By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications
Deanna Placa has been awarded a yearlong Newman Civic Fellowship for the 2026–27 academic year. Fellows are nominated by their president or chancellor based on their potential for public leadership and their work with communities.
UCLA International Institute, September 16, 2026 — Deanna Placa (UCLA 2027), a Bruin senior with a double major in international development studies, or IDS, and political science, didn’t start out intending to do a minor in community engagement and social change. But her study of international development eventually sparked a passion for the field that has come to center on civic education.
Placa has poured her enthusiasm and time into research, internships and volunteering during her first three years at UCLA. Now, in her senior year, she has been awarded a yearlong Newman Civic Fellowship from Campus Compact, a higher education non-profit organization that encourages colleges and universities to partner with communities to address complex social issues.
As a high school student, Placa was interested in politics and policy making, but had few opportunities to study civic education. A childhood spent between going to school in San Diego and spending summers in the Philippines (her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was six), awakened an abiding interest in poverty, inequality and governance.
“The dichotomy between my reality in the Philippines and my reality in the States [led me to feel] survivor’s guilt in many ways. My own cousins had such a different life than I had in the States. This piqued my curiosity as to well, why is that? Why do we live in a world like that? … I didn’t feel it was right,” she added.
By the time she applied to colleges, she was drawn to majors in global studies, development and political science, “because I knew they would help me with the questions I was asking,” she said.
From development to community engagement
“It wasn’t until I dove deeper into my upper division IDS courses that I started to see the importance of community engagement, especially as it pertains to development… I [began] to look more into communities and localities and bottom-up approaches not just to development, but also to policy,” she said.
She proceeded to do a staggering number of internships (including six months with the Los Angeles Unified School District 7), as well as volunteering for and doing community-based research with local L.A. organizations.
Placa, for instance, spent an academic year (2025–26) as an Astin Community Engaged Scholar. A program of the UCLA Center for Community Engagement, Astin Scholars earn course credit and a financial award for conducting community research that supports social justice. Another major internship involved life-changing international community-engaged work in South Africa, where Placa engaged with marginalized communities who had been displaced from Cape Town to rural areas during the apartheid era.
“Many of the families who had been displaced didn’t have access to water, to electricity, to good education,” she said. “Because they live in informal settlements, I guess the state doesn't feel like they have a basis to contribute to welfare services, and so what ends up happening is that many of these communities create their own community forums.” The Bruin student participated in many meetings of one forum, learning how the community was working from the ground up to address challenges of land and food sovereignty by creating a community farm and a chicken incubator project to access affordable food.
Seeing a community-based effort that created a parliamentary-type process of local governance struck a chord with what Placa had been studying. “It’s something that I was starting to analyze all over the world, how it manifests in the favelas in Brazil, how it manifests itself in different communities in the Philippines, how it manifests itself in different areas of Los Angeles and how it manifested itself in Cape Town, South Africa,” she shared. “It was an epiphany to me, so my experience in South Africa contributes to a lot of the work that I’m doing now.”
High school classroom. (Photo: Teaching for Change via Flickr, 2012; adjusted). CC BY-NC 2.0.
An internship grows into a civic education initiative
That work — creating a professional network and training opportunities for California teachers engaged in civic education — began with an Education Policy Initiative Internship (October 2024–January 2026). The internship plunges UCLA undergraduates into the complexities of education policy making.
In Placa’s case, that meant becoming project leader of a research and advocacy initiative to expand civic education in California schools. She conducted advocacy visits with California state assemblymen and state senators who had a background in education, qualitative research in the form of interviewing civic education teachers, as well as legislative research and budget and policy analysis of the California State Seal of Civic Engagement program.
“I glued myself onto this framework because it let me know that California does have a starting point when it comes to increasing civic education: essentially the state seal is given to high school seniors who meet the California standard criteria for being civically literate,” said Placa.
“I was diving into [the program’s] curriculum framework, what it looked like, the outcomes — and it was very poor. Despite the fact it was enacted in 2017, only 3% of graduating seniors in the 2023–24 academic year actually got the seal in the state of California.”
Teachers were encouraged to apply to the voluntary program with a proposal for a civic education class (and apply for funding from the California Serves program), but applications were entirely dependent on individual awareness of the program. This led to patchy implementation and inequitable distribution of resources among Californian schools. The program offered many pedagogical resources, but was not required in schools.
“I created a policy proposal for [the legislators with whom I was working] … but eventually it came to a point where there were obstacles,” said Placa. At the time, uncertainty surrounding future grant funding, coupled with state budget constraints, made it difficult to introduce a proposal to expand program funding due to competing legislative priorities.
Another obstacle was lack support for civic education teachers. “We reach[ed] out to teachers from different areas of California, many of whom are very passionate about the work that they do. And the problem is, no matter where you are in California as a civic education teacher, you have no support,” said the Bruin senior.
“You have no administrative support. You have no financial support, and you definitely don’t have professional support because a lot of the professional development training caters to STEM subjects now.”
Realizing the legislative route was not promising for the moment, Placa switched gears and created an initiative in January 2026, CivXpand. Her goal: offer the kind of information sharing network and professional training sought by the teachers she had interviewed. At the same time, she plans to conduct research on the impact of civic education that could be used to support future policy advocacy.
“I created a programming outline for, essentially, a teachers’ collective for civic education. And I pitched the idea to a local nonprofit called Changeist, ... [for which] I was volunteering last year.
“Their focus is on youth, but they now want to expand towards teachers. And my programming is what they’re planning to use,” she continued. “We're both in the process of creating a partnership. And what's incredible is that I was able to create a program, and now I’m reaching out to actual teachers in the Los Angeles area and asking them for feedback.
“It's been an incredible project, something that I cultivated from so much frustration and so much passion. And now it’s slowly coming to light. Being able to see that, and know that I can connect with teachers who’ve had problems with civic education or are implementing it now, especially now, has been an incredible experience. Working in that environment has been very motivating,” said Placa.
All of which means her Newman Civic Fellowship comes at just the right time. The fellowship offers skills training, mentorship and, most importantly for Placa, a peer network — starting with a three-day conference in Washington, D.C. this fall.
“This fellowship means a lot to me because it allows me to connect my passion for and interest in civic education and advocacy with broader networks all over the U.S., not just in Los Angeles,” she said.
“It also allows me to connect with people who are like-minded, young people who are doing exactly what I’m doing now here in Los Angeles and are also trying to figure it out for themselves.”
Published: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
