I study the process of community collaboration and how university and community partners collaborate in the research process. I am the inaugural Faculty Director of a new center at UC Santa Cruz called Campus+Community. We were awarded a William T. Grant Foundation Institutional Challenge Grant to collaborate with United Way of Santa Cruz County on a project called Youth and Undergraduate Transformation to Harness Community Change (YOUTH-C2 Project Summary).
I was previously the lead researcher for the Youth Data Archive at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities at Stanford University. My co-edited volume with Milbrey McLaughlin, From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes (Harvard Education Press) describes the process of collaboration amongst community organizations and with university researchers to produce actionable findings. We documented the formation of research partnerships with various community agencies using email exchanges and meetings notes.
A recent project called “We are about life changing research” explores the ways that seed grantees funded by the University of California Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC) approached engagement. We write about how community partners perceived their research engagements, including the challenges they faced.
Key Publications:
London, Rebecca A., Ronald David Glass, Ethan Chang, Sheeva Sabati, and Saugher Nojan. (2021). “’We are about life changing research’: Community partner perspectives on community-engaged research collaborations.” Forthcoming in the Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement.
Greenberg, Miriam, Rebecca A. London, and Steven C. McKay. (2020). “Community-Initiated Student-Engaged Research: Expanding Undergraduate Teaching and Learning through Public Sociology.” Teaching Sociology 48, no. 1: 13-27.
Nelson, Ingrid, Rebecca A. London, and Karen R. Strobel. (2015). “Reinventing the Role of the University Researcher.” Educational Researcher, 44(1): 17-26.
London, Rebecca A. and Milbrey McLaughlin. (2014). “The Youth Sector: Supporting Cross-Institutional Community Collaboration Through Shared Data,” in What Counts: Harnessing Data for America’s Communities. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute.
McLaughlin, Milbrey and Rebecca A. London (Eds). (2013). From Data to Action: A Community Approach to Improving Youth Outcomes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
McLaughlin, Milbrey and Rebecca A. London. (2013). “Taking a Societal Sector Perspective on Youth Learning and Development,” in Design-based Implementation Research: An Emerging Model for Relating Research and Practice, eds. Penuel, W.R and Fishman, B.J. New York: Teachers College Press.