1. Mission and Educational Purpose:
 2. History:
 3. Resources:
 4. Structure and Finances:
 5. Budget:
 
 

1. Mission and Educational Purpose:

The Center for the Study of Community and Society has evolved step by step since the formation of the University of Washington, Tacoma campus in 1990. Since beginning, the UWT has linked the campus and the community and highlighted the importance of diversity and social concerns across disciplines. Such concerns were written into the founding educational mission statements of our interdisciplinary urban based programs. The Center carries this mission out by providing an organizing vehicle on campus which can draw interested people together for educational programs, community outreach and research, teaching innovations, and involvement in social concerns. It also links university resources to the community by putting on programs in churches, schools or other settings and by working with teachers, unionists, civic, government and business leaders and other interested people on projects of mutual concern to the campus and the community.

The Center has a definite pedagogical purpose.  We are seeking to create a new awareness of the role of education in community development, and to help foster a new kind of citizenship, one in which the highest ideals of education are applied to society in an activist fashion. In the tradition of Tacoma's humanist civic and educational advocate Fred Haley and other founders of the UWT campus, we base our understanding of citizenship on an expansive sense of community which both creates unity and values diversity. We believe these purposes run across all our disciplines.

Educator Ernest Boyer in the 1990s suggested the need for an
interactive model of university teaching and learning in which students apply their respective studies and disciplines to the social environment and challenges around them. Just as universities created schools of social work and labor and industrial relations in response to the social dislocations caused by industrialization, he felt universities need to create new knowledge and modes of learning in the era of globalized
capitalism. We don't have a road map to follow, but we do know that higher education needs to respond to the many changes taking place in our society and the world in order to help shape a better future.

When the UWT opened its doors in 1990, faculty in the Liberal Studies program made many efforts to connect to the community. In the UWT's first years at the Perkins Building, Prof. Michael Honey organized a series of educational programs in African American and labor history held at the Tacoma Art Museum, at the First Baptist Church, at Allen A.M.E. church, and other venues in the Hilltop and downtown areas. A group of faculty put on an impressive public history program at the Tacoma Art Museum on The Power of Remembering, and we collaborated with the Washington Historical Society Museum and the Tacoma Urban League in several other major public history programs on labor, civil rights, and ethnic community history. 

In 1994, we formalized such activities under the name of the
Center for the Study of Community and Society. Dr. Janette Rawlings became executive director for a two-year period. She organized a series of discussions on poverty and policy with concerned community people, and we continued to bring speakers to the campus and to nearby churches and union
halls relating to ethnic, gender and labor studies. We developed rapport with an array of people in civic and educational organizations and the labor and ethnic communities of Tacoma. Faculty and staff who had been involved in the Pluralism and Unity state-wide program also developed campus events to speak to diversity issues and formed a campus Diversity
Committee.

In 1996, the west coast pensioners of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) designated the ILWU Local 23 hall at 1710 Market as the Ernie Tanner Labor and Ethnic Studies Center. Ernie Tanner was a leading longshore worker, father of federal court judge Jack Tanner, and led the effort to build the union hall. He was the only African American on the general strike committee of the famous longshore strike of 1934 which created a foothold for unions up and down the West Coast. Both the ILWU and members of the UWT Center wanted to make the longshore hall available for community and university functions. From 1996-2000, a series of UWT labor studies and other classes have been held in the Ernie Tanner Center, featuring important academic speakers on labor, race and gender concerns, as well as numerous organizing meetings of workers with an educational purpose. As one example, Dolores Huerta, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee with Caesar Chavez, spoke to one session with over four hundred participants as part of a three-day conference on Latino contributions to contemporary society hosted by three Tacoma universities.

The Ernie Tanner Center continues to be one of several projects that members of the Center for the Study of Community and Society support. During 1996-97, Profesor Steve DeTray became director of the Center for a two year stint, and he and Michael Honey worked closely together coordinating events and putting out newsletters and mailings. Under Dr. DeTray's leadership, the Center helped to explore new terrain in innovative teaching and service learning projects. Dr. DeTray and his associates in the community created a framework and raised the funds to start up the curriculum in nonprofit studies. Through the curriculum students are able to obtain the nationally-recognized American Humanics Certificate in Nonprofit Management. The certificate requirements include that students experience at least 400 hours of supervised service- learning internships with local nonprofit organizations. This brings immediate help to our local community organizations at the same time that it brings the community into the classroom. The Humanics project now has its own staff and funding, but helps to support Center projects just as the Center supports Humanics. 

In a similar way, Center members are now working with the Tahoma Indian Center to try to raise funds so that the latter can maintain its urban Indian programs across the street from the Ernie Tanner Center and ILWU Hall. The CSCS in this case hopes to help create new links between the urban Indian community and the UWT campus, and to expand our own offerings in Native American studies as part of this effort. This partnership is yet another example of how a Center operating on the UWT campus can provide a meeting place and a mechanism for faculty and staff to engage in important extra- curricular education and development projects with people in the
community around us. 

One part of the Center's mission also includes outreach to the
public schools, with the objective of making diversity and labor education programming more readily available to K-12 teachers. Past examples are two years (1995-96) of weekend seminars for teachers through the UW Labor Studies Center, bringing civil rights singers and speakers into ten public schools (1994), and developing programs in Asian-Pacific Islander and African American and Latino studies. We would like to link such efforts to increased recruitment of students of color and disadvantaged youth into area colleges.  Faculty at UWT have included a wide array of projects related to the community in their teaching, which the Center tries to support through its newsletter and facilities. Campus and community- based projects by faculty have included ongoing community health care and domestic violence prevention programs, oral and public history projects, support for the African-American and Washington Historical Society Museums and the Tacoma Art Museum, community- related media projects, anti-violence and drug addiction research and educational projects, the Chinese Reconciliation project, environmental research and development work in the surrounding area, and various other efforts.

Research-based learning has obtained special attention in 1999-2000 through Tools for Transformation grants from the UW. One grant has been channeled to all three UW campuses by the Center for Labor Studies, providing faculty release time to develop new courses on how to research labor market issues and develop service learning partnership with unions and community-based labor organizations. Another Tools for
Transformation grant has helped develop the Human Rights Education and Research Network, led on the UWT campus by Prof. Rachel May.

The Center has developed a mailing list of organizations and
activists in the community, and an office. Sometimes we have had part-time staff, other times we have functioned strictly on the volunteer work of faculty and students and staff. We have always had access to the library, media and other resources and support services of a fine university, and the support of the Chancellor's office and various program directors. The Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences (formerly Liberal Studies) has provided financial support for xeroxing, mailing, office and phone and other facilities, but faculty from Business, Nursing, and Education and well as IAS have also been involved in educational and other activities relating to the Center. We hope that some day there will be the resources on our campus to fund a professional staff person and maintain basic office expenses on an ongoing basis.

* Action committees, composed of faculty and staff from all programs, volunteer their time to spur particular programs, projects, research and
teaching. 

* Various faculty and staff serve as CSCS associates, depending on who is interested and involved at various times.

* We also have a leadership group of the most active members who initiate and carry out the Center's work. 

* Someday we may have a faculty chair for the Center, if we ever obtain course release time to compensate a faculty member for such added responsibilities. 

* A program assistant is needed, if we had the funding. This person would implement projects and be a liason to students, the community, and the larger campus, and help develop programs that neither faculty, staff, nor student organizations can develop by themselves.

* With funding and expanded activities, a community advisory committee, representing relevant individuals and communities, may some day be in order.

Over the years, we have done a remarkable amount with very little budget. At various times, we have obtained small amounts of money from the Chancellor's Office, from IAS, from ASUWT. The Harry Bridges Labor Studies Chair has opened a budget line and given a seed grant to support labor and ethnic studies projects and programs at the Ernie Tanner Labor and Ethnic
Center. IAS provides xeroxing and small mailing expenses but does not pay for flyers or large mailings; the UWT Facilities Office has provided us with an office and furniture in the Harmon Building. Individuals in the community have made a number of financial contributions to our Center. We have sought to raise seed grants for various projects, but it always remains difficult to locate funding for ongoing costs of an office and organizing staff. Lacking a dedicated source of funding, the Center continues primarily through the volunteer work of faculty and staff and
in-kind support from academic programs on campus.