When one high school student’s guidance counselor suggested that, as an incoming UCLA freshman, he trade in his drama class for a computer course that would better help him prepare for college, he refused.
It was the only class in his high school, he told ArtsBridge director Amy Shimshon-Santo later, that allowed him to express his emotions and feel cared for.
Shimshon-Santo, who heads ArtsBridge, a program geared toward promoting and maintaining arts education in public schools, said experiences such as these are not uncommon.
She said students often feel that drama and arts classes are the only times they can talk about what is happening in their lives and relate it to creating something new.
“You can’t be successful academically if you haven’t eaten, if you’re being beaten at home or if you’ve witnessed abuse,” she said. “You need to have a place to process real life.”
ArtsBridge is one of many programs supported by UCLA Center for Community Partnerships. In addition to performing and visual arts programs, the center supports programs in a wide range of fields.
Programs such as Homeless Health Care, in which David Geffen School of Medicine students and faculty provide health care to homeless people in West Los Angeles, fall under Health Services.
Another program run through the center is Educational Advocacy, which holds a clinic offered by both the UCLA School of Law and the department of psychiatry to train law students and psychiatry interns to provide educational advocacy for children with learning disabilities, according to the Center for Community Partnerships Web site.
The center supports programs under 10 broad categories.
As a result of such programs, in the last two years UCLA has connected with more than 150 non-profit organizations and produced a range of programs from documentary films to archives, training sessions, academic reports and web sites, said Frank Gilliam, associate vice chancellor for Community Partnerships.
Gilliam said he believes it is important that UCLA be concerned with the welfare of the Los Angeles community.
Historically, as a land grant university, UCLA has a responsibility to play an active role in the community, Gilliam said, adding that because the university is a large contributor to Los Angeles’ economy and culture, it benefits from a thriving community.
“We are a stakeholder in the community ““ it matters to the university how the L.A. community is doing, and therefore it’s important for us to be … productively engaged,” he said.
One of the many avenues at UCLA that provides support for community-based projects is the Center for Community Partnerships, Gilliam said.
The center is a part of UCLA in L.A., a program aimed at making the university active in Los Angeles, and focuses on projects that are relevant to three broad areas: supporting children, youth and families, stimulating economic development, and supporting arts and culture, Gilliam said.
The center focuses on creating mutually beneficial relationships with non-profit organizations and is not interested in “unidirectional outreach”, he said.
Gilliam said the center takes into account UCLA’s function as a large research university and seeks out partnerships that will benefit both the community and UCLA faculty and students as opposed to projects that will benefit the community alone.
“We are not a foundation, we are not in the charity business. … (This relationship) allows researchers to test their abstract theories against the real world of ugly facts. … And it’s important for the students to be able to do this as well. This expands their educational experience,” Gilliam said.
Many of the programs work with undergraduate and graduate students to achieve their goals.
One such example is the ArtsBridge program.
Because there are not enough qualified arts educators serving the local community, ArtsBridge trains UCLA arts students who want to be arts educators in urban communities by having them teach in local schools, Shimshon-Santo said.
In one case, Shimshon-Santo said a UCLA arts student worked with a science teacher to integrate the arts into science classes.
After discovering that students were unable to draw what they observed during experiments in observation books, the teacher moved to make changes in the curriculum. With the help of ArtsBridge, students were able to better perform in their science classes, she said.
The center has a competitive selection process for deciding which programs it will support, Gilliam said.
Groups seeking support from the center must submit proposals that outline their potential project in a way that is realistic, Gilliam said, adding that proposals must state how plans will support a mutually beneficial relationship with UCLA and be relevant to questions affecting the L.A. community.
Gilliam said once proposals are approved, they can receive a wide range of supports including, but not limited to funding.
Often, projects receive infrastructural help or offices on campus, and the university can also supply projects with the kinds of research and data they cannot find elsewhere, Gilliam said.
“It’s a mistake to focus on just the money. … In many ways it’s more about connecting people than the money (because the funding) may stimulate the project but we don’t give them enough to continue. (It) may get them off the ground, but it’s more about the relationship,” he said.
In the last two years alone, 50,000 Los Angeles residents and hundreds of UCLA students have been involved with approved projects, Gilliam said.
When she joined forces with the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, Shimshon-Santo said she received several resources from the university.
In addition to students’ participation, UCLA provides funding for the part-time director’s position and created courses in which students receive academic credits for participating in service programs. Also, UCLA matches scholarship funds provided by the state, Shimshon-Santo said.
Shimshon-Santo said UCLA’s decision to support the arts is significant since only a few UC campuses, including Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, San Diego and Santa Cruz, are supporting ArtsBridge programs.
Shimshon-Santo said she worries that new artists will lack the support they need to be creative.
“Where is the next generation of artists, painters, novelists, dancers ““ where are they going to come from?” she said.
In addition to programs that benefit students, the center also supports programs that focus on topics that may be interesting to professors who conduct research at UCLA.
The California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA, codirected by Anne Sirota, creates materials and presentations to help teachers teach students techniques to improve their reading comprehension, especially with textbooks.
“Many students in high school are well versed in speaking English, but they are not necessarily well versed in the academic language of textbooks so they may have a hard time understanding the textbooks,” Sirota said.
To help solve the problem, the California Reading and Literature Project selects and trains teachers and administrators to help students better understand their textbooks. Younger students are taught to decipher the grammar of academic language. High school students are taught techniques to improve their academic writing and vocabularies, Sirota said.
Sirota said UCLA helps support the project by providing office space in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, as well as partially funding directorial positions.