Maria Avila, Phd Email and Phone Number

I have experience in community organizing in Mexico and in the US. In 2001, I brought this background and skills to academia through the field of civically engaged scholarship (teaching and research reciprocally connected to community organizations). This led to becoming a civically engaged scholar myself, through my work as director of the center for community based learning at Occidental College, may doctoral research at Maynooth University in Ireland, an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at the University of Southern California, and as an associate professor at the California State University, Dominguez Hills. In my first book (Transformative Civic Engagement through Community Organizing, 2017) I share a model of civic engagement to illustrate how my teaching and research methodologies combined with community organizing can create culture change in and outside of higher education. My second book (Building Collective Leadership for Culture Change: Stories of Relational Organizing on Campus and Beyond 2023) features five research in action projects to create more collaborative cultures through community organizing. See more here: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501768729/building-collective-leadership-for-culture-change/#bookTabs=1I left my position as Associate Professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills in August 2022 to pursue independent projects that align with my interest in developing collective leadership for culture change in academic and non-academic settings. I co-founded, and was Lead organizer of the Southern California Organizing Cluster. I was a Housing Justice Fellow with the Urban Institute from 2023-24, led a consulting project to re-envision community engagement at CSUDH in 2023-24. In August 2024 I returned to CSUDH as Interim Director of Community Engaged Teaching and Research. I have given presentations and workshops in Mexico, USA, Ireland, England, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Germany, Uruguay, and Chile. I received a MA from the School of Social Service Administration at University of Chicago, and a PhD from the Department of Adult and Community Education at Maynooth University in Ireland. I am the recipient of two Fulbright awards (Ireland in 2010, and Colombia in 2021).My development as a civically engaged scholar is strengthened by my vipassana meditation for 15 years. So is my human development. https://vaddhana.dhamma.org/