Community Engagement

Our Commitment To Community

UBC has a strong commitment to community engagement – it is enshrined in Place and Promise: The UBC Strategic Plan, and is also expressed through its ongoing commitment to the Statement of Purpose and Charter of Principles for the Learning Centre.

At the Learning Centre, we know that engagement with community transforms service development, learning, and research – it creates commonality, sparks debate, inspires inquiry, encourages contemplation, fosters relevance, and advances excellence. The Learning Centre team is dedicated to ensuring that the Learning Centre fulfills UBC’s commitment and the Centre’s inspiring mission in ways that make sense to community, respect community expertise, and provide value to community priorities.

How We Work

Learning Centre staff work with community in many different ways: we reach out, we consult, we collaborate.

Outreach: Information Out

We see outreach as a basic approach to community engagement. It involves taking activities and services we’ve developed here on campus and making them available to the broader community for free. It also embodies activities that seek to share information about UBC and its activities and benefits with the broader community, as well as free public education.

Some of our outreach activities include: offering reading and speaker series, webcasting UBC-based lectures, advertising our general interest programming and events for community participation, supporting UBC community events such as Celebrate Research Week and other public education efforts, such as free Continuing Studies programs.

Consultation: Asking the Questions

Consultation is an important process for us. We do it formally, informally, and opportunistically. We are always looking for insight and feedback from community members across the province – we want to know what they want from their Learning Centre at UBC.

Some forms of consultation in which we have engaged include: the original twenty-seven community visits made by Mr. Barber and Catherine Quinlan in 2004, visits to communities to discuss specific and general services, telephone calls to people working in different organizations, community visits and meetings to ask for feedback, for example around the Small Business Accelerator Program, and, of course, meeting with our Advisory Committee.

Collaboration: Working Together

We love collaborating. It’s the way we prefer to work: finding organizations in communities and here at UBC with common interests and figuring out how we can work together to support each other. We view collaboration as a true relationship of equals, where we each bring unique value, create shared visions, and work together to achieve the same end, even if we’re often in it for different reasons.

Some forms of collaboration in which we have engaged include: BC Digitization Symposium and Coalition, Health Information Series, Remote Community Based Learning Fund, In-Digitization Project (including the Aboriginal Audi-Cassette Digitization Program) and our strategic partnership with Entrepreneurship @UBC.

Let Us Know

If you are interested in discussing what we might do to together or how the Learning Centre might support your community or organization, let us know!