Goals & Outcomes
The mission will guide the CEJ as it aims to develop teaching, research, and service by becoming a nexus for collaboration and interdisciplinary collegiality. The Center will be outcome-oriented: producing curriculum (with an emphasis on service-learning), fostering campus-wide and community-based collaborations for co-curricular events, and serving as a resource to connect community-based members with local researchers (with a focus on involving CLU students in research projects).
The Center will bring together students, faculty and staff who seek to channel their scholarly and activist passions into working collaboratively with others to make a difference with and for the residents of Ventura County and the surrounding counties.
Through critical engagement with social problems and scholarly issues, California Lutheran University will build on its tradition of academic excellence to contribute to the Lutheran tradition of higher education which seeks to "educate leaders for a global society who are strong in character and judgment, confident in their identity and vocation, and committed to service and justice.
Leading the Way for Social Change
The Center will serve as a nexus for community-based research and dissemination of findings to effect social change. The institutes will conduct projects under the auspices of the Center for Equality and Justice in order to facilitate wide ranging community partnerships that include non profit organizations and local academic institutions. In addition, the institutes interrogate both traditional learning and service learning in its quest to inspire students to pursue careers as wide ranging as, immigration law, inner-city teaching, public health, and law enforcement.
Both the two institutes and the VC Collaborative are dedicated to developing strong bonds between the academic and local communities; however, each has a distinct mission. The Center aims to achieve social change by utilizing web-based technology to coordinate the university's community outreach efforts. By centralizing the teaching, service and research efforts of CLU and other academic partners focused on promoting equality and justice, the Center's activities will foster collaborations to aid communities of Ventura County who may currently be disconnected but share common goals.
Target Audiences
Our target audience is social service agencies and concerned citizens, researchers, students and volunteers. Since issues of equity and social justice affect underrepresented groups disproportionately, we believe that these groups — comprising more than 25% of the county's population — will be the greatest beneficiaries of our efforts. Annually, we expect that up to 800 students from CLU, CSUCI and the community colleges will be involved, along with 15 different community organizations.