The Center works to build strong connections between the UCSC community, Santa Cruz community, and global civil society. We meet that goal through our strategic long-term partnerships with prominent organizations in social justice and environmental fields. We create win-win solutions that benefit both University students as well as our partners. We believe that cross-cultural partnerships such as ours serve as living models for the collaborative, innovative, and entrepreneurial synergies needed to create systemic change.

Locally, we make travel to and from our Campus location – historically a barrier to getting students off campus and community members onto campus – easy and accommodating. 

UCSC Partnerships

We collaborate with numerous campus units. We hesitate to name them here knowing that the list of collaborators will be too long to list. We seek inclusivity and collaboration with partners at UCSC and in the UC system.

Global Civil Society Partnerships

Chelsea Green Publishing

Founded in 1984, employee-owned Chelsea Green Publishing is regarded as the country's top independent publisher of books on the politics and practices of sustainable living. 

Chelsea Green is  a founding member of the Green Press Initiative and has been printing books on recycled paper since 1985, when their first list of books appeared. They set industry standards both in terms of content—foundational books on organic agriculture, natural building, eco-cuisine, and sustainable business/new economy—and in terms of environmental practice, printing 95 percent of their books on recycled paper with a minimum 30 percent post-consumer waste and aiming for 100 percent whenever possible. Chelsea Green is a true social enterprise, with employee-owners committed to a business model that will reflect, at as many levels of structure and function as possible, their commitment to sustainability. As a business, they are dedicated to what Paul Hawken calls "restorative economics," built around an integrated concern for intellectual capital, social capital, natural capital, and financial capital—a quadruple bottom line, if you will, and a model for businesses in the emerging economy of the 21st Century.

The partnership between Chelsea Green and Common Ground consists of providing a venue for authors at the UCSC campus when they are on book tours, in service of connecting students and authors around our shared mission of creating a just and sustainable future. We see this as one of the ways that we create a new model for regenerative education that cares for the "quadruple bottom line".  Furthermore, we facilitate intergenerational friendship building between future authors (students) and current ones, allowing both organizations to have a greater influence in the world. 

Bioneers

The World Café Community Foundation

The Right Livelihood Award Foundation - click here for details

University and College Partnerships

California Student Sustainability Coalition

Prescott College

Local Partnerships

Nonviolent Communication Santa Cruz

Transition Santa Cruz

Ecology Action

Resource Center for Nonviolence

The City and County of Santa Cruz