The Centre for Sustainability and Social Innovation

Rural Community Learning Initiative

The Sauder School of Business has long used applied learning projects for real-world clients in its undergraduate and graduate level programs. In partnership with UBC-CLI, ISIS Research Centre and the Irving K Barber Learning Centre, Sauder expanded on a successful pilot initiative and created the Rural Community Learning Initiative (RCLI). The partners established three overarching goals:

. The partners established three overarching goals:

• Enhance student learning;
• Contribute to achieving community priorities throughout British Columbia; and,
• Increase UBC’s and Sauder School of Business connections to those communities.

Community engagement is a key commitment enshrined in Place and Promise. Set in a context of community engagement, service learning pedagogy strives to balance academic rigor with practical relevance, which provides students with a broader, enriched educational experience.

At Sauder, this approach complements and enhances foundational elements of the business curriculum through its focus on developing essential professional skills in areas such as creative problem-solving, critical thinking, leadership, and communication. Community Service Learning (CSL) enables business students to directly experience and purposefully reflect on the role they can play in contributing to economic development and the resiliency of rural communities, and how their professional skills can be deployed in complex ‘real life’ contexts. Students taking part in the RCLI enjoyed learning while making genuine contributions to small businesses and community organizations, many of which had limited human and financial resources.

Activities this year focused on strengthening partnerships formed through the first phase, and developing new ones: three of four faculty continued participation from the pilot phase, and were joined by four new faculty members; community partnerships in Campbell River, Courtenay and Terrace established in the pilot phase were augmented by two new communities – Port Alberni and Tofino. The number of Sauder students who participated in the initiative grew from 74 in 2009-10 to 178 in 2010-11.

In September 2011, a group of students from the Marketing Applications class (COMM 468) traveled to Port Alberni to develop a marketing plan for the Klitsa Tutoring program. Click here to watch a video of their experience.