Founded in 1992, the Center for Community Partnerships (CCP) is Penn's primary vehicle for enlisting the broad range of knowledge of the research university and the engagement of students, faculty, and neighbors in implementing communal efforts to address the complex, comprehensive, and interconnected problems of the American city. Much of the CCP's work has focused on the public school as the educational and neighborhood institution that can, if effectively transformed, serve as the concrete vehicle of community change and innovation.

Through service-learning courses in the department of Anthropology and Environmental Studies, the CCP established the Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI), a program with a ten-year track record of implementing innovative nutrition education in public schools. UNI was first developed from a partnership between Turner middle school and an undergraduate seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, taught by Professor Francis Johnston, in 1990.

In 1999, UNI developed a partnership with University City High School to enable UNI to use their greenhouse to teach students about growing food. In 2000, a parking lot at the school was redeveloped into a schoolyard garden, run by students in UNI's youth job training and entrepreneurship program. UNI grew again in 2003, expanding its involvement to three schools and a church in West Philadelphia. UNI now has ten full-time, twenty part-time, and fifteen high school student employees, and in 2003 was recognized with the National Academy of the Sciences' Best Youth Development Program Award and the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society's Best Schoolyard Garden Award. UNI was also recognized by the Robert Wool Johnson foundation as one of four national models for addressing the obesity epidemic and improving heal and fitness in children and youth.