The UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT) develops the knowledge and capacity for transformative learning and action across lines of difference.

     

     As a participatory organization of the UMass Department of Anthropology, UACT builds the capacity for diverse, solidaristic, deeply relational, community-based social justice work. 

 

     Through our educational projects and our community partnerships, UACT aims to play a role in shifting the way people relate to one another and to structures and policies that affect them. We work, alongside our community organizing partners, to develop people (students, scholars, popular educators, and activists) and groups who know how to work both as members of and in solidarity with diverse communities that are building a more just and compassionate world. Our work is a form of public/engaged anthropology.

      UACT develops and shares our expertise implementing critical pedagogical practices through classes, facilitation trainings, workshops, program evaluation, and curricular advising.

 

     UACT cultivates partnerships with diverse programs and organizations working toward social, economic, racial, and environmental justice on the UMass campus, throughout Massachusetts, and in several other areas of the United States. We engage diverse social justice organizers as educators and partners in building a new generation of diverse, knowledgeable, sensitive, community-oriented, and highly skilled social justice activists.

 

      We view all students who are in (or interested in) the ongoing process of learning how to engage in critical community-based social justice work as our potential students and leaders. UACT is coordinated by student leaders, all of whom are alumni of UACT’s curricular programs. These leaders work together with the faculty Director to manage all aspects of UACT’s programs, including classroom facilitation, curriculum design, alternative spring breaks, facilitation training, community and activist engagement curriculum, and new community partnerships.