UNC Community Practice Lab

UNC’s Community Practice Lab (CPL) catalyzes and expands community-driven, sustainable initiatives through creative scholarship, innovative program development, and committed partnerships. The CPL creates space for interdisciplinary students, practitioners, and organizations to critically dialogue, deploy analysis rooted in communities’ everyday experiences, leverage strengths-based assessment, and enact justice-oriented action.

The CPL sponsors an OCAHC graduate intern that assists with the coordination of OCAHC meetings, event logistics, and communication among coalition members and partners. Additionally, the OCAHC intern supports  affordable housing policy advocacy and education efforts.

The CPL explores and mobilizes everyday experiences and occupation, rooted in lived realities, to enhance community and individual well-being through health science practice. The CPL’s work is guided by values of abundance, partnership, systemic justice, occupation, and community practice.

The CPL enhance community well-being by fostering deep and sustainable community-university partnerships. The CPL supports several long-term community partners with a wide variety of needs, including:

• Coaching: Leading workshops, developing training, and providing ongoing consultation to extend a team’s strengths and goals.

• Strategizing: Incubating, strategically planning, and evaluating programs and initiatives, producing actionable steps to further impact.

• Implementing: Administering and coordinating programs and serving on steering committees to add capacity to organizations’ work and missions.

• Disseminating: Developing theoretical and experiential knowledge produced through everyday experiences of occupation.