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The American Cultures Center is pleased to announce that we have received funding from the Campus Advisory Committee on Student Services & Fees, which will allow us to support our ever-evolving American Cultures Engaged Scholarship (ACES) program. By partnering American Cultures courses with Bay Area social justice community organizations, ACES promotes experiential learning and deep reflective engagement, allowing students to apply classroom content to today’s most pressing social issues.
This new funding will allow us to support 10 undergraduate students as ACES fellows for this upcoming semester in Spring 2026. Fellows play a critical role in developing a course’s community-engagement component, collaborating closely with faculty members to foster meaningful undergraduate learning experiences. They ensure that community partnerships are mutually beneficial and contribute to long-term community impact.
This opportunity could not have come at a better time, as the American Cultures Center is continuing to develop new and exciting opportunities for growing community-engaged scholarship on campus. In partnership with the Student Environmental Resource Center’s Decolonial Environmental Network, we have been diligently working to develop our newest initiative, the American Cultures Environmental Justice Initative. This initiative has already fostered exciting opportunities to develop critical, community-engaged environmental justice curricula that apply decolonial and environmental justice frameworks to real-world issues.
We encourage faculty who are interested in strengthening connections with communities to apply for funding to support an undergraduate ACES fellow. Faculty who are interested in supporting an undergraduate fellow can apply through this application by Friday, January 16, 2026. The AC Center can support in the matching process, or faculty are welcome to encourage undergraduates they may already be working with to apply.