History of Oakes Service Learning
The Oakes Service Learning Program was re-launched in 2012-13 by the initiative of then-provost Kimberly Lau, and in 2016 was re-named the CARA Program: Community-based Action Research & Advocacy.
The CARA Program strives to fulfill the Oakes College mission to promote positive social and political change, and builds on some of our college’s proudest legacies.
Oakes was the seventh college founded at UCSC, in 1972, and its founding Co-Provosts were Dr. J. Herman Blake, the first Black professor to work at UCSC, and Dr. Ralph Guzmán, one of the only Latino faculty members on campus.
Together they worked to establish a college whose academic theme would be the study of ethnic diversity, and whose mission would be to proactively advance educational attainment for first-generation and under-represented students, and the pursuit of understanding across differences at what was at that time an almost entirely White campus.
Among the many programs that Blake and Guzmán created and led during their years at UCSC were community engagement initiatives.
Guzmán, after helping to establish Oakes became the Provost at Merrill College, founded the Third World Teaching Resource Center and the Merrill Field Program for Experiential Learning.
Dr. Blake had already worked with Cowell Provost Page Smith to develop the Cowell College Extramural Education and Community Service Program in 1968, and continued to expand after Blake came to Oakes College in 1972. The program began with student placements on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, and expanded to a range of community-based organizations elsewhere in Beaufort County and throughout California. The Sea Islands region of South Carolina is home to the Gullah and Geechee people, now renowned for their long history of resistance and struggle for freedom. This region was the birthplace of the Citizenship School Movement of the 1950s, a grassroots education network created and led by Septima Clark, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins, and supported by Myles Horton and the Highlander Research Center. The Citizenship Schools of the Southeast were an important social, cultural, and organizing base for Black Power, and these methods and insights continued to evolve in both urban and rural areas throughout the country. Generations of Oakes students benefited from these powerful visions of justice and network connections that spanned the country, and permeated university-community boundaries.
Two of the other founding faculty members who contributed to Oakes’ history of community engagement were muralist Eduardo Carrillo and writing teacher Don Rothman. Carrillo connected students to Chicano art and social movements of our region, and to this day, his legacy continues through the Museo Eduardo Carrillo, and the Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship. Rothman, who began his teaching career at Merritt College in Oakland and studied at Highlander, founded the California Central California Writing Project in 1977. Nancy Stoller was another early faculty member of Oakes and Community Studies who worked consistently as an out-feminist, lesbian, and anti-racist on and off-campus, notably in fields of women’s health justice and abolition. Elba Sánchez, who worked as a teacher at Santa Cruz High before getting her graduate degree at UCSC, worked with bilingual students on their poetry and other writing, creating decades of publications such as Revista Mujeres. Along with poet and Spanish-for-Spanish-Speakers teacher Francisco Alarcón, Sánchez continued to write for a broad, Spanish-speaking audience of various ages.
In California, Oakes students in the Community Service Program worked in Alamada County, Stanislaus County, Contra Costa County, and of course Santa Cruz County throughout the 70s and 80s. The service program also worked as an outreach program, encouraging middle and high school youth from those areas to consider UCSC–and to think of Oakes as a new anchor or home away from home.
Dr. J Herman Blake, Co-founder Oakes College
Dr. Ralph Guzmán, Co-founder of Oakes College
Eduardo Carrillo pointing at one of his paintings
Ms. Septima P. Clark and Bernice Robinson, teaching in Citizenship Schools
Esau Jenkins & Citizenship Schools in action
Eduardo Carrillo mural, Birth, Death, and Regeneration, south wall
In an oral history interview in 2013 Blake spoke about his community-based education work at Oakes:
…(M)y basic principle was to provide service and resources to grassroots communities…I was making connections with people who had hopes and dreams but who were being exploited. And I did not want to see that exploitation continue. And I wanted to provide resources to the people in these communities. But the only resource I had was education. So it was important for me to try and open avenues of educational opportunity and when people came into the academy, to develop strategies that they might succeed. That was at Oakes College. That was serving the community. That’s always been my motivation. That’s always been my goal…I particularly focused on reading and writing. And reading for substance, not just calling words. So, that’s what I knew. That’s what I knew how to do.
—Oakes College Founding Provost J. Herman Blake
Today, each Oakes service learning course combines classroom study and analysis with real community work: students, faculty, and community partners develop agreements to work on projects together, and in the process work on understanding, accepting, and celebrating human diversity, and expanding our potential to create justice. Students learn about themselves in new ways while learning about the Santa Cruz region through community and civic involvement.
You can contribute to the Herman J. Blake Endowment for Oakes Service Learning
In 2017, Oakes alumni organized a new endowment fund to invest in the type of experiential learning that had been so transformative for them.
Through networked efforts and Giving Day, the fund quickly grew, and is well on its way to reaching endowment (payout) level. You can help!