Center for Community Engaged Learning

The main mission of the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) is to engage students, faculty and staff members in direct service, civic engagement, and community research to promote civic participation, build community capacity, and enhance the educational process.

Ways to be involved using Stanford's Pathways of Public Service and Civic Engagement:

1. Community Engaged Learning and Research: Connecting coursework and academic research to community-identified concerns to enrich knowledge and inform action on social issues.
2. Community Organizing and Activism: Involving, educating, and mobilizing individual or collective action to influence or persuade others.
3. Direct Service: Working to address the immediate needs of individuals or a community, often involving contact with the people or places being served.
4. Philanthropy: Donating or using private funds or charitable contributions from individuals or institutions to contribute to the public good.
5. Policy and Governance: Participating in political processes, policymaking, and public governance.
6. Social Entrepreneurship and Corporate Social Responsibility: Using ethical business or private sector approaches to create or expand market-oriented responses to social or environmental problems.

Examples of Pathways

• Volunteering with a local organization that distributes food to the homeless and develops and harvests community gardens to increase the capacity to reach more people;
• Joining a community health center in their legislative advocacy efforts in Sacramento to ensure that mental health services continue to be funded in our safety net clinics;
• Working with a local philanthropic foundation to develop a monitoring and evaluation tool for their grantees;
• Meeting with and writing letters to local legislators to create support behind a ballot initiative;
• Designing and building a rainwater cistern for an isolated rural community in Southern Mexico and evaluating its use and impact;
• Assisting public health officials in the Surgeon General’s office to design a rational community health response to a coronavirus outbreak;
• Running for public office;
• Tutoring immigrant elementary school students in English;
• Surveying local industries and services for evidence of compliance with environmental and safety regulations.