Project Vision:

Wellness Collaborative for Research & Education Activities to Transform and Empower (WeCREATE) is a community–school–university partnership that brings together The RelationalMedical Foundation, UCLA faculty and students in Education and Medicine, School teachers, school students, families, and community members in South Los Angeles. It is a trans-disciplinary model for education, research, and teaching & medical practices. It is a comprehensive cross-generations cross-grades program. Its purpose is to address health and educational inequities through shared research, service, and reciprocal learning.

WeCREATE is grounded in community-based participatory research (CBPR). We work with partner communities—co-designing projects, learning from and with each other, and building initiatives that respond to lived realities.

All the initiatives are about fostering community-led knowledge, action, and relational empowerment. We strive to develop a community-driven program that empowers racial/ethnic under-resourced people who are under-represented in medicine to transform their and the medical communities towards social and health justice.

At the heart of all our work is care

Across all its initiatives, WeCREATE cultivates:

  • The capacity to listen deeply

  • The ability to build in dialogue with others

  • The formation of a caring approach toward community life

  • The development of critical inquiry grounded in lived experience

It is about forming people—students, educators, and clinicians—who can enter complex social and medical spaces with humility, attentiveness, and a commitment to building together.

WeCREATE Activities:

WeCREATE encompasses different connected activities that we have collectively envisioned and are continually creating. The activities are constituted by three iterative components: 

A) Service to all stakeholders

B)  Co-learning

C)  Participatory Action Research for ALL stakeholder


The Heart Clinic

As part of multi-prog activities, the Heart Clinic starts as a service component with comprehensive primary prevention toward reducing cardiovascular disease. Screening and prevention activitiesare designed to become integrated into the family life of school students.

Our first Clinic ran on November 5th, 2022.  The Heart Clinic takes place twice a year



UCLA Undergraduate Course Series

With our partners we have developed a Undergraduate (UG) course sequence at UCLA to involve UG students in a community-engaged research and service associated with WeCREATE.

The two courses that can be taken as a sequence or separately, one in the Fall and one in the Winter quarters follow the biannual schedule of the Heart Clinic.

Students are trained in research and how to support Mann students in engaging in community based Youth Participatory Action Research projects. This series was awarded the 2023 UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Community-Engaged.

Youth Participatory Research

UCLA UG and Mann school students engage in video analysis and photo narrative research to explore 1) Medlife to understand how to care for others, understand how a work-day in the hospital develop and what it means to be a caring practitioner.