About
The Community Practice Lab was founded in 2020 by Dr. Ryan Lavalley to enhance community well-being by fostering deep and sustainable community-university partnerships. The Community Practice Lab is housed within the Division of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Our Mission
We catalyze and expand community-driven, sustainable initiatives through creative scholarship, innovative program development, and committed partnerships. We create space for interdisciplinary students, practitioners, and organizations to critically dialogue, deploy analysis rooted in communities’ everyday experiences, leverage strengths-based assessment, and enact justice-oriented action.
Our Methodology
We explore and mobilize everyday experiences and occupation, rooted in lived realities, to enhance community and individual well-being through health science practice. Our work is guided by values of abundance, partnership, systemic justice, occupation, and community practice.Abundance
We honor the wealth of strength, skills, knowledge, and history embedded in communities. The CPL initiates partnerships with a strengths-based perspective, and we also celebrate communities’ vitality and resilience before trying to address “needs.” We root our work in the lived experiences of both community members and our team. Our abundance-based mindset resists competition and cultivates rich soil in which partnership can flourish.
Partnership
The CPL builds sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships driven by community interests, strengths, ideals, and needs. We believe that community work requires time, energy, and commitment to foster lasting and effective outcomes. Collaborating across organizational boundaries is integral to our approach. We incubate and coordinate innovative solutions to complex problems that foster collective benefits across systems and organizations. As we do, we critically examine social power to respond to institutional dynamics, historical inequities, and societal norms among institutions, communities, and people that could contribute to harm or further injustice. Meet our long-term community partners.
Occupation
Our roots are in “occupation”, or the everyday experience of living – a construct born from occupational therapy. The CPL’s occupation-rooted approach encourages us to explore the mundane routines, habits, and happenings of communities. By focusing on occupation, we learn from the processes of community practice, initiative development, and social transformation firmly rooted in the everyday, practical experiences of those with whom we work.
Systemic Justice
The CPL’s projects and research focus on systemic justice. Research shows that communities exist within multiple social, historic, and economic systems. Through our work, we learn from our community partners that systemic norms, cultures, and policies contribute to injustices, disparities, and barriers to health and community participation. The CPL builds programming, initiatives, and curricula that are critically evaluated and oriented toward structural and systemic changes.
Community Practice
The CPL’s work is rooted in an occupation-based approach to community practice. While occupational therapy has historically served individual clients through the health care system, we are committed to and have experience developing innovative practice areas outside the health care system. We work with community partners to imagine programs that mobilize everyday life, or occupation, for positive community change.