State support now covers less than 15 percent of UC Irvine's total budget. Now, more than ever, private gifts are vitally important to ensure the excellence of the School's varied scholarly activities. Individuals, foundations, and corporations that value our work have a profound and beneficial impact on research, scholarships and fellowships, and community outreach programs. For general support and online giving
The School appreciates support in its priority giving areas, described below.
For additional information, please contact:
Stacy Skwarlo
Executive Director of Development
(949) 824-0383
Dean's Award for Community Engagement
Volunteerism, a staple in our democracy, serves to educate individuals to the merits of public service, enriches the lives of those engaged in public service, and addresses virtually every kind of pressing human problem or need. To emphasize the importance of social involvement, the Dean's Award for Community Engagement enables the School to recognize students who demonstrate both academic achievement and outstanding community service during their college experience. In 2010-11, three remarkable students were honored as the recipients of this award:
Sang Xuan Do, Mahrukh Madad and Stacey Tsuboi. Learn More...
Field Study Program
From criminal justice agencies to elementary schools to non-profit agencies and beyond, Social Ecology students have the opportunity to take what they learn in the classroom out into the community, effectively serving our communities and enhancing the value of their education. The Field Study program is a unique experiential-learning program for undergraduates in Social Ecology and a key element of the School's commitment to training future leaders. The general goal of Field Study is to integrate academic and experiential learning. This approach is based on evidence that learning is maximized when it is active, when students are engaged, and when theories and research are informed by their application to "real world" problems. Having students reflect on how to apply what they learn in the classroom to addressing societal challenges facilitates personal and professional growth and deepens understanding of linkages between theory and experience, producing more informed and engaged civic leaders.
Year in and year out, over 800 Social Ecology undergraduate majors complete a minimum of 100 hours of field-based learning in more than 225 participating organizations and corporations. These organizations are the School's partners in a collaborative effort to enable students to apply classroom-based learning to real-world problem-solving and to develop our students as community leaders. This first-hand community interaction gives students an opportunity to examine social problems, evaluate the merit of
classroom ideas and conduct naturalistic observations or investigations. The benefit to the community is immense-- students complete at least 100 hours of community Field Study work. Last year, more than 81,300 hours were completed, which is equivalent to more than 17 full-time positions in public-sector agencies and 16 full-time positions in nonprofit agencies.
Learn More...
Metropolitan Futures Initiative
Better communities and more effective solutions to common problems through integrative planning and collaboration beyond jurisdictional borders – those are the aims of the Metropolitan Futures Initiative (MFI), a collaboration between the departments of Planning, Policy and Design and Criminology, Law and Society in the School of Social Ecology. By sparking and sustaining thinking about the connections among seemingly disparate community problems, the initiative will bring together individuals and groups in a process of discovery, strategic thinking, and planning. MFI research focuses on the interlinkages between various demographic, social, and economic processes and their consequences for the social relations and well-being of persons living in the Southern California region. Concretely, these processes include studying the intersections among air quality, energy, water, and land use; the distribution of jobs and housing and transportation network supporting this distribution; and the connections among crime, neighborhood well-being, segregation, and social conflict within the region.
Learn More...
To join this proactive discourse or join in the consortium of investors, please contact Stacy Skwaro at sskwarlo@uci.edu or (949) 824-0383.
CLS Peer Mentoring Award
The Peer Mentoring Award was started in 2010 and is managed by CLS doctoral students. Presented annually to a doctoral student who has demonstrated outstanding peer mentoring, the award is defined broadly through such avenues as service, research, ethics, and/or role-modeling. Examples include outstanding mentoring of a younger cohort by an older doctoral student, extraordinary research assistance given by one student to others, fostering diversity & access for all students, or other work done by a doctoral student for the betterment of the CLS doctoral student body. If you are a current doctoral student in Criminology, Law and Society, an alumni, or just interested in supporting doctoral students, we ask you to consider donating to this award.