Backpack with Kind People are My Kinda People on a deck overlooking water and wetlands

Center for Compassionate & Sustainable Communities

Using research and practice to advance human flourishing

The Center for Compassionate & Sustainable Communities seeks to engage in basic and applied research, engaged teaching, and translational activities. Our work centers compassionate, just, and sustainable policy, planning, and other community-level action. We aspire to solve grand challenges facing society, including climate change, inequality, and justice.

What We Do

Cultivating Care

We seek to meet the need for a caring and equitable community within the academy through activities that create time and space for informal interaction and sharing. We explore intersections of research activities and care practices to enhance our ability to sustain our individual and collective efforts to counter systems of oppression and foster flourishing.

Intellectual Development

We foster the development and exchange of ideas through facilitation of small groups for informal networking, sharing research in progress to gather insight and feedbacks, and hosting events to bring together expertise across disciplines. Our efforts to support the generation of ideas aim to advance existing research projects, produce research publications and presentations, and develop new proposals and grants.

Public Engagement & Creative Exchange

We work with research participants and partners to develop community-engaged scholarship, including experimentation and practice with creative exchange within and beyond the University of Kansas. Creative exchange is broadly understood to encompass a range of activities draw from the arts, humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and professional fields to understand and serve community needs.

Knowledge Translation

We help researchers communicate their findings effectively to multiple audiences, including scholars, practitioners, and members of the broader public. These efforts involve writing and design activities on behalf of researchers, as well as trainings to empower researchers’ own efforts at knowledge translation.