University-Community Partnership: Disrupting Institutional Culture and Honoring HSI Designation Through Community Servingness

• In Event: Historicizing University-Community Links at 30: Proleptic Learnings in Resistance, Responsiveness, and Reimagining Education

Abstract

This study examines institutional change at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), which has leveraged community-centered programming through its UC Links partnership to advance educational equity for over thirty years. Club Proteo, and its many community-driven iterations, was a founding program in the UC Links network. In Spring 2025, the founding faculty retired and a new PI is continuing this legacy through the Campus Conexiones. Focusing on Campus Conexiones (CC), a practicum-based after-school program serving Latinx youth, we explore how Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) operationalize “Servingness” (Garcia et al., 2019) beyond enrollment thresholds and how institutions themselves can be responsive to community needs and pressures. By examining Club Proteo as a historical model of community partnership, characterized by engagement and centering community needs (Nation et al., 2021), we explore how future programming can build on the UC Links legacy of disrupting systemic racism and set a precedent for sustainable, equity-focused programming.

The study adopts a qualitative research design grounded in ethnographically informed case study methods (Yin, 2014) and explores an activity involving K-12 after-school program participants accompanying undergraduate mentors to an HSI career-day workshop on the UCSB campus. The workshop, designed for undergraduates, was scheduled for the same time they would be participating in the after-school program. While HSI workshop organizers hadn’t previously engaged K-12 participants, they were open to university and K-12 students attending together and are now reorganizing future programming to be more responsive to local communities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with undergraduate participants, program principal investigators, and UCSB’s HSI Initiatives Director to capture perspectives on program impact and institutional alignment. Data sources and analysis also include field notes documenting CC activities and the HSI-focused Career Day workshop. Institutional documents and census data further contextualize the program within UCSB’s HSI designation and the demographics of the local Latinx communities. These methods allow the application of a sociotechnical activity system lens, examining the dynamic interplay between program implementation and organizational commitments (primary work system) and sociopolitical forces of the macrosocial system (Author, 2021).

Our findings suggest that CC fosters reciprocal learning between undergraduates and youth through culturally responsive mentorship embedded in supportive community contexts. Undergraduates gain professional competencies while co-constructing college-going identities with youth and UCSB’s HSI mission is operationalized through praxis rather than enrollment metrics alone. These efforts sustain affirmative action legacies and resist anti-equity narratives (Contreras & Gandara, 2023). These findings underscore the importance of scholarship and partnership that demonstrates how institutions can move beyond symbolic gestures toward authentic collaboration responsive to community needs and expertise (Moll et al., 1992).

This research contributes to scholarship on HSIs, community-engaged learning, and equity-focused institutional practices by introducing a sociotechnical activity system as a tool for analyzing multilevel dynamics in campus-community partnerships. By addressing institutional resistance and the centrality of community knowledge in shaping change, this study moves us towards a roadmap for future research and practice.

Authors

• Monique Mercedes Estrada, UC Santa Barbara

• Amanda Salcedo, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Jaquelyn Valenzuela, University of California Santa Barbara