Growing Community-University Research Partnerships in the San Joaquin Valley

Introduction

Social science research on rural community problems in California's San Joaquin Valley is characterized by a legacy of both conflict and collaboration. Such relational dynamics engage researchers inside and outside academic institutions, advocates for agriculture and other industries as well as for typically underserved populations and places in the region. The saga of Walter Goldschmidt and the attacks on his pioneering research on the impacts of industrial consolidation in agriculture, the suppression of Richard Bradfield's research on malnutrition of Latino children, and H. Fagin's research on the impacts of the state water project and the construction of Interstate 5 on further land consolidation and subsidized water for agriculture are all testament to the political pressures on researchers that threaten the economic powers of the region.1

The establishment of the University of California (UC) Small Farm Center and Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program as a legal settlement reached with agrarian advocates concerned about the university's favoring agribusiness over the needs of workers and rural communities is testament to both to the contentiousness of these relationships and to the responsiveness of the university to advocates' pressure.2 Likewise, the long career of Goldschmidt at UCLA after his ouster from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Bureau of Agricultural Economics (albeit with a research program focused primarily on Africa, and not the wilds of California) does demonstrate some academic buffering from political pressures. More recent research by UC academics in public health, rural sociology, community development, and other fields that address issues of social and environmental disparities conducted in collaboration with affected communities illustrate the possibilities for university community partnerships.3

It is within this matrix of conflict and collaboration that a new effort to ground and sustain such university partnerships, Community University Research and Action for Justice (CURAJ) arose. Launched in 2006 by a network of community-minded academics and research-oriented community advocates, CURAJ has produced a number of engaged scholarship innovations related to community-university partnerships. Despite—or more accurately—learning critical lessons from—the legacies in which it is embedded, CURAJ has succeeded where many similar efforts have faltered. This article seeks to examine CURAJ by exploring three questions.

Based primarily on participant observation by the co-authors as founding members of CURAJ, the article nonetheless attempts to adopt a critical reflexive stance to sound out the tensions as well as the innovations of this partnership.

Regional Context

California's San Joaquin Valley, one of the richest agricultural areas in the world, is also one of the fastest growing and ethnically diverse regions in the United States.4 Its population of just over four million is spread over an expanse that runs 250 miles from north to south and up to 60 miles east to west. While many of its residents live in small rural towns the region has several large metropolitan areas as well. Not only does it represent the new face of California in the twenty-first century, it also serves as a prototype for other rural areas throughout the country. Yet the enormous challenges faced by its most disenfranchised communities and their innovative efforts to combat those problems have received scant attention relative to other regions of the country.5 It is ironic that with a poverty rate worse than Appalachia, the Valley has received less governmental funding than far wealthier regions and has historically been ignored by philanthropy.6

As increasing numbers of commuters from to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley have settled on the northwest side of the Valley and the disparity between the rich and the poor has widened, the region's historic ethnic and racial segregation has been magnified. In this tale of two Valleys, many institutions continue to bear traces of feudalism and the weak body politic struggles to sustain healthy communities. The imagery of the San Joaquin Valley illustrates the contrast between the two Valleys, or what Isao Fujimoto (2010) calls the front and the back stage of the San Joaquin Valley. Many images of the Valley, including city logos and welcome signs, promote it as an environmentally attractive and picturesque region: flat, well-cultivated landscapes and orchards, a wealth of natural resources, distant mountains framing the Valley, abundantly irrigated fields, and lush fruits and vegetables. Three of the eight counties that comprise the San Joaquin Valley—Fresno, Tulare, and Kern—rank nationally as first, second, and third for annual agricultural cash receipts. Fresno County's agricultural commodity value ranks ahead of more than half of the other states in the country.7 Omitted from these images of abundance are the diverse faces of those who produce this wealth and the impoverished circumstances in which they live.8 Wages earned by the great majority of farm workers are often less than $10,000 per year. In some areas of Fresno County more than 40% of the population lives below the poverty line and in other regions 100% of the student body qualifies for free lunch. Unemployment rates are high, educational attainment rates are low, and the Valley's cities are ground zero for the recent foreclosure crisis.

If great agricultural wealth represents the visible front of the Valley, the costs of producing that wealth also remain largely hidden backstage in the form of multiple environmental problems. That wealth emerged in part through the federal government's investments in infrastructure and high use of water from the Sierras and aquifers, which are now substantially depleted and increasingly contaminated with nitrates and arsenic, leaving many communities without safe drinking water even as clean flows are channeled from the mountains to distant agricultural fields.9 High application rates of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and large volumes of animal waste from concentrated animal feeding operations have created significant health hazards. These problems are particularly pronounced in the west side of the Valley where corporate agribusiness dominates, creating what geographer Howard Gregor has termed “plantation agriculture.” Plantation agriculture is built on monoculture for distant markets produced on large tracts of land, dependent on large-scale machinery, and worked by laborers of color who look very different than the managers and owners. Indeed, many parts of the San Joaquin Valley bear a remarkable resemblance to the rural south of the 1950s.10 Like the proverbial canary in the mine, the Valley's poorest residents are the first to feel the impact of its social problems: air and water pollution, pesticide misuse, inadequate educational opportunities, lack of public service infrastructure, housing sprawl, agribusiness control of labor, exploitation of undocumented workers, and a lack of both political leadership and fully representative government.11

However, the challenges of poverty and social disparities in the San Joaquin Valley have also historically been met with idealism and social justice activism. In the early nineteenth century it was the home for Allensworth, California's first African American settlement, a community built on the utopian concept of a prosperous, independent and self-sustaining black community. In the 1960s during the federal government's War on Poverty, the region attracted many poverty fighters who worked with local residents to establish the nation's first Head Start program in South Dos Palos, a rural unincorporated area. The region was also home to legendary activists César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, and was the site for their work with the United Farm Workers. More recent movements for environmental justice continue the struggle for the health and well being of rural residents in the face of the region's dominant economic and political powers.12 It is important to acknowledge the valiant efforts that have taken place in the region, for it is this history that inspired the formation of CURAJ.

Birth of a Collaborative Research Partnership

Imaginative research projects, successful lawsuits, and legislative reforms are now occurring throughout the San Joaquin Valley. Because the geographical area is so vast and the “back stage” positioning of the region compared to the state's iconic coastal cities, however, much of the innovative social and environmental justice work is being accomplished in small isolated pockets below the radar of mainstream news and so is seldom recognized or replicated.

To both highlight the complex problems facing the San Joaquin Valley and develop strategies to overcome those challenges, in November 2005 the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the UC Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) held a symposium on “The New Face of California: The Great Central Valley.” It gathered academics from a variety of fields and brought lawyers, policymakers, community advocates, and journalists from the San Joaquin Valley to collaborate on solutions. The symposium was designed to coincide with the opening of UC Merced, the first UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley, and to provide an opportunity for academics at UC Berkeley and UC Davis to work with colleagues at the new UC Merced campus and the young UC Sacramento Center.

In preparation for the symposium the Henderson Center contacted over 75 San Joaquin Valley grassroots organizations, legal services entities, organizers, policy advocates, media representatives, service providers, and community researchers. Many of those activists then contacted other members of their organizations, colleagues in other organizations, and others working to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged and underrepresented communities in the Valley. Without exception people expressed the need for Valley activists to have access to academics to articulate their research needs, to work with academics in formulating research, and to be part of a network of academics and activists committed to social justice. A common theme was that the knowledge and wisdom of the most vulnerable residents of the region articulated directly through participatory and community-based research are rarely incorporated into the scholarly or policy conversations about the region. The symposium focused on environmental justice and health issues, access to decent education, labor issues like the protection of agricultural laborers and immigrants, and political enfranchisement/civic engagement. The symposium papers were published in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal. The support of the California Endowment was instrumental in these efforts.

On the last day of the symposium many of the participants met to confirm their interest in a community-university enterprise and to form a working group to build an organization in which academics and community members would have equal voice. Participants included faculty and students from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Sacramento Center, and several state universities; lawyers at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) and the CRLA Foundation, the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, and legal services and other lawyers in the Valley; organizations like the Latino Issues Forum, the American Friends Service Committee, the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship, the Great Valley Center; and many smaller community organizing groups throughout the Valley.

As they sought to translate the momentum of this one convening into a sustained partnership, these and other actors faced significant challenges and opportunities related to the ambivalent legacies of university-community relationships in the San Joaquin Valley. As will be described below, the partnership that grew from this convening was able to negotiate these legacies and—at least to date—to develop innovative and sustained collaboration. What were the factors that contributed to the relative success of this new effort? We will argue that there were several key assets mobilized by partners that allowed them to build and sustain their collaboration. These factors included the following: a strong and shared commitment to participatory governance; a solid foundation of prior collaborative relationships between key leaders; and long but eventual transition from group-building process to collaborative projects.

The remainder of the article will explore these three factors and will conclude with reflections on what lessons this partnership may offer to other university-community partnerships focused on social and environmental justice.

Building a Participatory Governance Structure

One month after the summit at UC Berkeley, a smaller group of participants who had self-selected into am exploratory planning committee met with other Valley activists and academics at UC Merced to brainstorm about next steps. This volunteer planning committee spent several months developing recommendations for a mission statement and a governing structure that were discussed at length and adopted by the larger group in the late spring. The community and academics selected seven representatives each, with seven additional community alternates, to serve on a one-year interim governing board. The fledgling group faced numerous hurdles but also drew from a range of individual and collective assets from its members and collective assets.

The vast majority of San Joaquin Valley grassroots organizations, advocacy groups, and legal services entities historically viewed the University of California as, at best, indifferent to their needs and, at worst, antagonistic to their interests. As such, during these first planning meetings, a number of the community advocates expressed doubts about the sincerity of the academics to truly work in the interests of rural communities, and not to replicate what they described as the “academic industrial complex” of the university. They expressed a desire to reorient the vast research capabilities of UC towards the interests of rural communities because such work could provide factual support for their advocacy and give their positions a degree of legitimacy. Advocates sought research that could demonstrate that pesticides used by agribusiness were polluting their air and water, illuminate the pockets of extreme wealth in the region, and trace the exodus of money from their neighborhoods. Yet they were skeptical that academics were capable of being responsive to their needs or interested in their perspectives. Some had no experience with UC academics at all. For those who did have previous experience, the contact too often confirmed their preconception of academics as disconnected at best and condescending and exploitative at worst.

In response, the academic partners worked to both respect the concerns of the community advocates and to share their own histories and normative orientations of their careers and commitments with disenfranchised populations and places. As a counterweight to these challenges was the strong foundation built between the academic and community representatives on the planning committee. Isao Fujimoto, a professor emeritus from UC Davis was a veteran of decades of struggle for immigrant rights in California drawing on his own experience of dispossession as a second generation Japanese immigrant. Fujimoto had helped found and facilitate the Central Valley Partnership for Citizenship (CVP), a learning collaborative of independent community-based organizations whose mission was to improve the lives of immigrants, migrants, and low-wage workers by building their social capital. Funded by the James Irvine Foundation for ten years, the CVP had 22 member organizations at its peak in 2003. Mary Louise Frampton was a pioneering legal aid and civil rights attorney who had litigated many key cases on behalf of immigrants, farm workers, and other marginalized communities in the Central Valley who later joined the faculty at UC Berkeley School of Law to direct the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice. Jonathan London had helped build Youth In Focus, a leading non-profit intermediary organization dedicated to applying Youth Participatory Action Research to struggles for social justice in the San Joaquin Valley and beyond and who later became to founding director of the UC Davis Center for Regional Change. The community partners from these earlier efforts—including Jorge Aguilar with UC Merced, Noe Paramo from the CVP, Baldwin Moy from California Rural Legal Assistance, Caroline Farrell from the Center for Race Poverty and the Environment, Rey Leon from the San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advancement Policy Project, Kevin Hamilton from the Medical Advocates for Clean Air, Marta Frausto the tribal and environmental justice liaison from the California Department of Transportation, and Denard Davis, a long-time educational and community advocate—represented the core community leadership for what would become an ongoing partnership. The intersecting and overlapping networks and leadership in the region that formed the foundation of CURAJ can be visualized in Table 1 which details the multiple affiliations of the CURAJ founders.

Building on this foundation, the planning committee founders felt strongly that an organizational form was necessary to provide a site for the growing relationships between academics and activists, to develop best practices for community-university collaborative projects, and to foster and conduct research that was actually responsive to the needs of the Valley's most vulnerable communities. Such an organized structure was also necessary to contribute to re-centering the UC towards research and capacity-building partnerships with those populations and places typically on the margins of research agendas and political visibility. At the same time, the planning committee sought to avoid the limitations of formalizing the partnership as either an official university institute or a non-profit organization, and instead to exist as a virtual or networked organization with no one institutional home. While this structure did help prevent “capture” by any one host organization, it did also represent a profound challenge to the speed and efficiency of making decisions and moving from discussion to action. This challenge notwithstanding, one of the first decisions of the group was to name itself with the descriptive if somewhat cumbersome title, Community-University Research and Action for Justice (CURAJ). By clearly announcing its partnership with community interests in the “lead,” its hybrid strategies of research and action, and its normative position, “justice,” CURAJ sought to embody its values and aspirations. CURAJ recognized that knowledge is power and that the power of knowledge can be used for many ends. The question is to which ends will knowledge be used—in the service of those with least power, or for existing power monopolies? CURAJ was created to wield the power of knowledge to help the communities of the San Joaquin to increase their own power as they struggle to improve the quality and opportunities of their lives.

CURAJ sought to catalyze sharing and connection between community needs/priorities/aspirations for research and university interests/resources for community-based research. It sought to mobilize resources from member organizations and outside funders (public and private) to provide strategic and sustainable support for community action research activities. It sought to raise the profile of community issues and innovative action research responses to these issues (in the eyes of funders, policymakers, and practitioners). By raising the profile of action research on behalf of community interests it sought to leverage institutional change within the California higher education system to value, promote, and support an active role for high education partnering with under-represented and under-served communities in the San Joaquin Valley. CURAJ sought to foster dialogue between current and potential researchers focusing on the needs of the poor and disenfranchised in the San Joaquin Valley and community-based organizations to develop practical strategies for enhancing community capacity and for using research to influence public policy that reduces poverty and discrimination and enhances democracy.

The participatory structure developed by CURAJ demanded a significant commitment from members. Each member of the interim governing board committed to attending a monthly meeting and to serving on a committee. For most of the governing board representatives these monthly meetings required a full day because of the travel time involved. Despite the fact that all of the participants were exceedingly busy and stretched thin, they contributed their time and paid their own expenses to attend the meetings and do the other CURAJ work. This was particularly noteworthy in light of the difficult nature of those initial meetings. Because of the historic distrust between grassroots community organizations in the Valley and academics, those gatherings were exceedingly challenging and the continued existence of CURAJ was always in doubt. Early discussions about the governing board centered on the need to circumscribe the power of the academic members. Some community members wanted the vote of an academic member to count less than the vote of a community member. Varying methods of decision making were discussed at length. In the beginning the focus on process over substance was necessary but frustrating. Laying the foundations of mutual trust was time-consuming and painstaking. It meant that any tangible progress seemed minimal and participants often felt that they had nothing to show for their sacrifices of time except bruised feelings. All members were working outside their comfort zones and were constantly being challenged about their assumptions, privileges, and perspectives.

Initially the group worked to maintain a balance or equilibrium of power and interests by meeting in both remote rural areas like Allensworth and Huron, cities like Merced, Madera, and Fresno, and at the campuses of UC Merced and UC Davis. While the meetings in rural areas attracted fewer participants and made teleconferencing challenging, they were key to building relationships and credibility. The meetings at campuses and more urban areas were better attended and easily accessible for teleconferencing but sometimes risked the balance shifting toward the academic interests. The board also sought to have a variety of types of meetings. Some were focused on discussions of organizational and administrative issues, some on research needs, and some on building relationships of affection and trust. In some of the meetings in the first few years the community governing board member from the area where the CURAJ board was meeting would arrange for local community groups to make presentations about their work and their desire for collaboration with the University of California.

Through the generosity of the Walter S. Johnson Foundation, in 2007 CURAJ was able to hire Anna Garcia, a researcher with significant outreach experience in the San Joaquin Valley, to meet with a wide range of community groups serving low-income communities and populations and elicit their needs for community-engaged research. Using the best available survey and other data, Garcia completed a regional scan that summarized existing and ongoing research about the social problems confronting the poor and disadvantaged in the San Joaquin Valley, the efforts in the Valley by community, advocacy, organizing, and policy organizations to solve those problems, and the research and other tools identified by such groups as necessary to continue and improve their work. The findings of that research then informed a day long Action Summit at UC Merced in October 2008 that brought together more than one hundred community activists, researchers, and academics from around the Valley to discuss their most pressing needs and brainstorm about how participatory action research could be responsive to those needs. That summit was followed by a year of community outreach meetings throughout the Valley in which CURAJ community and academic governors met with community-based organizations and activists to brainstorm about additional ideas and strategies.

This lengthy process of community outreach and information gathering was frustrating for many CURAJ participants who were eager to begin doing participatory action research. However, the governing board decided that it was vitally important to counteract the historical pattern of researchers deciding on their research questions with minimal consideration for the needs of what they viewed as their research subjects. Participants wanted to stay true to CURAJ's vision of forming mutually beneficial partnerships and long-term commitments between academic and community partners with the shared goal of transforming society. The group wanted to insure that community members would be co-decision makers in research projects and co-producers of knowledge. It kept stressing the fact that the power/knowledge dynamic that privileges the experience, expertise, and capacity of academics over that of community partners needed to be addressed. These foundational steps became the essence of CURAJ and once established facilitated an intense yet fruitful dialogue about what the new research collaborative could achieve.

CURAJ faced a minor crisis when the key academic member from UC Merced, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, returned to Stanford and another early academic supporter also left Merced. It was critical for CURAJ that UC Merced, the only UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley, play a leadership role. Fortunately, that vacuum was filled with a new faculty member at UC Merced, Robin DeLugan, an anthropologist who became the dynamic leader of CURAJ's academic membership.13 CURAJ also weathered an administrative change when Chancellor Sungmo Kang succeeded Carol Tomlinson-Keasey as Chancellor of UC Merced and became a strong supporter of CURAJ. Chancellor Kang envisioned UC Merced as a twenty-first century public university that would endeavor to apply its resources to problem-solving research. CURAJ represented the type of research enterprise that Chancellor Kang valued. He was appalled by the social and economic conditions, which he observed in the new university's home in Merced County and embraced CURAJ's mission. Kang would establish the Chancellor's Taskforce on Community Engaged Scholarship to develop strategies that would align the research, teaching, and outreach of the new university to the most pressing needs of the region.14

A key internal development during this formation period came at a two-day governing board retreat in a rural area outside Fresno in 2006. During that meeting the social justice mission of the collaboration was solidified and the participatory action research model was explicitly adopted. It focused on its shared belief that the poverty in the Valley was perpetuated by power imbalances and identified its interest in revealing and re-allocating that power by democracy building. It reiterated its commitment to cultural diversity. De-mystifying research and de-stigmatizing poverty became two critical goals. Honoring UC's original land grant mandate was another key theme. The participants coalesced in a way that made it clear that CURAJ would survive. Finally there was a real sense of excitement in every meeting about building something concrete that could make a significant difference in the Valley.

From Process into Implementation: Putting Community-Driven Action Research on the Ground

With its governance structure established and trust built between the partners but with little to show by way of tangible actions on the ground, CURAJ began to lose momentum. Members recognized that they must transition from process to implementation. CURAJ decided that its first pilot projects would focus on two of the most disenfranchised communities in the San Joaquin Valley, the unincorporated areas of South Dos Palos in Merced County and Fairmead in Madera County. The group decided to focus on unincorporated areas because they have suffered from an unconscionable degree of neglect and disinvestment by governmental entities, have the fewest resources, and illuminate the legacy of the historic racial and ethnic segregation in the Valley.15 South Dos Palos and Fairmead were selected because they had robust community organizations and the deep ties that founding community members of CURAJ had to those areas had earned them the trust of local residents. They were areas that had not been targeted for assistance by foundations and had been marginalized for decades. They had originally been predominantly African-American communities because of housing discrimination within cities and had developed more recently into ethnically diverse areas. Their proximity to UC Merced also made it easier for faculty and students to partner with them.

Having selected these two communities CURAJ members convened a series of meetings with the South Dos Palos George Washington Carver Center Board and the Friends of Fairmead to ascertain whether there was interest in a collaborative effort. Once those community leaders expressed their enthusiasm for working with CURAJ the next step was for the community groups to select and prioritize their most pressing concerns and for academics and community researchers to discuss how research could best contribute to the solution of those problems. One of the needs expressed was for additional information on the lack of basic infrastructure in their communities. Hence, one of CURAJ's first projects was a collaborative effort with California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation and PolicyLink to conduct an infrastructure needs scan in those two communities. Students and faculty from UC Merced were instrumental in organizing those scans and interviewing community residents. Community residents are now using the findings to obtain governmental and foundation funding for economic development efforts.

CURAJ board member Denard Davis, a long-time educator and community advocate from Merced played a leadership role in building bridges with South Dos Palos. Community leaders in South Dos Palos expressed their need for revitalization of the George Washington Carver Community Center in South Dos Palos and its five surrounding acres as a way to honor and build on the agrarian African American heritage of the community. In response, law students at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Mary Louise Frampton researched economic development strategies. Residents in Fairmead were also interested in the benefits and disadvantages of working with redevelopment agencies so law students researched those issues and connected Fairmead with other unincorporated areas that have been successful in their redevelopment efforts. Students arranged a trip for Fairmead community leaders to visit these other unincorporated areas to learn from their experiences. Another concern raised was that most people were unaware of the vibrant social, cultural, and economic history of South Dos Palos and Fairmead and of the pattern of governmental disinvestment in their communities. Community leaders felt that the recovery of this history might instill a degree of pride in their young people and galvanize efforts to rebuild. Hence, students at UC Merced and law students at Berkeley Law have begun to track the history of disinvestment and to take oral histories of community members. For Fairmead's centenary celebration in 2011, UC Merced graduate student Michael Eissinger collaborated with CURAJ's community-based participator research efforts by researching, writing, and publishing Fairmead: A Century of Change.

CURAJ's most recent achievement has been the award of one of the inaugural grants issued by the UC Center for Collaborative Research for an Equitable California (CCREC).16 The grant has allowed CURAJ to establish a Participatory Action Research (PAR) Resource Center in Fresno to act as catalyst for multiple research partnerships and to provide a dedicated site for training community members, faculty, and students on the principles and best practices of participatory action research. The PAR Resource Center's educational component will focus on building the advocacy capacities of communities by training on research questions and methodologies pertaining to pressing issues. The new Center seeks to address that omission in an effort to provide more accurate research and more effective policy prescriptions. The PAR principles of engagement developed by CURAJ will guide the training, convening, and design of associated research projects, which will initially be focused on the links between health and the environment and on the work of the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project (see below), Central Valley Air Quality Coalition, and Asociación de Gente Unida Por el Agua (AGUA). UC Merced Professor Robin DeLugan, academic co-chair of CURAJ, and UC Davis Professor Jonathan London, one of CURAJ's founding members, are the co-principal investigators on the grant and Rey Leon, Director of San Joaquin Valley Latino Environmental Advancement and Policy (LEAP) and also a CURAJ founding member, is the major community partner. The CURAJ Board will serve in an advisory capacity.17

The CURAJ approach to regional coalition building and to community-university partnerships both built on and contributed to a range of related initiatives by CURAJ partners. One such effort is the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project (SJV CHIP) that brings together CURAJ leaders from both the community and the academic domains.18 Initiated by local and regional environmental justice organizations and networks active in the San Joaquin Valley, SJV CHIP seeks to transform the typically “siloed” public policy responses to environmental health issues into a holistic model responds to the lived realities of low income communities and communities of color struggling with environmental hazards. Working with partners at UC Davis through the Center for Regional Change and the Environmental Justice Project, the collaboration has produced what they are calling a Cumulative Environmental Vulnerability Assessment (CEVA) that measures concentrations of environmental hazards, social vulnerability, and poor health conditions across the communities of the region. The intended outcome of these efforts is to inform and empower environmental justice advocacy with state, regional, and local government entities to adopt and apply CEVA to improve the health of the Valley's most vulnerable people and places. The elements of the project to highlight are the collaborative mechanisms that allow partners to bridge the typical chasm between communities and universities. Central to the success of the partnership has been the early development of a set of agreements, formalized in a memorandum of understanding signed by the community and university partners. The terms of the agreement provide a basis to establish trust and a reference to mediate any tensions that arose through the project between partners.19

These PAR projects are part of a deepening foundation of community-engaged scholarship at UC Davis, including a graduate course on PAR taught by Heidi Ballard in the School of Education, the Environmental Justice Project directed by Beth Rose Middleton. Ballard and Middleton, as well as London, received their training at UC Berkeley under the direction of Louise Fortmann, a progressive rural social scientist, who championed community-engaged research on issues of disparities in rural regions, and helped launch the Community Forestry and Community Partnerships fellowship to support young scholars to pursue such research.20 The three would later reassemble at UC Davis to continue this work and to affiliate with networks such as CCREC. Finally, a new initiative by law faculty from UC Davis including Angela Harris and Lisa Pruitt, and at UC Berkeley including CURAJ co-founder Mary Louise Frampton, have launched a partnership with California Rural Legal Assistance and community residents in unincorporated areas in the Valley to engage students in environmental justice participatory action research projects.

Conclusion: Lessons from CURAJ

Founding CURAJ was a leap of faith by its members and continues to be an ambitious intervention in the history of university-community relationships in the San Joaquin Valley and elsewhere. Ever mindful of the controversies provoked by earlier research by researchers such as Walter Goldschmidt and Paul Taylor, the members of CURAJ sought to push the boundaries of action research while avoiding pitfalls that would derail the partnership. Several factors contributed and also threatened the success of this negotiation that can serve as lessons for future academic and community partners engaged in research on environmental justice and related issues.

The open structure of the partnership was both an asset and a liability. Unlike most community-university PAR endeavors, the partnership was not formed to design and execute a particular research project or even to focus on a specific academic area or advocacy campaign. Nor was it confined to a particular discipline, a single university, or a community organization. At its creation even its specific mission was loosely defined because its founders were committed to the collaborative decision-making process and the need for evolution. Despite the challenges, this participatory process allowed CURAJ to follow the mandate from the environmental justice movement that communities “speak for ourselves” and not allow academics, agencies, or others to represent or define their interests from the outside.

The truth is that community-university partnerships that are guided by community-based participatory action research (CB-PAR) values and principles are often painful, difficult, and time-consuming. Those who desire efficiency, clear outlines, a fixed template, and a quick work product will likely need to set aside these priorities in order to be successful CB-PAR collaborators. A dispassionate stance between researcher and the objects of study are considered crucial for many traditional research projects, but CB-PAR calls for multi-partiality instead of impartiality and mutual learning between researchers and community partners.21 Because CB-PAR depends on those open and trusting relationships to succeed, the research process requires participants to be both more patient and more vulnerable than is necessary in a more traditional research endeavor. Perhaps most importantly, CB-PAR requires the participants to share power, to listen carefully, to give up assumptions and preconceptions that sometimes have shaped identities, and to value perspectives different than their own.22 These normative principles led the partners of CURAJ through a time-intensive, ongoing, and “inefficient” trust and relationship building process that often conflicted with both the urgency of community advocacy and of the typical publishing requirement of faculty in research institutions such as the University of California.

Fortunately, PAR produces rewards that more traditional methodologies alone cannot equal. Research grounded in university-community partnerships can provide access to otherwise invisible populations, places, and issues (especially in “back stage” regions such as the San Joaquin Valley). Its rigor is enhanced through the iterative and interactional knowledge production process between researcher and subject and through the blending of multiple sources of knowledge and ways of knowing. Its relevance to pressing social issues is ensured by a research design process informed by the people with the most direct and intimate experience of these issues. Its reach is empowered by linking leaders in the domains of knowledge production and knowledge application, and builds action-oriented collaborations as part of the research process. Over the long term, the relationships that are built can form the basis for additional research ideas and opportunities, more varied perspectives, and more meaningful work. The examples of the research partnerships between UC Merced, UC Berkeley, and the communities of Fairmead and South Dos Palos (as well as intermediary advocates such as Policy Link and California Rural Legal Assistance), the San Joaquin Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Project and the associated research, teaching, and outreach innovations are testament to this.

Because CB-PAR has the potential to produce innovative, rigorous, and relevant research that can contribute to more informed public policy it should be a natural fit for public research institutions. There are signs that some institutions understand this. UC Merced has formed a Resource Center for Community Engaged Scholarship guided by a special faculty and community-based advisory committee. UC Berkeley now gives Chancellor's Public Scholar awards for community-engaged teaching and the UC Davis Faculty Senate has an award for Distinguished Public Service. CB-PAR is clearly gaining legitimacy within academic circles yet much still needs to be done. CURAJ-affiliated academics are committed to encouraging their campuses to broaden their thinking about research methods, to demonstrate the value that CB-PAR can bring to their scholarship, and to create more opportunities and incentives for community-engaged research.