how students who are Black, Indigenous and others who are people of color are coping with the uncertainties wrought by the pandemic<\/li>\n
\n<\/ul>\n
The Racial and Social Justice Seed Grant Program is a partnership between UCLA\u2019s Office of Research & Creative Activities and its Institute of American Cultures. Roger Wakimoto, UCLA\u2019s vice chancellor for research, and David Yoo, vice provost who leads the institute, had previously partnered to launch a postdoctoral fellowship program focused on racial and social justice.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, this is just part two of a vision,\u201d Wakimoto said. \u201cAnd who knows, there may be a part three. It\u2019s imperative that the campus increase diversity, support Black Lives Matter and help build equity. All of the ethnic studies programs require a commitment from the university, and I think my office can help.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yoo said that support from the vice chancellor who oversees research has been critical to the goals of the Institute of American Cultures as it administers the seed grants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we talked with Roger about these particular seed grants we talked about the Bunche Center wanting to promote cross-racial solidarity as part of \u2018Rising to the Challenge,\u2019\u201d Yoo said. \u201cIn addition to what was happening in terms of Black Lives Matter, there was this longer vision of really trying to promote solidarity across different racial groups and communities.\u201d<\/p>\n
Building the infrastructure for the grant program was led by Lorrie Frasure, political science professor who was serving as interim director of the Bunche Center when \u201cRising to the Challenge\u201d was announced, along with Kelly Lytle Hern\u00e1ndez, director of the Bunche Center, and Todd Presner, special advisor to the vice chancellor for research.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their work is serving as a model for the groups that are evaluating proposals in support of research that advances UCLA\u2019s goal to become a Hispanic Serving Institution.<\/p>\n
Planting seeds for UCLA student success<\/strong><\/p>\nAmong the first projects to receive funding is \u201cAll Bruins Belong: Addressing Inequities through Positive Academic Engagement,\u201d led by Adrienne Lavine, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and associate vice provost for UCLA\u2019s Center for the Advancement of Teaching, or CAT.<\/p>\n
The first phase of \u201cAll Bruins Belong\u201d has entailed interviewing students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds and academic disciplines. Sociology graduate student Abraham Calderon Martinez, who has been leading the interviews, said emergent themes have been borne out of existing literature about student belonging, and the obstacles to it that often exist in higher education.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBelonging is directly tied to a student\u2019s own sense of deserving to be in this space,\u201d Calderon Martinez said. \u201cAnd that perception of deserving is really tied to their academic preparedness, and how the lack of it \u2014 or a perception of the lack of it \u2014 contributes to what we know as imposter syndrome or the lack of deserving.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project could lead to the creation of new trainings for teaching assistants, said Molly Jacobs, coordinator for curriculum assessment at CAT. She added that existing partnerships with UCLA\u2019s Academic Advancement Program and the Program for Excellence in Education and Research in the Sciences \u2014 both of which focus on supporting nontraditional students \u2014 could lead to increased programming.<\/p>\n
Jacobs said the next phases of the project would include broadening the survey to include LGBTQ students, those with disabilities, students who grew up in foster care, or have had experiences with the criminal justice system, student veterans and students who are parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The \u201cAll Bruins Belong\u201d team is currently pursuing a second round of funding from educational research group the Spencer Foundation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things that was important to us from the beginning was to create a model that would help people turn the seed grants into larger funding,\u201d Yoo said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Growing understanding of community issues<\/strong><\/p>\nAnother grant will fund research into policing, which has been an important part of calls for racial and social justice for many years. Alicia Virani, Gilbert Foundation Director of the Criminal Justice Program at UCLA School of Law, leads the project, which is called \u201cOvercoming (Claimed) Legal Barriers to Defunding the Police.\u201d She\u2019s working with law professor Noah Zatz and Fanna Gamal.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re examining how insurance laws in Los Angeles might act as barriers to reforms, such as having mental health teams or de-escalation teams respond to non-violent situations, instead of police.<\/p>\n
The value of institutional funding is the constancy it provides for projects like this, which take a huge amount of time and management of materials, said Gamal, who recently joined the law school faculty.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt expands the type of research we are able to do and allows us to think creatively about how and where we collect empirical data, analyze that data and, eventually, share our findings with the public\u201d Gamal said.<\/p>\n
For Henry Burton, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, the grant has created an opportunity to focus on racial inequality within his broader research about earthquake risk management.<\/p>\n
His work investigating the impacts of statewide seismic retrofitting goals led him to want to take a closer look at how much Black communities have been able to access programs like the California Brace and Bolt Grant, which offers stipends to homeowners for earthquake retrofitting.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the Black community, a lot of times a lot of our wealth is vested in our homes,\u201d Burton said. \u201cSo if you have this big disparity in risk and potential loss that\u2019s something that could have a huge impact on individual and community wealth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Burton said his findings would be shared with state policymakers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we find a large disparity in access to the grant, that could mean that Black homeowners are not getting information,\u201d he said. \u201cIf there\u2019s a benefit out there, part of accessing that benefit is having access to information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wakimoto said it was important for grants to fund projects that spanned social sciences, arts and humanities, which tend to be concentrated in north campus, and science and engineering projects, which traditionally call south campus home.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOften south campus-type research has more straightforward funding streams from various state or federal agencies, while north campus-type projects can be a little more challenging,\u201d he said. \u201cSo, the university stepping up to the plate, providing seed funding can really make the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ideally the grants will have a cohort-effect, Yoo said, in that the recipients in a given year (and perhaps across the years) can form a sense of intellectual community that might also spawn more projects that might not have been envisioned had they not been talking with one another.<\/p>\n
\u201cCOVID threw a wrench into these plans, but the hope is that we move on this dimension in the coming rounds,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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