Few moments are more intense than when a first responder arrives on the scene of a crisis. Few first responses are more fraught than those involving behavioral health: crises that feature issues of mental health, substance use, or overdose.
This June at the Aggie Square Launch Space on Stockton Blvd in Sacramento, UC Davis Sociology Lecturer Elizabeth Siggins brought together the full range of working professionals who deal with crisis response to develop new and better ways to do their work by playing a very serious tabletop game.
Government and Community Relations, in collaboration with Aggie Square, co-hosted an event to expose students to a variety of careers available at UC Davis Health.
More than 60 fifth grade students from the nearby Language Academy of Sacramento school visited UC Davis Health to spend the morning learning from and interacting with staff.
Quarter at Aggie Square is an academic program offered by UC Davis for undergraduates at UC Davis Sacramento campus that consists of coursework, internships, and community engagement of up to 18 units towards graduation. Different topics are taught each academic quarter. Quarter at Aggie Square’s 2022 fall quarter Biomedical Engineering cohort won the 2023 Big Bang! Competition in spring 2023 with Square Solutions, one of their two medical innovations.
Premiered on September 7 at the Crest Theater, Breaking Bread is a three-part documentary series produced by Moonracer Films and Sacramento TV affiliate KCRA, that focuses on a cast of renowned chefs in Sacramento and highlights the region’s leadership in the farm-to-fork movement.
In May, more than 65 fifth-grade students from The Language Academy of Sacramento visited UC Davis Health to learn about careers in healthcare and at UC Davis Health. Hosted by the UC Davis Office of Government and Community Relations and Aggie Square, the goal of the Discovery Day event was to educate elementary students about careers available in healthcare, with a focus on engaging students who lived in neighborhoods nearby the healthcare center.
Aggie Square has the potential to substantially expand what we mean by “health” research at UC Davis. An excellent example of how it will do that is the health system’s Digital CoLab, which is looking to carve out a place for itself on an upper floor of Aggie Square’s Lifelong Learning building.
Looking around the U.S. for examples of innovation campuses to learn from, The Aggie Square team has returned again and again to Philadelphia. There, two research universities — Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania — have joined the venerable, research-focused, nonprofit University City Science Center. Not only that, the partnership extends to a canny business district — University City District — providing us both a model and a warning.
The whole idea of an innovation campus — devoted to catalyzing research that links UC Davis faculty with industry and community partners — depends on space that is better-designed for collaboration than what we have now.
Quarter at Aggie Square is one year old. It is going to grow up fast in the next year, since this fall will be the first opportunity students and faculty have to work together in person on the university’s Sacramento campus.
After a year of remote instruction on the one hand and global tumult on the other, students and faculty alike are primed to collaborate on new kinds of learning that can help improve the world.
