The Office of Regional and International Community Engagement (ORICE) at the University of British Columbia (UBC) believes in creating spaces to connect, inspire, and cultivate impact-driven communities to build a more sustainable, inclusive, and collaborative world.
Located on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) people, we are a community of staff, faculty members, practitioners, students, and researchers, all working together to advance the study and understanding of community engagement. ORICE offices are physically located in Mary Bollert Hall at the UBC Vancouver Point Grey campus.
We offer curricular (for-credit) and co-curricular (not-for-credit) experiential education programs to help build the connections between theory and practice in addressing global issues. We work with community organizations, faculty, and students to co-create, co-learn, and co-imagine possible solutions to these complex global issues. Our team works to understand how experiential education can prompt students and the community to interrogate the potential, the limits, and the application of disciplinary knowledge to global priorities.
ORICE aims to broaden traditional conceptions of teaching and learning by:
- Prioritizing process alongside outcome;
- Questioning roles of expertise;
- Valuing reciprocity; and,
- Collaboratively re-imagining spaces of learning
Since 2008, ORICE has been on campus in various forms and with various units. In 2020, ORICE joined theSchool of Public Policy and Global Affairs as a Partner of the school. Currently, ORICE also houses two collectives: the UBC Human Rights Collective and the Gender+ in Research Collective. The work of these Collectives cuts across all the work ORICE does as intersectional and human-rights based frameworks and approaches are integral to community-based research and community-engaged work. The Collectives collaborate with ORICE on various programs and projects, in addition to creating resources for the larger community and in support of ORICE’s programming.
