Transforming Teaching, Research, and Community Partnership into Scalable Impact

The Ateneo–Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship is an interdisciplinary faculty and student development learning program that enables Ateneo faculty and students to work with the Municipality of Paracelis, Mt.Province and its communities on real-world development challenges.

Jointly advanced by Ateneo de Manila University, the Municipality of Paracelis, and the Asian School of Government (Civika LLC), the Fellowship builds on their partnership to promote innovation, leadership, sustainable development, and collaborative problem-solving.

Adapted from international models of creative inquiry and experiential education, the Fellowship supports faculty members in transforming their courses, research, and academic expertise into platforms for sustained community impact through a network of Co-creation Labs that help accelerate SDG gains and provide long-term continuity beyond individual academic semesters.

Paracelis Municipality: An Innovation Gateway to the Cordilleras

Paracelis is envisioned not only as a site for university–community engagement, but as an innovation gateway to the Cordilleras—a culturally diverse and ecologically significant region with a population of approximately 1.8 million people.

With a land area of approximately 270 square kilometers, Paracelis offers a substantial and diverse environment for developing, testing, and refining practical solutions. Its geographic scale, communities, ecosystems, livelihoods, and development conditions provide high potential for piloting viable innovations before adapting and scaling them to other municipalities in Mountain Province and across the wider Cordillera Administrative Region.

Through the partnership, Paracelis becomes a living laboratory for systems innovation, where faculty, students, municipal leaders, Indigenous communities, civil society organizations, and development partners co-create solutions that respond to local priorities while generating knowledge that can inform policy and practice across the region.

The Ateneo-Paracelis Co-creation Labs

Adapting from MIT's social lab ecosystem, a network of social labs serve as multi-year innovation platforms connecting Ateneo faculty, students, municipal leaders, communities, Indigenous knowledge holders, partner universities, and development organizations around shared development priorities.

Unlike traditional academic projects that often conclude at the end of a semester, the Co-creation Labs provide continuity by advancing innovation initiatives from one semester to the next. They enable successive cohorts of faculty and students to build upon previous work, allowing ideas to mature from early exploration to validated solutions with measurable community impact. The Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) methodology helps build-up traction and capacity among partners in projects.  

The Social Labs help overcome the limitations of semestral academic cycles by creating an institutional memory of research findings, community relationships, datasets, prototypes, policy recommendations, and implementation experiences. Rather than beginning from scratch each semester, new faculty and student teams contribute to an expanding body of knowledge and innovation.

The initial portfolio of Paracelis-Ateneo Co-creation Labs includes:

• Governance Innovation Lab

• AI4Gov Lab

• Climate Action Labs

• Smart Agri Lab

• Sustainable Energy Lab

• Bamboo Impact Lab

• Zero Hunger Lab

• Social Finance Lab

• Social Enterprise Lab

• Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Lab

• Financial Inclusion Lab

• Innovation Ecosystem Strengthening Lab  and more

Together, these interconnected Social Labs create a long-term innovation ecosystem where teaching, research, extension, and community partnership reinforce one another. Over time, we envision co-listed innovation projects with the Mt.Province State University and other Cordillera-based universities, cultivating depth of knowledge, evidence, trusted relationships, and practical innovations needed to strengthen Paracelis while contributing solutions that can be adapted across the Cordilleras. 

The Faculty Impact Fellow Experience

Faculty Impact Fellows align existing courses that they teach so that student learning contributes directly to the impact work of one or more Paracelis-Ateneo Social Labs.

Throughout the Fellowship, faculty members participate in an innovation-to-impact journey that includes interdisciplinary collaboration, community engagement, AI-enabled teaching, and applied research. Monthly Communities of Practice, mentoring sessions, and innovation showcases provide opportunities for Fellows and their students to learn from one another while contributing to shared municipal priorities.

Faculty members may participate individually or as interdisciplinary teams. Ateneo schools, departments, and institutes are encouraged to mobilize 3–8 faculty members from different disciplines whose courses collectively strengthen one or more Social Labs.

Fellows are encouraged to public their student's final outputs so that student projects become part of the Social Labs' continuing innovation agenda, allowing future cohorts to refine, expand, validate, and implement promising ideas over multiple years.

Student Experience - Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP)

Students are at the heart of the Ateneo–Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship. Faculty Fellows mentor multidisciplinary teams of undergraduate and graduate students who become active contributors in the co-creation of solutions with communities, local government, and partner organizations.

Inspired by Lehigh University's Global Social Impact Fellowship undergraduate students may participate in in-person on online research, community consultations, applied research, AI-assisted inquiry, systems mapping, design workshops, prototyping, and implementation. Their work contributes directly to one or more Ateneo-Paracelis Social Labs, allowing successive cohorts to build upon previous research and innovations beyond the limitations of semestral academic cycles.

Faculty Fellows are encouraged to help evolve student projects into an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) experience adapted from MIT's, enabling undergraduate research to address real-world challenges identified by the municipality and local communities. Student contributions may also support theses, capstone projects, internships, scholarly publications, and community initiatives.

From Prototypes to Startups thru the Ateneo Intellectual Property Office

We aim to take viable prototypes to scale through startups or technology licensing. Beyond research publications, promising solution prototypes can be incubated into startups or licensable technologies through the Ateneo Intellectual Property Office (AIPO). Solutions to problems in Paracelis are likely partially relevant to the rest of the Cordilleras, or parts of the Philippines, or Southeast Asia. The AIPO provides the lab-to-market bridge towards scalable impact. 

Cordillera a Cordillera Innovation Ecosystem with Partner Universities

The Ateneo–Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship is designed to generate impact far beyond a single course, project, or academic year.

By working with Paracelis as an innovation gateway to the Cordilleras, the Ateneo-Paracelis Faculty Impact Fellowship creates opportunities for faculty and students to contribute to solutions that can benefit a region of approximately 1.8 million people.

At the center of this effort are the Ateneo-Paracelis Social Labs, which provide the long-term continuity necessary for transformative innovation. While individual courses may last only one semester, the Social Labs sustain multi-year research agendas, community partnerships, policy experiments, and innovation initiatives that continue to evolve over time.

This continuity enables deeper scholarship, stronger community relationships, richer longitudinal evidence, and more robust innovation than would be possible through isolated academic projects alone.

With an area of approximately 270 square kilometers, Paracelis provides an ideal municipal-scale environment for testing integrated solutions before adapting successful approaches throughout Mountain Province, the wider Cordillera region, and other mountain and Indigenous communities across the Philippines.

The Fellowship seeks to demonstrate how a university–local government partnership can transform teaching, research, and public service into a sustained platform for regional innovation and community impact.

Academe-Government Co-creation

Paracelis Research Opportunities/ Problem Sets

Faculty Impact Fellows will have a direct line to social lab managers in Paracelis, facilitating inclusive desing, data-gathering and joint interpretation. An emerging partnership with the Mt.Province State University and the TARAKI Innovation Consortium of the Cordillera-based universities can help accelerate and amplify impact.