Starting in 2009, a group of students, staff, and faculty working with Dean Frank Gilliam started a series of dialogues and initiatives aimed at encouraging the then UCLA School of Public Affairs and peer institutions to develop more effective ways of including social justice concerns in urban and social policy courses, research, and community engagements .   

As Dean Gilliam has written: “A social justice perspective, a lens on the systemic, institutional, and structural conditions that constrain individual and community development, is a necessary and underdeveloped analytical tool in policy curricula.” 

The School of Public Affairs, comprised of three departments with independent, distinct, and notable histories and traditions of social justice analysis and teaching, has proven to be a fertile ground for developing new synergies and approaches in the field.

With generous support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, we have been able to launch new orientation activities, new courses,  a social justice academy for South Los Angeles high school students, and a range of talks, seminars, and extra-curricular events, and community outreach initiatives across Los Angeles around the theme of social justice in public policy across the three departments.

And with generous support from the Ford Foundation, the School has partnered with the NYU Wagner School of Public Service to hold inter-school dialogues on social justice, which were expanded to include deans and faculty representatives from over 30 peer institutions who came to Los Angeles and New York to discuss ways to better integrate social justice themes in policy-related curricula.  These dialogues have since been featured in papers and panels at academic conferences, including the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) and the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM).

The goal of any such initiative is, of course, for it to become “institutionalized,” permanently integrated into the School’s academic culture. In addition to being known as a public affairs school steeped in UCLA’s standards of excellence, unique in our combination of policy, urban planning and social welfare disciplines, and committed to the wider Los Angeles community that surrounds us, we are now becoming a school known for our commitment to equity, ethics, social justice, fairness, and diversity among our peer schools nationally and internationally. And the best evidence of that is the role that our commitment to social justice played in Meyer and Renee Luskin’s generous endowments that made us the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. Meyer Luskin, who targeted a portion of the gift to the support of faculty and students committed to social justice, said “If we do not create a community and a world where equal opportunity, justice, and an active regard for the environment is the rule, then no act of technological genius will matter because the likelihood is that some of us, or most of us, will be denied the enjoyment of the wonderments of this planet.”

The Center for Civil Society is fully committed to being a hub of the Luskin School’s social justice focus. We have been deeply engaged in the School’s initiatives from the beginning. Our community work, particularly our decade-long research and teaching on human services and community nonprofits, has served to prepare and inspire students as well as to support and inform nonprofit and philanthropic leaders. In an era of limited government capacity, the opportunities and responsibilities fall to civil society, the sector where, in the words of Timur Kuran,  “. . .citizens protect their rights as individuals, force policy makers to accommodate their interests, and limit abuses of state authority. Civil society also promotes a culture of bargaining and gives future leaders the skills to articulate ideas, form coalitions, and govern.”

Learn more at the School of Public Affairs' page on Social Justice initiatives.

To read about the UCLA Luskin Spring 2012 Social Justice Workshop Series, please click here.