Nonprofit and community-based organizations are facing unprecedented leadership and management challenges. Consisting of over 43,000 registered organizations and employing over 275,000 people in Los Angeles County, the nonprofit sector is bearing much of the brunt of the state’s fiscal crisis, particularly those agencies that provide social services, health care, and housing, funded directly by government. However it is not only agencies that are heavily reliant on government funding that are vulnerable in the current economic and political climate. With national and local declines in philanthropic giving, education, advocacy, and arts organizations are all looking carefully at their missions, activities, and organizations as well.

What is more, the coming years will likely present a new set of challenges in Southern California including a widening gulf between the rich and the poor, under-funding of public services, and dysfunction of public institutions, from the legislature to local health care agencies. With the role of government changing, expectations are that nonprofits could shoulder greater responsibilities, in the hope that they would fill gaps left by a retreating public sector. Yet are nonprofits able to do this? Do they have the capacity to address the region’s growing and diverse needs?

The Los Angeles Community Engagement Initiative, a project spearheaded by the UCLA Center for Civil Society in collaboration with the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships and the UCLA School of Public Affair’s Policy Forum, is designed to build this capacity by connecting the resources of the University with the greater Los Angeles nonprofit and philanthropic communities, using its knowledge and expertise as a bridge. The Community Engagement Initiative is built around three primary activity areas:

1. Experiential-based learning. The Initiative is developing case studies of local nonprofits, as well as a compendium of good practices, to hone leadership, management and executive problem-solving skills;
2. Monitoring, Annual Reporting, and Convening The Initiative monitors the nonprofit sector in the greater Los Angeles region, publishes and disseminates an annual report, and serves as a forum for an emerging network of local nonprofit executives and community leaders; and
3. Teaching. The Initiative will coordinate and conduct a broad menu of executive-level teaching sessions on nonprofit organizations, foundations, community-based organizations and other civil society institutions.

Engaged universities, according to the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-Grant Universities, are “institutions that have redesigned their teaching, research, extension and service functions to become more sympathetically and productively involved with their own communities.” Through the Community Engagement Initiative, the Center will make its knowledge and expertise available to the local nonprofit community, effectively linking nonprofit theory to practice and bringing together the full-range of the Center’s activities – research, teaching and community engagement – to more fully benefit the Los Angeles nonprofit field.