Congrats to Community Partner Innovation Fund Awardees!

The ethos of Engage San Francisco is creating campus-community partnership and the Community Partnership Innovation Fund (CPIF) exemplifies this mission. The CPIF awards funding of up to $5000 towards organizations in support of children and families in the Western Addition neighborhood. Additionally, funds support teams of faculty/staff and partners proposing well-defined projects that support the achievement of a community-identified need, while deepening their partnership through an intentional and collaborative process.

We’re very proud to announce the awardees of the 2018-2019 Community Partnership Innovation Fund!

Curriculum Design: Youth Development, Performing Arts, and Social Equity by Judith Cohen/Handful Players; Christine Young/USF Performing Arts and Social Justice; Sumer Seiki/USF Teacher Education
This innovative and impactful project is designing a comprehensive performing arts curriculum for Handful Players’ education programs with Western Addition youth in after-school and summer educational settings. This curriculum will fuse performing arts instruction, with socially conscious pedagogical practices, in a pragmatic format. By documenting culturally responsive teaching practices and providing a framework for teaching artists to create individual lesson plans, the curriculum will integrate artistic, academic, and social learning goals, and offer tools for addressing the needs, backgrounds, and skill levels of diverse students. The project outcomes of a socially conscious performing arts curriculum and teacher training tools will benefit Western Addition youth served by Handful Players and will have broad
application for other underserved communities.

Farming Hope at New Liberation Garden by Asha Kimball/Farming Hope; Melinda Stone /USF Urban Agriculture
Farming Hope is a San Francisco-based 501(c)(3) community organization that fosters community leaders in the food system, through empowering jobs and career training in garden and culinary work. Apprentices face major barriers to employment, being homeless, at-risk and/or formerly incarcerated. Growing and serving food gives back to our city. This grant will build out the New Liberation Church garden and programming to train and transition more apprentices as well as grow more food for the community and for culinary work. The church is interested in having seasonal garden dinner gatherings to thread in with the growth of the garden program and the garden itself.

Project Amplify: Art, Music, Poetry by Reyna Brown/USF student, Roberto Varea/USF Performing Arts and Social Justice; Nico Bremound/Collective Impact
USF Performing Arts & Social Justice students and faculty will collaborate in mentoring students from the Ella Hill Hutch Community Center for fifteen weeks to devise an original theatrical performance rooted in the testimonies and observations of the students’ reflections and reactions to our national political climate. Through art, music, poetry the students shape their stories of navigating oppression and share their stories with an audience. The project will create spaces for young people to dive deeper into their own artistic talents to seek healing and understanding while inspiring their communities to do the same. The curriculum devised by Project Amplify, based on the history of American slavery and its impact on African American communities, offers students tools to artistically express themselves and the injustices they face. Through Project Amplify, students will gain the invaluable skill of analyzing and articulating systemic oppression, while using their imaginations to challenge those systems.