Maria Avila

California State University

Biographical Abstracts

Maria Avila’s community-engaged scholarship includes relational community organizing, research in action, and narrative inquiry.

Avila was an associate professor of social work at California State University - Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) from 2014 through 2022. In 2023-24, she was a fellow with the Urban Institute, exploring the role of power building in the housing crisis in Los Angeles, and a community engagement consultant with CSUDH.

From 2012 to 2014, she was a postdoctoral, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow with the Center for Diversity at the University of Southern California. She was the founding director of the Center for Community Based Learning at Occidental College from 2001 to 2011.

Avila earned a master’s in social service administration at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in adult and community education at Maynooth University in Ireland. She received a Fulbright award focused on civic engagement in Ireland in 2011, and a second one in June 2021 to teach pedagogy to faculty at Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander in Colombia. She was recently selected to be part of the design team for the Democracy Inventory Project, a joint initiative of Campus Compact and AAC&U to advance democratic engagement efforts nationally.

She was a community organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation from 1990-2000. This organizing model has underpinned her community-engaged scholarship of over two decades.

Areas of Expertise

• Relational community organizing
• Community engagement
• Role of higher education in supporting and enhancing democracy
• Collective leadership development
• Institutional culture change