Mission

Nuestra Misión y Visión

Cambio means change. Our mission is to work alongside communities undergoing demographic change to advance interdisciplinary knowledge, cross-sector partnerships, and best practices toward healthy integration and well-being, particularly for Latin American and newcomer populations in the Midwest.

Our vision is to be a nationally recognized, interdisciplinary, self-sustainable center that leads Latin American and newcomer research and outreach in partnership with changing communities.

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. Notable outreach programs includes our language services offering Spanish-English translation and interpretation, our previous film series hosted with the community, and working in partnership with local organizations to develop welcoming communities.

In all of its work, the Cambio Center aims to develop a shared, cross-sector 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.

The Cambio Center was founded in 2004 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.