to attend as many of the meetings as possible, and serve as members and resource people for a working group focusing on one of the three themes. The students will do the heavy lifting on research, while community participants will bring community experiences, knowledge, and perspectives. This is an intense process and a serious commitment, but past Community Collaboratives participants have found it incredibly rewarding. It is also a major service to the Crenshaw community.

If interested, please fill out the Google form at http://bit.ly/uclacrenshawrising by 11:59 pm on December 23, 2021.  

We hope you will join us in this exciting undertaking.