Your Gifts at Work
Chancellor’s Greatest Needs funds scholarships that allow UCLA to recruit and enroll bright, promising graduate students. The scholarships allow these graduate students to focus on being a part of UCLA’s tradition of being pioneers in the study of emerging fields and topics.
5 students in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies
4 students in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
4 students in Psychology
2 students in English
1 student each in Art History, Asian Languages & Culture, Classics, French and Francophone Studies, Germanic Languages, Italian, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures
Curriculum & Course Work Development
Programs such as Fiat Lux and Freshman Clusters, created with seed money from Chancellor's Greatest Needs, highlight UCLA’s innovative undergraduate curriculum.
Freshman Clusters is a curricular initiative that is designed to strengthen the intellectual skills of entering freshmen, introduce them to faculty research work, and expose them to such "best practices" in teaching as seminars and interdisciplinary study. Launched in 1998, Clusters are year-long, collaboratively taught, multi-disciplinary courses that are focused on a topic of timely importance such as the "global environment," or "interracial dynamics."
Fiat Lux offers up to 200 seminars annually. These seminars provide students and faculty with small group settings to engage in meaningful discussions on a range of topics.
Research Grants
Annually, UCLA conducts over $1 billion dollars in competitively awarded research grants and contracts across 350 research programs and centers. The University holds manages 1,800 inventions, 500 material transfer agreements, and enters into roughly 50 licensing and 400 industry-sponsored agreements each year. Chancellor's Greatest Needs provides matching funds to grants that are conditional on university support.
UCLA Volunteer Center
Funds from Chancellor's Greatest Needs helped launch the UCLA Volunteer Center in 2009, which is the central hub for civic engagement, linking students, staff, faculty, and alumni to numerous projects across Los Angeles.
Though its website and use of social media, the Center also serves as a hub for community planning material, how-to guides, recognition of community leadership, opportunities for volunteers to share their experience and connect with others, and access to an interactive database and calendar of volunteer opportunities in Los Angeles
Today, more than half of UCLA's undergraduates currently participate in a wide range of ongoing community service projects, ranging from tutoring yougnsters from low-performing schools to providing legal and medical assistance to the needy.
At a time when volunteer participation is viewed as a national priority, by starting the Volunteer Center, Chancellor Block has positioned the University as a catalyst for social change and a leader among educational institutions.