The Center for Community Solutions is a research center housed within the UCR School of Public Policy.
Our mission is to answer challenging public policy questions that are of the utmost relevance and importance to communities in Inland Southern California. We believe in the promise of our region and aim to contribute to its growth and prosperity by helping to ground public decisions in credible research, fostering knowledge exchange across diverse constituencies, and developing the next generation of policy leaders.
The Center for Community Solutions strives to embody the School of Public Policy’s motto—solutions for the region, solutions for the world—by providing research services and resources to improve the lives of residents in our local region, while cultivating generalizable knowledge that can improve public policy in communities throughout the world.
Identify Important Regional Policy Questions
Through ongoing conversations with regional leaders in government, community organizations, and industry, we learn about the challenges they face and work to develop big policy questions based on the problems they want to solve. By working directly with local leaders, we are able to hone our inquiry and co-create research questions that yield clear, actionable policy solutions that fit the regional context.
Community-Informed, Empirically Rigorous Research Program
Inspired by our conversations with the community, we identify funding sources, build teams of UCR researchers, and design methodologically sound studies that leverage our expertise in a way that maintains UC’s excellence in research, while meeting real-world needs. This model produces credible insights that are of local significance, but also yields generalizable solutions for communities around the world.
Foster Shared Knowledge
We actively engage a diverse range of regional stakeholders and strive to cultivate idea exchange through our community-engaged research model, partnered projects, and hosting forums that bring experts before the community. We endeavor to share our academic expertise with those who can apply it to real-world challenges, but also strive to continually learn from the professional and lived experiences of those in our region. Through this dynamic, reciprocal flow of knowledge, we believe the relevance and impact of our research is enhanced and the community is further equipped to make evidence-based public decisions.
Develop Tomorrow’s Policy Leaders
Whenever possible, we educate the next generation of public policy leaders by involving UCR undergraduate and graduate students in the generation and dissemination of the Center’s findings. We are especially interested in working with regional organizations to identify emergent questions that can be answered by Master of Public Policy students under the supervision of the School of Public Policy faculty as a client-based capstone, among other opportunities for student participation.
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