Ginsberg Center’s Community Engagement @ Michigan Series 2025-2026

Do you do research or teaching in partnership with communities? Would you like to find ways to connect your work at U-M with local communities?  With a network of over 400 community partners across Washtenaw County and Southeast Michigan, Ginsberg Center works to connect local communities with U-M courses, researchers, internships and other community-engaged initiatives. In this workshop, we’ll take you beyond the data to help you understand local priorities and university-community dynamics in Washtenaw County. You’ll leave with an understanding of key issues facing our local community and answers to your questions about what local communities really want from U-M stakeholders. 

With special guest, Ginsberg Center Community Leader-in-Residence Jessica A.S. Letaw 

• Jessica A.S. Letaw (she/her) is a housing justice organizer whose work bridges policy, organizing, and racial justice. She has been deeply involved in land use and zoning reform efforts, housing affordability initiatives, and neighborhood-based organizing. With a background in architecture and public engagement, Jess combines technical knowledge of the built environment with questions around equity, belonging, and access. She is co-founder of FutureRoot, a woman-led collective working at the intersections of race, place, history and culture. She is also the co-founder of the Co-liberation Collaborative, working alongside white women and femmes to reimagine the role of white folks in political campaigns and movements; founded Ann Arbor Housing for All; and is the co-host of the local policy and politics podcast Ann Arbor AF. Her forthcoming book,MOVE, is a primer on housing organization for anyone. 

Open to U-M faculty, graduate students/GSIs, post-docs, admin/staff.

Community-engaged research is a valuable, high impact methodology that can contribute to the University of Michigan’s mission of developing new academic knowledge while advancing the public good. Community-engaged research encompasses a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, but what this body of work shares is substantive involvement of community partners in creating, translating, and disseminating knowledge that strengthens the well-being of communities and broader society.  Ginsberg Center’s Getting Started with Community-Engaged Research will introduce you to definitions, spectrums, and some frameworks of community-engaged research, including examples from multiple disciplines. Participants will consider how to apply these workshop concepts to their own research, and leave the workshop with tools to begin to approach this work ethically and equitably.

This session is designed especially for participants who are new to or interested in community-engaged research at Michigan. 

Open to faculty, staff, admin, and post-docs. Graduate students who are interested in attending can email ginsberginfo@umich.edu for more information. This session is not open to undergraduate students

Developing equitable and mutually beneficial partnerships with community members and organizations requires taking a critical look at how power operates in university-community partnerships. This interactive workshop will introduce participants to key principles of equity-focused community engagement and discuss how relationships of power shape university-community partnerships for research and student learning. We’ll consider how power operates in such areas as: the structure and terms of partnership agreements, participation dynamics in university-community projects, and funding/compensation. Participants will generate strategies for re-shaping inequitable power dynamics, share insights with colleagues, and identify ways to apply key principles to their own community-engaged work. 

This session is designed especially for participants who are involved in (or interested in) community-engaged research, teaching & learning, project/program administration, and/or campus initiatives at Michigan. 

Open to faculty, staff, admin, and post-docs. Graduate students who are interested in attending can email ginsberginfo@umich.edu for more information.

This session is not open to undergraduate students.