Nuestra Misión

Cambio means change. The Cambio Center at the University of Missouri was founded in 2004 to lead research and outreach about Latin American populations, immigration, and integration in partnership with communities undergoing demographic change.

To understand processes of integration and community change, the Center supports interdisciplinary research projects and a thriving network of Cambio Fellows, who come from fields as diverse as community development, economics, education, health, human development and family studies, history, language acquisition, law, and psychology. 

To ensure that research is useful to communities, the Center regularly facilitates outreach efforts, including community conversations, professional development, and the annual Cambio de Colores (Change of Colors) conference.

In all of its work, the Cambio Center aims to develop a shared community of practice among academics and practitioners — researchers and community members — focused on building bridges and creating strong, integrated, caring communities. The Cambio Center advances this work both at the university and throughout the region by organizing the annual Cambio de Colores conference, and through its network of Faculty and Student Fellows.  

The Cambio Center was founded to:

• Contribute to the University of Missouri’s mandate to provide education and enhance the welfare of all residents in our state, with a special focus on the context of demographic changes that are resulting in dynamic, multicultural, and diverse societies.
• Develop a premier source of knowledge, scholarship, outreach, and education, to respond to the effects of globalization in local communities, both rural and urban, following the land-grant model.
• Support sustained research to understand the immigration process in Missouri in particular and the Midwest in general.
• Provide knowledge and best practices to facilitate a smooth integration of economically vulnerable newcomers to Missouri and the Midwest, and prepare all citizens for a diverse society.
• Provide an institutional scholarly base to extend the Cambio de Colores initiative beyond the scope of the annual conferences, sustaining immigration-related research and outreach work of the university
• Understand the international nature of the immigration process, particularly through study of the cultures, economies, and social institutions of Latin America. 
• Collaborate internationally and develop the conditions for comparative studies of the push and pull immigration processes in the Americas, in collaboration with Latin American universities.
• Provide enhanced opportunities for global education and connections among our faculty, students, and communities.