About the Center
Founded in 2013, the Right Livelihood Center at UC Santa Cruz is a partnership between UC Santa Cruz and the Right Livelihood Foundation, which gives the prestigious Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” and manages global university partnerships through its Right Livelihood College project.
We link faculty and students with “Alternative Nobel Prize” Laureates for research and education about proven solutions to the world’s most pressing global problems.
Our center is housed within the Institute for Social Transformation. We receive guidance and support from institute staff, who help oversee a part-time academic coordinator and our student-led club.
In the past five years, we have led:
4
annual Right Livelihood Laureate lectures
22
global online events
3
major conferences in Santa Cruz and Bangkok
365
students through two RLC-connected courses
20
student leaders to get involved in international activism
9
university partnerships across five continents
Our Right Livelihood affiliates
Right Livelihood Foundation
The Right Livelihood Foundation is a courage-powered community for social change. Established in 1980, the foundation is committed to peace, justice & sustainability for all. Each year, they present the Right Livelihood Award known as “the Alternative Nobel Prize”. By recognizing the actions of brave visionaries & building impactful connections around the world, the Award boosts urgent & long-term social change. Our center is part of their university network of thirteen campuses supporting their mission.
Right Livelihood Laureates
Each year, four people or organizations who provide practical solutions to the root causes of global problems in human rights and the environment are inducted into the foundation’s group of laureates. To date, 196 laureates from 76 countries have received the distinction, including Greta Thunberg, Wangari Maathai, Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, Amy Goodman, and David Suzuki.
Right Livelihood College
This project of the Right Livelihood Foundation links us with other universities to promote a just, peaceful, and sustainable world for all. Together, we develop and disseminate knowledge about laureates’ solutions across a network of hundreds of university partners. By bridging the gap between activism and academia, our shared education work stimulates research on real-world problems and provides civil society with knowledge and tools to address pressing challenges.
The Right Livelihood College has four main goals:
- Accessible knowledge: Making the knowledge of laureates accessible to all, the general public as well as individuals and academics, with the potential to make the “winning ideas” of laureates succeed and multiply.
- Accessible data: Actively linking the most excellent educational institutions with the Laureates, thus providing researchers and students unparalleled access to primary data and case studies of eminent civil society activists and movements.
- Synergies: Connecting the global community of laureates to help release synergies, scale-tested know-how, and create the critical mass to help bring their common goals forward.
- Promoting solutions: Providing a hub and an incubator for promoting and multiplying the most successful solutions to urgent global problems through the development of information and education activities, including web-based learning materials, meetings, networking, and internship and research scholarship programs.
Our Right Livelihood College university partners
- University of Austral, Valdivia, Chile, Institute of Economics
- University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Faculty of Gender and Conflict Studies
- University of Bonn, Germany, Center for Development Research
- National University of Cordoba, Argentina, Faculty of Psychology
- Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Centre for Livelihoods and Social Innovation, Mumbai, India
- University of Zurich, Right Livelihood Centre, Switzerland
- Lund University, Sweden, Sustainability Studies
- University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Faculty of Anthropology
- School for Wellbeing Studies & Research, Bangkok, Thailand
- Global Campus of Human Rights