Community Partners
826LA—a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write.
The Francisco Homes—a nonprofit organization that offers hope and multi-faceted, holistic support to formerly incarcerated individuals aspiring to re-integrate back into the community. The homes are five neatly kept and well maintained houses in South LA.
Miracle Friends: an initiative within Miracle Messages that addresses social isolation by partnering with our unhoused neighbors with volunteer friends who can provide support and companionship through weekly phone calls and texts.
Miracle Messages: a nonprofit organization that helps people who do not have stable housing record messages to their dearly missed loved ones, and then attempts to reunite them using social media.
USC Dornsife Prison Education Project (PEP): an organization that creates the opportunity for USC and incarcerated students to learn from each other in a rigorous and collaborative learning environment across a variety of academic disciplines. Through PEP, USC students and faculty design, teach and participate in classes with people incarcerated in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation system. PEP seeks to reinforce the idea of education as a fundamental human right and to facilitate connections that transcend walls both literal and figurative.
Water Drop LA: a community organization whose mission is to provide clean drinking water to people experiencing homelessness. By distributing 2,000+ gallons of water during weekly water drops, Water Drop aims to support existing organizers and groups and to meet the immediate needs of the community. The organization believes that access to clean drinking water is a fundamental human right and that legislative advocacy must be accompanied by a swift response to critical necessities.
Trojans for More Housing: an emerging student club that will be the USC chapter of Abundant Housing LA. The club focuses on education and advocacy work for affordable housing and volunteering for organizations in Los Angeles addressing homelessness.
“Over the past thirty years, amid intense national debates, public policy has placed stronger emphasis on community-based volunteerism and nonprofit programming as a means to address social needs...The difficulty facing universities is how to support the community’s own intellectual sense of purpose, its desire for change, as well as support the work of educating students. The answer...Everyone is an intellectual. For if everyone is an intellectual, then everyone can also be a teacher. And under the right circumstances, partnership work can bring all these intellectuals together (students, faculty, and community members), blending existing knowledge and new insights to create solutions and possibilities for local communities.” –Stephen Parks, “A Letter to Students”