University Communications

Fall 2002
Man on the Street
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Where we feel we can make a significant difference, we will bring our faculty, staff and students to the community and partner with community-based organizations, service agencies, faith-based organizations, corporations. We will partner with them to host community forums on important issues of the day. We’re hoping to have a community-fellows program to upgrade the communication skills of people in the community, as well as a postdoctoral-fellows program to train a new generation of thinkers focusing on the greater Los Angeles area. We will be actively going after grants with one hand, and we will be giving out community grants with the other. And there will be ample giving opportunities for friends and alumni of UCLA.

Q: Will UCLA students benefit from these partnerships?
A: Whenever I talk with an organizer of a program that takes UCLA students out into the community, they say the students return transformed. This is their opportunity to get off the campus and experience the real world, and to see for themselves the challenges we face as a society. They will also see that they can make a difference. Their experience fundamentally alters the way they view their educational experience at UCLA.

Q: What do you like best about your new job?
A: That it’s a blank slate — no one here has done this before. By that, I mean we don’t want to follow convention; we don’t want to think about limits or traditions that dictate what we can or cannot do.

Cultural critics say that we don’t have those kinds of codifications in Los Angeles. People can move a little more freely here. In the spirit of that kind of frontier ethos, that’s where we want to be. We want to be able to think in new and innovative ways. We want to be able to get ahead of trends. We want to be able to reimagine how universities relate to their communities.

http://la.ucla.edu

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