Fonna Forman, Ph.D.

“Capital funding for the three UCSD Community Station sites has now been fully committed, through a combination of public and private sources. We are turning our efforts now from getting the physical infrastructure built to long-term programming, and increasing the research and teaching capacity of the Community Stations.

We see the UC San Diego Community Stations as a campus public good, especially important as the campus seeks to become a Hispanic Serving Institution, committed to experiential learning.  The new light rail is our best friend! We will continue to run our own Field Internship into the future, supporting 30-40 students each academic year, but our vision is much larger. Our vision for the future is that the UCSD Community Stations become a hive of undergraduate research and service activity distributed across our border region.

For my proposed Changemaker project, I will work in the next year to develop one - possibly two - pilot CESL internship programs, with a campus unit (or possibly two) that have expressed interest to embed teaching and learning opportunities in the UCSD Community Stations.  We are in conversations with the Institute for Public Health (on whose Advisory Board I sit), the Music Department, the new Bending the Curve climate solutions course (that I co-developed and co-teach with SIO climate scientist, Ramanathan) and the college writing and practica program at Warren.  What these CESL internships can look like, how they might function, who will staff them, and how students from various majors will obtain course credit or satisfy field requirements for participating in them, is still very much an open question. I anticipate that my proposed Changemaker CESL internship program/s will emerge in partnership with one or two of these units, and will tackle these sorts of questions.  The internship program we design can become a model for other units interested in developing CESL programming in the Community Stations.”

1) The UCSD / EarthLab Community Station in Encanto, in partnership with the non-profit Groundwork San Diego;

2) The UCSD / Casa Community Station in San Ysidro, California, in collaboration with the non-profit Casa Familiar; and

3) The UCSD / Divina Community Station in the Los Laureles Canyon, an informal settlement on the periphery of Tijuana , in collaboration with the non-profit Los Colonos De Divina Providencia.