UCSF Medical Students Share Lessons from Community Partnerships at Campuswide Community Engaged Learning Showcase
UCSF learners, faculty, and community partners gathered at Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay campus on May 1 for the inaugural UCSF Center for Community Engagement Community Engaged Learning Showcase. This campuswide event celebrated projects that address community-identified health priorities through collaboration, service, and shared learning.
The showcase highlighted partnerships between UCSF learners and community organizations working to advance health and well-being across the Bay Area. Projects presented by medical, pharmacy, and graduate students, as well as residents, reflected the breadth of community-engaged learning across UCSF. Throughout the day, attendees explored projects spanning maternal and infant health, reproductive health education, mental health support, and culturally responsive health promotion efforts.
Created to celebrate partnerships between learners and community organizations, the showcase highlighted the many ways collaboration can advance health while creating meaningful opportunities for future health professionals.
The campus event, organized by the Director of Community Engaged Learning, Aisha Queen-Johnson, MSW, opened with welcoming remarks from Dan Bernal, Vice Chancellor for Community and Government Relations, followed by a panel discussion featuring learners and community partners reflecting on the reciprocal benefits of their work together.
The discussion highlighted one of the defining features of community-engaged learning: reciprocal benefit. Learners described gaining a deeper understanding of the communities they hope to serve, while community organizations reflected on the value of partnering with learners who brought new perspectives, energy, and expertise to ongoing initiatives.
Some of the most important lessons in health care aren't taught in hospitals or classrooms. The stories shared throughout the day suggested they often begin in community centers and organizations where learners work alongside community members to address health priorities identified by communities themselves.
Learning Beyond the Classroom
The event's keynote address, "Seeds of Learning and Co-Creation in the Margins: What Community Teaches Us That Classrooms Cannot," was delivered by Monica Hahn, MD, MPH, Professor of Family and Community Medicine.
Drawing from her experiences as a community organizer, public health practitioner, physician, and educator, Hahn challenged attendees to rethink where meaningful learning occurs.
"I hoped attendees would leave with the understanding that community engagement is not an extracurricular activity or an optional add-on to health care—it is central to how we learn to become healers," Hahn said.
Many of the most important lessons in her own career, she explained, came not from lecture halls but from patients, advocates, organizers, and people with lived experience.
"One of the messages I shared is that we are not just people who serve communities—we are people who are shaped by them," Hahn said. "If we want to train healthcare professionals capable of advancing health equity, then community-engaged learning must move from the margins of medical education to the center."
At a time when health inequities persist, she argued, communities themselves remain essential partners in creating solutions.
"Communities are not simply recipients of care; they are experts in their own experiences and essential partners in creating solutions," Hahn said.
Partnerships Rooted in Community Priorities
Throughout the afternoon, attendees moved between posters, speaking with medical, pharmacy, and graduate students, and community partners about projects addressing community-identified health priorities across the Bay Area.
Among the posters was Kapwa Means Togetherness: A Collaborative Health Festival Between the Bayanihan Equity Center (BEC) and UCSF Filipino American Medical Student Association, a partnership designed to support the health needs of San Francisco's Filipino community.
The collaboration began when leaders from the BEC, a longtime community organization serving Filipinx veterans, low-income families, and people with disabilities in South of Market, sought a partner to help develop sustainable health programming.
For the medical student team, the experience reinforced the importance of approaching community partnerships with humility and intentionality.
"When collaborating with community partners as an individual representing an academic institution, I think that it is always important to be intentional and reflect on one's position in order to create an equitable and sustainable partnership," said Katherine Chua, an MS3 involved in the project.
By centering community priorities and being transparent about their capacity as students, the team built a relationship grounded in trust.
"Community engagement means working alongside a community and not necessarily 'for' it," Chua said. "Effective and proper community engagement means working towards a common goal that addresses the specific needs and concerns of a community through unity, collaboration, and mutual trust."
For Leona Hariharan, MS1, community engagement took the form of supporting maternal and infant health through the First Foods Justice Breastfeeding Certification Program, a community-based lactation education initiative developed by the Mama Glow Foundation.
Created in response to longstanding breastfeeding inequities and the infant formula shortage of 2022, the program trains doulas and community care workers from historically marginalized communities to provide culturally responsive lactation support.
Hariharan's work focused on curriculum development and program evaluation, helping assess the impact of training more than 100 participants across two cohorts.
"Reading participants' reflections was incredibly powerful," she said. "It showed me that education can be more than information-sharing; it can create space for healing, advocacy, and community-led change."
Another project focused on mental health at Multi-Service Center South, San Francisco’s largest homeless shelter. After identifying a need for gender-specific mental health services, Leela Mohan, MS3, and her team developed a Support Group for Unhoused Women.
"I learned about the importance of effective listening and welcoming feedback, from both our community partner and the community members it serves," Mohan said. "We've made it a priority to incorporate feedback so that we can best respond to the needs of the women this group serves."
The team hopes the program will continue providing "a safe space to find community, solidarity, and empowerment for years to come."
Medical students Marli Berry, MS3, and Flo Ebem, MS3, focused on improving access to reproductive health education through the Community Access to Reproductive Education (CARE) Initiative.
Recognizing that many individuals receive little formal reproductive health education beyond high school, the team sought to provide reliable, accessible, and medically accurate information to underserved communities.
Through their work, they discovered how eager people are to engage when given opportunities to learn about their health.
"Many individuals have questions about reproductive health but lack access to reliable sources of information," Berry said. "This reinforced the importance of meeting people where they are, whether that is in the community or in the clinic, and creating spaces where they feel comfortable asking questions."
Building Healthier Communities Together
Throughout the day, a common theme emerged: meaningful solutions to health inequities require collaboration, shared learning, and a willingness to recognize expertise beyond traditional academic settings.
For many medical students, these experiences reinforced the importance of approaching communities as partners rather than recipients of care.
Hariharan reflected, "Community-engaged work has shown me that some of the most innovative solutions to health inequities are already happening in communities. My role is not to bring solutions, but to listen, learn, and use the tools I gain through medicine and academia to help amplify, sustain, and support that work."
The projects showcased at the inaugural Community Engaged Learning Showcase demonstrated that some of the most meaningful learning happens beyond traditional classrooms and clinical settings. More importantly, they highlighted the power of partnerships that prepare future health professionals to advance health not only for communities, but alongside them.
