Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change [1 ed.] 0128155752, 9780128155752

Table of contents :
CHAPTER 1 - Introduction: our global story
Chapter outline
A community
A university
Organization of the book
A partnership
References
CHAPTER 2 - A case for engaged research and practice
Chapter outline
Social problems as “wicked problems”
Social theory offers alternatives to positivism that make efforts to address these issues
Planning traditions offer alternative methods of bridging the gap between uncertainty and action
Engaged research to address environmental change
References
CHAPTER 3 - Resilience is Rawlsian
Chapter outline
References
CHAPTER 4 - Origin of the Institute for Sustainable Communities
Chapter outline
Introduction
Director and founder of the IfSC
TAMU environmental grand challenge
The Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP)
From RCCP to IfSC
Living laboratories
References
CHAPTER 5 - Discovery initiatives
Chapter outline
Introduction
Coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative
Community infrastructure initiative
Water security initiative
Community resilience initiative
Health and environment initiative
Cross-pollination across discovery initiatives
References
CHAPTER 6 - Breaking down the walls: challenges and lessons learned in interdisciplinary research
Chapter outline
Introduction
Engaging graduate students
Developing a common language and shared conventions
Overcoming barriers and challenges
What does an interdisciplinary career look like for the next generation of researchers?
Where do interdisciplinary scholars seek professional development opportunities, apply for grants, and publish their research?
Going slow to go fast? Finding collaborators for interdisciplinary research
What happens next?
References
CHAPTER 7 - The community in work
The east end story
Furr High School
The south side story
Jones Futures Academy
Conclusion
References
CHAPTER 8 - Empowering learners
Chapter outline
Introduction
Experiential education for wicked problems
Interdisciplinary education for wicked problems
Community-based education for wicked problems
Projects that benefit all
Toxic tour
Stormwater infrastructure assessment and planning
Surface water quality
Green infrastructure designs
Discussion: student feedback
Diverse perspectives
Principles of practice
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 9 - Integrated impact
Chapter outline
Community and university engagement process
Identify the value proposition
Demonstrating success
Applying data-driven approaches
Building community capacity
Highlighting community assets
Investing time and people
Recognize champions and discover leadership
Invest in staff
Establishing a core team and core faculty
Core team
Core faculty
Connecting to a community task force and students
Connecting to students
Differences in partnerships
Service-learning partnership
Engaged research partnership
Conclusion
References
CHAPTER 10 - Ethics of community-based research
Chapter outline
Introduction
Participation rules of thumb
First, who designs projects?
Second, who holds the knowledge?
Third, who benefits?
Finally, who stays?
Conclusion
References
Chapter 11 - Program evaluation
Chapter outline
Introduction
Why evaluate?
Evaluating program activities of the IfSC
Measuring inputs
Evaluating the process
Identifying and measuring outcomes and impacts of the IfSC programs
Conclusion: challenges for the future of the IfSC
References
CHAPTER 12 - Conclusion-lessons and regrets
Introduction
Finding synchronicity in theory and practice
Institutionalizing and sustaining engaged research: challenges and opportunities
Challenges and opportunities external to academe
Confluence of climate change and a rapidly growing population
Growing economic inequality
A lack of capacity in disadvantaged or under-resourced communities
Understanding of climate resilience as being linked with other social opportunities is increasing
More and more tools, many that are usable by residents, are becoming available
Looking within: challenges and opportunities for academe
Faculty advancement
Value-engaged research in the tenure and promotion process
Allow time for building and maintaining community relationships
Recognize the “broader impacts” of engaged research
The education of funders, grant reviewers, and collaborators to view engaged research as equal, empirical, and as cutting e...
Engaged research will produce numerous other research outputs beyond grants and publications and benefit many other learner...
Staff involvement and advancement should be integrated with long-term engagement efforts
Educating faculty and administration on the real costs of engagement
Conclusion
Reference

Citation preview

ENGAGED RESEARCH FOR COMMUNITY RESILIENCE TO CLIMATE CHANGE SHANNON VAN ZANDT Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

JAIMIE HICKS MASTERSON Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

GALEN D. NEWMAN Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

MICHELLE ANNETTE MEYER Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Elsevier Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, United Kingdom 50 Hampshire Street, 5th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Details on how to seek permission, further information about the Publisher’s permissions policies and our arrangements with organizations such as the Copyright Clearance Center and the Copyright Licensing Agency, can be found at our website: www.elsevier.com/permissions. This book and the individual contributions contained in it are protected under copyright by the Publisher (other than as may be noted herein). Notices Knowledge and best practice in this field are constantly changing. As new research and experience broaden our understanding, changes in research methods, professional practices, or medical treatment may become necessary. Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-12-815575-2 For information on all Elsevier publications visit our website at https://www.elsevier.com/books-and-journals

Publisher: Candice Janco Acquisitions Editor: Marisa LaFleur Editorial Project Manager: Devlin Person Production Project Manager: Vignesh Tamil Designer: Christian Bilbow Typeset by Thomson Digital

Contributors John T. Cooper, Jr. Texas A&M University, Office of Public Partnership and Outreach, College Station, USA Juan Elizondo Furr High School, Houston, USA Jennifer A. Horney University of Delaware, Epidemiology Program, Newark, USA Katie Rose Kirsch Texas A&M University, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, College Station, USA Jaimie Hicks Masterson Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA Michelle Annette Meyer Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA Galen D. Newman Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA Juan Parras Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s), Houston, USA Garett T. Sansom Texas A&M University, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, College Station, USA Shannon Van Zandt Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA Charles X. White Charity Productions, Houston, USA

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Acknowledgments The authors would like to acknowledge those involved in the creation of the Institute of Sustainable Communities, which emerged from the Environmental Grand Challenge. There were people in the upper administration at Texas A&M University, including Karan Watson and Chad Wootton, who helped to make both happen, but we want to acknowledge those from our department, including Forster Ndubisi, Jorge Vanegas, and Walter Gillis Peacock. They were instrumental in the hiring first of John Cooper, Jr. as a community engagement and outreach expert, who pioneered and continues to drive our way of working, and then of John’s long-time mentor and collaborator, Phillip Berke, the first director of the Institute, as a direct result of the Environmental Grand Challenge. Berke brought together an initial group of faculty, including Francisco Olivera from Environmental Engineering, Steven Quiring from Atmospheric Science, Kent Portney from Public Service Administration, Nasir Gharaibeh from Civil Engineering, author Shannon Van Zandt, and the inimitable Jennifer Horney from Public Health, who first suggested this book as a way to capture the processes and outcomes of the work we were doing. This first group was later joined by Wendy Jepson from Geography and Ashley Ross from Marine Sciences as other “Discovery Leads” (along with authors Galen Newman and Michelle Meyer) and have continued to drive the engaged research being done today. We would also like to acknowledge the first “class” of students to come through the Institute, including Marccus Hendricks, Tiffany Cousins, Leslie Munoz, Matthew Giglio, Isaac Oti, and finally Garett Sansom, who took on a leadership role as Assistant Director and has ensured the day-to-day operations of the Institute. These students got a hands-on education in engaged research, played critical roles in how the rest of us experienced engaged research, and all have gone on to make it a critical part of their research agendas going forward. Texas Target Communities staff members and interns, led by author Jaimie Hicks Masterson, including Jeewasmi Thapa, Emily Tedford, and Amanda Hoque, and others provided excellent support for our field efforts and relationship building. We are immensely proud of each of them. Finally, we would like to acknowledge our major partners in the field— Charles X. White of Charity Productions; Juan Parras, Ana Parras, Yvette Arellano, Yudith Nieto, and Nalleli Hidalgo and Cinthia Cantu (former Green Ambassadors) and their team at the Texas Environmental Justice xi

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Acknowledgments

Advocacy Service (tejas); Tracy Stephens, president of the Sunnyside Civic Club; and the Green Ambassadors at Furr High School, led by Juan Elizondo, David Salazar, Fredalina Pieri, and others. These young people are going to save the world.We are thankful to the residents that participated in the work, who opened their homes and hearts to us—sharing experiences, stories, and their invaluable local knowledge. The engaged research described within has been supported both by internal funding from Texas A&M University, as well as millions in external grant funding from agencies and funders including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Environmental Protection Agency, and others. Furr High School involvement has been funded in part by a $10 Million grant from the XQ Foundation.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: our global story Jaimie Hicks Mastersona, Shannon Van Zandtb

Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

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Chapter outline A community A university Organization of the book A partnership References

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“When you know their stories, you grow strength from their survival.” Sam Collins III, City of Hitchcock, Texas resident

This is the story of community-university partnerships. It is the story of place and of people. It is a story of survival and urgency. It is the story of local knowledge and empirically driven science.

A community Once I heard a local Houstonian chuckle and say, “smells like money,” referring to the toxic fumes of the refineries along either side of Highway 225, the major highway along “the Houston Ship Channel” connecting the port areas to downtown. Fenceline communities and those vulnerable to hazards do not chuckle at this sentiment. Instead of “snow days,” Houston schools are more likely to temporarily close from “flood days.” These flood events might not make the national news because they are not always named events like Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Houstonians know all too well the devastation of tropical cyclones and bake the colloquial “hurricane cookies” (or “hurricane cake”) when a hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico. If Texans embody the independent,rugged spirit of the nation,Houstonians embody that of Texas. Houston is gritty and tough. Houstonians are tougher and fiercely independent. They possess a rugged spirit that do not give up. In fact, Houstonians deal with pollution, environmental injustice, hurricanes, storm surge, and ever constant flooding.This place has toxic industries Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00001-7

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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adjacent to neighborhoods and schools-which are also primarily communities of color on the city’s historic East End. Houston has 4600 energy-related companies, refines 14% of the the nation’s petroleum, and produces 44% of the nation’s chemicals (Greater Houston Partnership, 2019). Houston air quality regularly exceeds healthy ozone levels and is ranked among the most ozone-polluted cities in the United States (American Lung Association, 2019). A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of contracting leukemia than children living 10 or more miles away.The residents within the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood in East End Houston along the Ship Channel bear some of the highest cumulative cancer risk among all of Harris County (Linder, Marko, & Sexton, 2008). Flooding in Houston makes up most of the whole state’s losses, and the city’s flooding issues have become a bear weather of impacts to come for other urban areas under increased climate change impacts. As for flooding, between 1996 and 2007 Houston had $1.1 billion of the $1.8 billion in insured flood losses for all of Texas. Predictions show that the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall events will only increase due to climate change. Climate change is expected to increase the annual probability of Houston receiving large-scale rainfall events from once in every 2000 years to once in every 100 years by 2081-2100 (Emanuel, 2017). While annual precipitation is expected to remain about the same over the next 100 years, the variability-more extremely wet days and extremely dry periods-will increase (Li, Li, Wang, & Quiring, 2019). Events like Hurricane Harvey, and the floods (e.g., Tax Day Flood and Memorial Day Flood of 2016, among others) in the years preceding Harvey, will be a new normal for the city. The problems described are not a neighborhood problem, or just a Houston problem, but a global problem. Since 1880, the earth has warmed 1°C (1.8°F). With current carbon-emitting trends, by 2100 the earth will warm by 4°C (or 7.2°F). Because of these grave numbers, in April of 2016, 175 of the 196 world countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by curbing the impacts to only 2°C (3.6°F).The Paris Agreement set the record for the highest number of countries to sign an international agreement, and the highest emitters, -such as the United States, China, India, and the EU, all committed to lessening the impacts of climate change, although the United States ceased participation in 2017. Many cities within the United States continue their commitments to this agreement and other environmental and resilience goals, in hopes of addressing some of these challenges. City-led initiatives and neighborhood-level

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resilience efforts can promote grassroots and equitable practices that compliment national efforts or fill a void in national leadership. Houston is a microcosm of global trends and problems. Houston happens to be a living laboratory to understand these complex problems and how cities and neighborhoods can develop just resilience practices for the future. A way to establish and grow resilience locally is through knowledge sharing. Universities are leaders in knowledge generation. Positioning themselves to engage with local communities in using this knowledge and developing new knowledge is one underutilized and needed avenue to address the complex challenges communities face. The Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) with the Texas Target Communities Program of Texas A&M University has partnered with civic clubs and nonprofit organizations in inner city Houston, but Houston is not alone. We have worked in rural places in Texas, like the cities of Nolanville and La Grange, and counties including Liberty and Grimes County.We have worked with small communities like Buffalo, Texas with less than 2000 in population, to large multicounty regions, like the Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission. We have worked side by side with communities to think about hazards, and we have been a resource to communities recovering from wildfires, technological events, tornadoes, and flooding. All communities we have worked with say the same things. We want safe places, we want higher quality of life, we want, as Judge of Liberty County put it, “a place we’d be proud for our kids and grandkids to live in.” So what does that mean for Houston and other communities faced with hazards and climate change? Communities and universities across the country and the world are working together to understand these complex problems to affect change. This book details one such relationship that supports the best science simultaneously with community empowerment.

A university Rather than using communities as “laboratories,” community groups desire a partnership with researchers to identify problems and issues within the community and develop solutions. Laboratories imply scientists testing their hypotheses in a space without external input or especially input from the subjects of the studies.While many scientists are accustomed to engaging students in field research and data-gathering, they are often accused of “using” communities for their own scientific needs, and failing to build bidirectional relationships that bring real change to communities or address problems

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that the community itself identifies. The partnerships community partners want require a shift in the traditional thinking of academic researchers.They require working across disciplines to solve complex societal and environmental problems, as well as a mode of communication that is unfamiliar to academics, focusing on the real-world human impacts of climate change, and how the science can be used to advocate for and institute change. Fortunately, universities engaged and working with communities is not new. Even at the founding of American colleges, they were “cloaked with a public purpose” (Rudolph, 1962, p. 177). The Morrill Acts of 1860 and 1862 linked higher education to the concept of service with the formation of land-grant colleges.Woodrow Wilson signed the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 to establish cooperative extension services within the land-grant institutions to promote the “spirit of service.” The very concept of extension was to extend the knowledge of universities to communities, mainly farmers and other industries. During this time the settlement house model was pioneered by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull House with a communitycentered response to social problems. Other Black scholars and educators working on community issues used a settlement house model in the late 19th and early 20th century (Stevens, 2003).We can also see the community focus and community voice as pivotal to the civil rights movement. In 1970, the University Year for ACTION, “involved more than ten thousand students from over one hundred colleges and universities” (Jacoby, 1996, p. 12). Boyer identified three areas of successful colleges, one being students that “advance the common good” (Boyer, 1988, p. 296). President Clinton wrote a letter to all higher education institutions in 1994 asking for their help in “inspiring an ethic of service across our nation” (Jacoby 1996, p. 17). Boyer insisted universities were not doing enough (Boyer, 1990, 1996; O’Meara & Jaeger, 2006). Land-grant institutions and other universities were urged to “apply knowledge and provide service to the community” and be the “new American college” (Silka et al. 2013, pp. 42-43). State universities across the nation, particularly those that are land grant, face increasing pressure to engage meaningfully with their communities and state residents. The Kellogg Commission on the Future of the State and Land-Grant Universities advocated for community engagement “by integrating teaching, research, and service” (Silka et al. 2013, p. 42). In 2004, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching established the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement to recognize universities for their service to community partnerships and reciprocity (Carnegie, 2006). Other groups have pushed for community engagement

Introduction: our global story

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along the way, such as the National Science Foundation, Campus Compact, the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, the Engaged Scholarship Consortium, the Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N), and the list goes on. In total, 100 years have passed since the extension service model moved research into communities, and today universities aim for community “inclusivity, mutuality, reciprocity” (Driscoll, 2009). In the last decade, over and over again, researchers have called for more authentic community engagement and liberating service-learning to go beyond outreach and lip service of change and moving “toward community” (Driscoll 2009; Frank 2015; Trencher, Bai, Evans, McCormick, & Yarime, 2014, Stoecker 2016). Universities are moving away from fitting communities into their courses and research projects and moving toward designing courses, research, and new processes to tackling pressing local problems. Universities are embedding such efforts into organizational structures and institutional commitment (Frank, 2015). The main message is universities also want higher quality of life in communities.We feel that universities in this age of climate change and environmental inequities can move toward resilience scientifically and in practice by moving toward community.

Organization of the book The authors and their collaborators describe in the chapters that follow how we-a team of interdisciplinary academic researchers working handin-hand with practitioners and communities-undertake engaged research that seeks to bridge the uncertainties of science and the multiple and sometimes conflicting interests present in communities vulnerable to impacts from climate change. We offer both successes and failures, best practices and lessons learned, in our efforts to engage in vulnerable communities and to directly work with them to identify research questions, develop approaches to collaboratively answer these questions, and to return the gained knowledge in such a way as to facilitate both learning and action. The book is useful for university administrators and researchers who wish to build meaningful relationships with communities in their state or region, thereby strengthening their real and perceived contribution to society. Put more simply, universities (especially, but not exclusively, public universities) are under increasing pressure from state legislators and external funders-including federal funding agencies and private foundations and donors-to produce research that transforms communities by addressing

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locally identified and defined problems. This book is also for community organizations-both public and nonprofit-as well as local, regional, and national philanthropic institutions (i.e., foundations) that have as part of their missions the application of science to the betterment of society-solving real problems and reducing negative impacts. The book is in two parts. The first part offers case studies of research projects that have resulted in positive resilience outcomes for communities and their stakeholders. While each case shares peer-reviewed research findings, it also explains and discusses the funding sources, field methods, and short- and long-term outcomes for the community, demonstrating the ways in which the science benefited from its interdisciplinarity, as well as how community input changed the research process. Specifically, Chapter 2 describes why it is challenging to understand and solve “wicked problems” (through theory). Universities can move from theoretical purity toward productive action when we include multiple forms of knowledge. Chapter 3 describes the case for equity and supporting the most marginalized in resilience planning. Chapter 4 explains the creation and formation of the IfSC and how this hub of connection supported researchers and residents. Chapter 5 describes the various “Discovery Leads” or interdisciplinary group of faculty and the research they focused on with community partners. Chapter 6 explains how we were able to break down disciplinary walls along with challenges and lessons learned while working across disciplines in an academic institution. Part II focuses on the process of creating, growing, and sustaining interdisciplinary working groups of researchers and methods of engaging meaningfully with community groups and residents. It addresses ethical behavior for researchers working with community groups, beyond that which is required by human subjects review in universities. Chapter 7 describes the work of the IfSC community partners and their relationship with science and researchers. Chapter 8 describes projects codesigned and coproduced by interdisciplinary scholars (and their students) and local residents to understand hazard risk in socially vulnerable communities and resulted in the empowerment of learners within the university and the community. Chapter 9 describes the university’s engagement framework with partnerships in service-learning and engaged research, called integrated impact. The integrated impact model describes how staff of the university engage communities in parallel to engage faculty and students. Chapter 10 describes the IfSC rules of thumb for ethical community engagement. The chapter highlights best practices for holistic community engagement above traditional research methods; toward the inclusion of diverse voices in a broader

Introduction: our global story

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engagement and planning process that empowers community action and compliments a community’s own adaptive capacity and resiliency. Chapter 11 discusses program evaluation and its role in engaged research similar to the IfSC. The chapter highlights ways to use the program’s mission statement and identified stakeholders to go from reporting successes to full evaluation of impact and the challenges that engaged research produces for traditional evaluation styles. Finally, Chapter 12 describes our lessons learned and dissects things we would change for other universities who may undertake what we implemented.

A partnership

Today we are thrilled to have played a role in shaping the future of communities and neighborhoods across Texas and we are blessed to have sustained relationships with the amazing people we have met in the process. We are not achieving liberated service learning in the fullest sense, as Stoecker (2016) describes it, but very few do.This is our attempt at the ideal of liberated service learning, and this is how we are trying to do it. It is not perfect and sometimes we get it wrong, but there are things we feel like we are doing right.We are a connection of people building and growing toward something (Stoecker 2016). All we have required of our students, faculty, and community partners is to believe in themselves and in the process. Here is our story and the story of our partners. Their story is bound up in ours. They have changed us. And we continue to pursue

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authentically engaged action research that moves beyond grants and funding and “toward community.” As Alexis Cordova of Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service said, “we are not at liberty to give up.” Here lies a fragment of hope: The people make a place resilient-that fierce, never give up mentality. With that spirit we can make our communities a little better. The many people the IfSC has been fortunate enough to work with are the diamonds in the rough of this imperfect place and our home.There is no other privilege in the world than to listen and learn. We look forward to sharing what we have learned.

References American Lung Association (2019). State of the Air 2019. Available from: https://www.lung. org/assets/documents/healthy-air/state-of-the-air/sota-2019-full.pdf Boyer, E. (1988). College:The undergraduate experience in America. New York: HarperCollins. Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professorate. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Boyer, E. L. (1996). Scholarship of engagement. Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1(1), 11–20. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CIRCLE (The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement). (2006). Higher education: Civic mission and civic efforts. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation. Available from https://civicyouth.org/PopUps/higher_ed_civic_mission_and_civic_effects.pdf Accessed 12.03.19. Driscoll, A. (2009). Carnegie’s new community engagement classification: affirming higher education’s role in community. New Directions in Higher Education, 147, 5–12. Emanuel, K. (2017). Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall. National Academy of Sciences, 114(48), 12681–12684. Frank, A. (2015) Reaching the summit: explorations in meaningful learning through community engagement. In: International higher education teaching and learning (hetl)--scholarship of teaching and engagement (SoTE) conference (20-22 January 2015). Orem UT: Utah Valley University. Greater Houston Partnership. (2019). Advanced manufacturing. Available from https:// www.houston.org/why-houston/industries/all-industries#Manufacturing. Jacoby, B. (1996) Foundations and principles of service-learning. In Jacoby, Barbara & Associates. Service-learning in higher education: Concepts and practices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Li, Z., Li, X., Wang,Y., & Quiring, S. (2019). Impact of climate change on precipitation patterns in Houston, Texas, USA. Anthropocene. p. 25. Linder, Stephen, Marko, D., & Sexton, K. (2008). Cumulative cancer risk from air pollution in Houston: Disparities in risk burden and social disadvantage. Environmental Science & Technology, 42(12), 4312–4322. O’Meara, K., & Jaeger, A. J. (2006). Preparing future faculty for community engagement: Barriers, facilitators, models, and recommendations. Journal of Higher Education Outreach Engagement, 11(4), 3–25. Rudolph, F. (1962). The American college and university: A history. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Silka, L., Glover, R., Hutchins, K., Lindenfeld, L., Blackstone, A., Elliott, A., et al. (2013). Moving beyond the single discipline: Building a scholarship of engagement that permeates higher education. Tamara Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry, 11(4), 41-52.

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Stevens, C. (2003). Unrecognized roots of service-learning in African American social thought and action, 1890-1930. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 9(2), 25–34. Stoecker, R. (2016). Liberating service learning and the rest of higher education community engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Trencher, G., Bai, X., Evans, J., McCormick, K., & Yarime, M. (2014). University partnerships for co-designing and co-producing urban sustainability. Global Environmental Change, 28, 153–165.

CHAPTER 2

A case for engaged research and practice Shannon Van Zandt

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Social problems as “wicked problems” Social theory offers alternatives to positivism that make efforts to address these issues Planning traditions offer alternative methods of bridging the gap between uncertainty and action Engaged research to address environmental change References

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In a time of rapid environmental changes due to climate change, it is imperative that scientists engage with communities to speed the transfer of knowledge and to identify problems that are salient and pressing to those communities. The urgency of climate change impacts no longer permits the transfer of knowledge through more traditional, detached methods that require community members to seek information or wait for traditional media or politicians to translate research into actionable information. This urgency is driving scientists and communities to work together.The type of engaged research that is now required draws upon a long effort by applied scientists to address the pressing problems of society. The social sciences in particular originated out of a desire for science to serve humanity. As an applied social science, urban, or city planning professionalized this aim, seeking to solve problems related to the health, safety, and welfare of the general public as the industrial revolution sped urbanization across Europe and North America. Planners had early success with problems of civil engineering—addressing the physical needs of urban and rural residents, eradicating problems of sanitation (e.g., sewage) and the distribution of various services to the public at large. But after those relatively easy problems had been addressed, planners were asked to turn their attention to problems that were much more stubborn. These more stubborn or “wicked” problems are characterized by diverse demands coming from an Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00002-9

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increasingly differentiated public. The demands, rather than being of one voice, were of many, conflicting voices. In other words, planners were being asked to solve problems that were defined differently by different groups. Planners and other applied social scientists have long struggled to bridge gaps between theoretical purity and productive action, especially those working in academic settings. For planning academics—one of the few disciplines for whom the production of knowledge is not enough for career success—the struggle has real consequences for the communities in which we work. For planners working in distressed communities, for example, the conflict between individual and group attainment is an inherent source of tension. For example, while individual upward mobility may be considered development in the community, the exit of individuals from a neighborhood may destroy or degenerate the resources available in the abandoned neighborhood, thus undermining development of the community (Wilkinson, 1991).Thus efforts to facilitate individual residential mobility for disadvantaged households often do so at the expense of neighborhood stability. This community development dilemma illustrates one of the problems that planners practicing in all areas face: how to define the public interest and to resolve conflicts over contradictory needs and purposes.

Social problems as “wicked problems” In a classic article in Policy Sciences, Rittel and Webber (1973) present their “dilemmas in a general theory of planning.” Bellwethers of changes to come, they lamented the increasing demands and expectations being placed on planning professionals. Once seen as providing technical solutions to problems that were “definable, understandable, and consensual,” planning professionals of the late 1960s were being asked to evaluate objectives, clarify purposes, reorder priorities, and redistribute outputs among the competing publics. The “wicked problems” posed by an open, interacting social system required skills beyond the scope of what planners, or at least Rittel and Webber, considered manageable. Constrained by a conception of science that required, at the very least, that problems be describable, they interpreted issues like equity and justice—those involving multiple sources, understandings and consequences—as being dilemmas, issues for which a satisfactory approach could not be found. The logical empiricism to which they had faithfully subscribed would simply not permit them to deal with the type of problems with which they were now being faced; thus the characterization of these problems as “wicked.”

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A dilemma, in its most general, definitional sense, can only be generated by an inflexibility in one’s way of knowing, or understanding. Yet, as planning theorist John Friedmann (1993) notes, planning is the application of knowledge to action. If the epistemology held by the planner prevents her from acting, then an impasse has been reached. Coming from a classic technocratic vision of planning, Rittel and Webber make an attempt in their discourse to identify paths of action within their epistemological framework that may be more productive.Yet even the tone of the discourse suggests that they do not expect to be successful.They are reluctant to admit that a purely positivist approach—one based exclusively on data or knowledge that can be observed, measured, and analyzed—is inappropriate for addressing the nature of the problems facing planners. But the lesson here is not that planners are obsolete, but that they must welcome other kinds of knowledge that allow for productive action. Applying a positivist viewpoint to social problems requires that theories be tested by observing the physical consequences of an intervention to see whether they support or disprove the hypothesis generated by the theory. For this to be possible, the consequences must have a factual, observable record of facts. Rittel and Webber recognize that our diverse public, with their different backgrounds, cultures, and understandings, can interpret the same physical consequences as evidence supporting more than one possible multiple theory. So how can we settle on one theory? And if we are unable to settle on one theory as explanatory of the consequence, we wish to manipulate, how may we proceed? Empiricists would reject that such multiple interpretations are possible—they would insist that the “real world” is equivalent to the “world of our experience;” it is not relative. The problems as they are manifested must reflect the true nature of the problem, and ought to be measurable in concrete terms. Consequently, they should be consistently and identically interpreted by all members of society, and reflective of only one explanatory theory.The facts, and thus problems described by them, must be agreed upon. But, as Rittel and Webber note, “to describe a wicked problem in sufficient detail, one has to develop an exhaustive inventory of all conceivable solutions ahead of time.” So, it is not just that we have multiple, competing possible solutions, but that we do not have the full set available from which to make the correct choice, even if there were just one. Rittel and Webber suggest that there will never be just one solution, however, since “there are no ends to the causal chains that link interacting open systems, the wouldbe planner can always try to do better.”

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Further, we cannot wait for experience to bear out our theories, because “there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem…. Any solution… will generate waves of consequences over an extended—virtually an unbounded—period of time” (Rittel and Webber, p. 163). And still further, “[e]very wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem….The level at which a problem is settled… cannot be decided on logical grounds.” Thus, wicked problems cannot be successfully demarcated—no criterion exists by which to identify the problem, or a single solution. When trying to accommodate multiple theories from divergent publics, it is inevitable that theories put forth by some publics will find more favor than others, either for sound scientific reasons (the theories offer superior or more complete explanations of the observed phenomena), or for political reasons (those putting them forth have more power or influence). To make these distinctions—to answer the questions about what we should be doing, and for whom we should be doing it—makes it necessary to impose an additional, normative framework to the process of identifying and selecting solutions. For planners, problem solving also means that we are experimenting on people. Planners and other applied social scientists like policy makers are regularly implementing policies and programs that have a high likelihood of failure, and planners have repeatedly failed big (not by themselves, but in conjunction with others) on things like urban renewal and zoning. We have made segregation worse, contributed to society’s dependence on automobiles, widened inequalities, placed people in harm’s way, often through intentional activities designed to address some other problem. Society may prefer not to be used as a laboratory for our social experiments, and is typically more concerned with the betterment of their conditions than they are in a search for the truth. Not only do our mistakes substantively impact them, they may even hold us liable. Relying exclusively on empirical facts can put social inquiry at odds with the natural and physical sciences, making socioecological problems like climate change insurmountable. Bringing logical empiricism to bear on social problems is a misapplication, at best. Problems of social policy are not experimentally testable—they cannot be falsified without inflicting or worsening already poor conditions. But that does not, or should not, mean that social scientists are unable to offer meaningful or effective courses of action for social problems. Rittel and Webber offer 10 wicked problems that urban planners face. They can be classified into principles to guide the scientific inquiry into problems of social policy that planners face.

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First, Rittel and Webber lament that there is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem; wicked problems have no stopping rule; and that every wicked problem is essentially unique. These observations suggest that for science to address social problems, it must be able to identify and articulate a problem. Second, as noted earlier, they observe that solutions to wicked problems are not true-false, but good-bad. In other words, they are normative or valuative, based on conceptions of what is good or bad, right or wrong, not whether they can be confirmed or falsified. Next, wicked problems are unbounded, which stifles the ability for action to be taken. Rittel and Webber note that every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem, discrepancies in wicked problems can be explained in numerous ways, and they have an inexhaustible set of potential solutions. Finally, there is no way to test hypotheses as potential solutions. Rittel and Webber suggest that there is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem; every solution to a wicked problem is a one-shot operation—there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error; and finally, the planner has no right to be wrong. So, to move closer to a way to address wicked problems, we must find other ways to find the truth of a situation, to be able to act for good.

Social theory offers alternatives to positivism that make efforts to address these issues As an approach to understanding and approaching problems of social policy, interpretive inquiry offers some ways to overcome positivism’s shortcomings. Interpretive inquirers abandon the need for a single, unitary definition of a social problem. By recognizing that the same physical actions or consequences may be interpreted differently depending on culture and context, scientists operating in this epistemological model reframe the difficulty of problem definition, and allow each group to define the problem as it has meaning for them. The ideological character of interpretive inquiry permits issues like justice and equity to rise to the surface and be addressed by participants and policy makers alike. Observable facts may be interpreted within a valuative framework, where priorities and goals may be formulated and objectives may be evaluated. Interpretive inquiry allows us, individually and in groups (but not as a society), to respond to questions like, “What should we be doing?” An interpretive approach is inevitably normative because action only becomes meaningful in the context of the rules and moral codes shared by members of the same group or culture. Traditional approaches to scientific inquiry like positivism or empiricism choose to ignore participants’ values

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while studying the underlying or systemic causes of the consequences observed. But interpretive inquirers would argue that this approach leads to an overly conservative view of the participants’ plight and is unlikely to identify a need for change or reform. Yet while proponents of interpretive inquiry expend much effort criticizing a neutral approach, they fail to provide a satisfactory alternative for policy inquiry or formulation. For public policy to be made, some reconciliation among competing interests must occur. Interpretive inquiry offers little help, since conflicts among them cannot be settled by a simple appeal to the facts, which may support more than one interpretation. At the extreme, this issue leads to radical relativism, where views and ideologies can only be reported, but never explained, analyzed, or otherwise addressed. So, the while goals and objectives can be identified within group, formulating policies that affect more than one group, as all public policies do, becomes difficult, if not impossible. Proponents of interpretive inquiry are more interested in understanding their world than in addressing its problems as planners. Interpretive inquirers fail to take the next step of applying their second-order explanations to the formulation of policies, which then need be tested through implementation. Hence, planners are still confounded by the inability to test solutions to wicked problems, the lack of opportunity to learn by trial and error, and the prohibition of being wrong. Picking up where proponents of interpretive inquiry leaves off, critical theorists seek to unite both the empirical and the normative as a basis for action that will transform society. A decidedly interpretive approach, critical theory acknowledges and allows for multiple interpretations, but provides a method of reconciliation which not only captures meanings and values but allows us to critically assess their truth. Incorporating the technical realities based on empirical-analytic sciences, as well as practical realities of communication based on history and culture, Jurgen Habermas offers a third “cognitive interest”—an emancipatory interest that seeks to remove distortions from acts of communication. In this way, Habermas expects that differing views may be reconciled toward a single understanding that in turn should lead to productive action. The promises of critical theory, as planning theorist John Forester puts it, are methods of investigation that are: (1) empirically sound and descriptively powerful; (2) interpretively plausible and phenomenologically meaningful; and yet (3) critically pitched, ethically insightful as well. Further, critical theory also challenges us to overcome the troubling disjunction between actor-focused and institutionfocused research strategies (p. 2).

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Critical theory acknowledges multiple priorities and varied interests—the many forms of meaning within the symbolically structured reality of the social world. But rather than accepting and embracing these “validity-claims”, as proponents of interpretive inquiry do, critical theorists attribute these differences to distorted communication. Critical theorists, thus, eagerly anticipate the challenge of problem formulation. The process of problem formulation would be one in which all parties are able to bring information to the table so that the problem can be agreed upon and a solution undertaken. To reach consensus, Jurgen Habermas’ “ideal speech situation” suggests that undistorted communication will result in all individuals seeing the world in the same way, with all relevant data and information forthcoming. The “good-bad” continuum is an issue that should be resolved to a “true-false” through the ideal speech situation where the truth is uncovered through an examination of assertions. Such an examination occurs much the way psychoanalysis does, where agreement is reached through self-reflection into the underlying causes of incongruities in understandings. Presumably, this method will overcome inequalities among parties, so that all interests are equally represented, and are real interests, rather than nominal interests. The institutional power differentials inherent in relationships between, for example, planner and resident may be overcome, allowing a discourse free from coercion or misunderstanding. Thus, the need for intelligibility in secondorder explanations will be eliminated through philosophical inquiry and contemplation—everyone involved will have the same level of understanding and agreement. Rather than having some solutions confer good results for some and bad for others, and vice versa, consensus reached through the ideal speech situation should lead to a win-win action, in which all parties agree on and benefit from the action undertaken. In reality, without assurance that the values presented are autonomously derived and equally considered through discourse that is truly undistorted, we cannot feel confident that consensual solution will be a “good” one. An information-gathering environment free from barriers to open communication can only lead to the highest possible level of exchange and thus the highest quality of information available, assuming the presence of all relevant parties.This ideal is difficult to actualize and thus cannot address some of the issues that wicked problems generate. Even a fully realized ideal speech situation need not necessarily lead to consensus, for example. The idea of consensus suggests that rational disagreement is disallowed and even undesirable. In other words, even when achieving undistorted communication, there still may be some disagreement. Liberal political traditions would even encourage disagreement, in the name of diversity. Furthermore, and

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even more elementary, the ideal speech situation is just that—ideal. Achieving an ideal speech situation, and through it, consensus, in no way guarantees that a practical political course will be the result. Moreover, it is unlikely that such a situation will ever be realized, or even approximated. Falling short of the ideal, we are left with an approximated, less-distorted speech situation that may or may not lead to a consensual problem identification. Further, Habermas assumes that the process of uncovering the truth will lead to a defined problem with a closed set of solutions from which to choose. The interrelationships among wicked problems and discrepancies among explanations of wicked problems are issues, in critical theorists’ perspective, that result simply from miscommunications and misunderstandings of the nature or reality of the problem. But Habermas seems to take for granted the transition from communication to action. While integrating his emancipatory interests with the technical and practical interests, Habermas focuses almost solely on perfecting the speech act, to bridge the identified gap between theory and practice. Since successful communicative action is thought to overcome distortions in understanding, it should lead to congruence between policy and action—we should be doing what we said we would be doing. As policy and action come closer together; that is, the more achievement reflects intent, it is less likely that planners will be inflicting unanticipated consequences on the public. The resolution of conflicts over contradictory needs implies that these needs have been defined well enough to determine their contrariness. Within distressed communities, planners, and residents may identify numerous “symptoms” that characterize an undesirable condition—underemployment, dilapidated housing, crime, a lack of commercial services, for example. Still, an understanding of the relationships between these symptoms and the causes thereof is incomplete. If planners are unable to “know” the causes of these problems, how can they be expected to identify appropriate courses of action, much less predict the outcomes of such courses? This second problem—the problem of knowledge and prediction—has the potential to paralyze planners by limiting their ability to act and their confidence in doing so, and by diminishing their probability of successfully addressing the problem. To the extent that planners have been immobilized or been made ineffective by insufficient knowledge, the development of their professional identity and legitimacy has been stunted. As a result, planners have sought to overcome this third problem by establishing a place for themselves among decision-making institutions and providing a service that

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is not provided by other players. Community development planners, for example, seek to understand the social and economic forces that result in distressed neighborhoods and then to develop tools (usually policies) to counteract these forces. As Friedmann (1993) suggests, they do this by linking knowledge to action. Given the imperfect state of our understanding of social problems and processes, and perhaps even more so with problems that include environmental forces that are not fully understood (or agreed upon), action requires faith, if you will—a capacity for acting with a certain degree of confidence and conviction beyond what is “known,” trusting in experience and understanding to provide the missing information.

Planning traditions offer alternative methods of bridging the gap between uncertainty and action The technically rational traditions—the rational comprehensive model, disjointed incrementalism, and social reform—stem from a more positivistic basis and require some assumptions to be made as it moves from knowledge to action. These models hold that knowledge generated through social science is complete and accurate; that a unitary public interest can be served; and that only planners have the superior knowledge needed to conceive of and implement plans.These models are both commonly and currently practiced by public sector planners, those working for cities, municipal agencies, state agencies, and other public institutions.Yet they fall short in upholding their own assumptions. The rational comprehensive model assumes that knowledge applied to planning problems is full and perfect; it is “unbounded.” In comprehensive planning, the further assumption is made of a perfect understanding of the relationships between the individual parts of a comprehensive plan (land use, transportation and the economy, for example). Planners use this socalled perfect knowledge to gain consensus on the end to be pursued and the appropriate means by which to reach it. Reaching consensus assumes that an ideal speech situation described earlier is present—that every interest is represented, and that agreement can be reached through a dialogue unmarred by power struggles or deliberate misinformation. To enable the transition from knowledge to action, the rational comprehensive model uses the “ignorance is bliss” approach to handling uncertainty—whatever is unknown is disregarded as unimportant in the formulation of both problems and alternative solutions, as well as in the choice of and implementation of solutions.

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Yet the rational comprehensive model requires planners to undertake persuasion to gain support for their proposals; this implies a distorted communicative action. Further, identifying a unitary public interest is, practically speaking, impossible. An alternative plan of action may affect an individual or a group in a number of ways, depending on his or her role or capacity (e.g., professional, taxpayer, parent); it is difficult to know what the net effect of a policy will be on the individual in all of his or her capacities. Second, it is unlikely that one policy will be better for everyone than any other policy. And finally, free-riders threaten to undermine the public benefit of a particular policy by seeking private gain at the expense of the public. Disjointed incrementalism acknowledges such incompleteness in knowledge; rather than trying to overcome it, it embraces uncertainty by taking baby steps along the path from knowledge to action. Like the rational comprehensive model, disjointed incrementalism takes as true knowledge that “on which a consensus is formed among informed people discussing the matter in undistorted communication” (Sager, 1994, p. 8). However, incrementalists acknowledge that complete information cannot be acquired from the start, but that it can be added to and improved upon as the planner moves through the planning process. By allowing the ends to remain undefined, disjointed incrementalists avoid substantive rationality in favor of simple functional rationality—in other words, as long as each individual action is rational, it does not matter what the ultimate outcome is, since it is almost certain to be better than what they started with. In doing so, however, future interests may be sacrificed in favor of responding to present consensus.The consequences of such a short-term view may be great. These future interests are unlikely to have been articulated because they are unanticipated. A disjointed incremental approach prohibits the identification of future wants. To their credit, however, disjointed incrementalists embrace pluralism, acknowledging that multiple interests are present, and that determining courses of action among them is a sort of an analysis in itself (Sager, 1994). By presupposing that no one interest has a monopoly on the production of information and analysis concerning a specific plan of action, they emphasize communication and learning as a method for improving the knowledge available for action (Braybrooke and Lindblom, 1970).While such emphases reflect a more sensible grasp of the realities under which planners operate, the underlying assumption on which action is taken is that a unitary conception of interest can be reached through these methods of communication and learning.

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In the technically rational traditions, planners hold a singular position in society. Not only are planners uniquely qualified to lead, they are granted considerable power to do so. It is no wonder that the technically rational models are so popular among planners. These models confer planners with perfect knowledge and selflessness, along with power and goodness. Yet, of course, this role for planners is far from what the discipline of planning has been able to attain in the United States. Since the role of the government is and has been so unpopular in the United States, planning has failed to establish its professional legitimacy. This may be one reason that European countries have been more successful implementing policy and action that address climate change, for example. European planners have been much more successful in achieving professional legitimacy and in affecting real change both in local communities and at the state level. In contrast to the top-down approach of technically rational traditions, the planning traditions based on liberalism use a bottom-up approach to deal with uncertainty. While not abandoning the ideal of a unitary conception of collective interest, emancipatory traditions embrace the idea of self-realization and recognize that independence is necessary for a society in which individuals can develop freely, an idea which contradicts that of a collective will. Rather than seeking to guide society, as the technically rational models do, the emancipatory traditions seek to transform society. While technically rational traditions favor scientific and technical knowledge, radical planning rejects the universal validity claims of such knowledge, embracing instead the knowledge generated through personal experience and interpretation. The knowledge needed for radical planning comes from practice itself; it is knowledge acquired by the mobilized group during the course of its own actions. Like the technically rational models, radical planning looks to science to offer solutions and tools for societal transformation, but unlike these models, radical planning understands that the choice of solutions will have differential consequences for different groups and interests. Radical planning responds to these multiple interests by encouraging them to organize, articulate their needs, and identify (with the help of radical planners) possible courses of action. Choosing from among the possible technical solutions then becomes a highly politicized and strategic process. Radical planners must help their constituents play to the limits of the public’s attention, by selecting carefully which issues to pursue, when, and how. They must also recognize the uncertain nature of the information available. Here, radical planning seems to take a cue from disjointed incrementalism by taking only steps justified by the available information. While “cautious”

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might characterize the steps taken by disjointed incrementalists, “strategic” or “deliberate” might better describe radical planning’s approach. This type of social mobilization does not need planners. As a grassroots effort, competing publics take on for themselves the responsibility to enact change. Because planners, as we traditionally think of them, are criticized as being part of the repressive apparatus of government, they cannot legitimately be a part of social mobilization. But planners possess some special skills, such as meeting facilitation, communication, and problem solving that can be helpful. These planners are working almost exclusively outside the government; they are often working for nonprofits, including universities. Planning traditions based on pragmatism seem to stem from an understanding of the limits of technical rationality and a desire to enact change with (almost) the abandon of radical planning. Acknowledging that technical knowledge is incomplete and imperfect, and further that each solution formulated must be situationally unique, pragmatists look to experience to fill the gap necessary to facilitate action (Mannheim, described in Friedmann, 1993). Pragmatic planners can marry technical reason with experience, resulting in information that both reflects past understandings of the ways our social systems work and embraces the tools and solutions offered by technology. To negotiate between both types of knowledge, the pragmatic traditions employ the dialectical methods, advocated by Habermas, Dewey, Marx, and others. In such a process, the truth is arrived at by disclosing and then overcoming contradictions between the two sides. Like an ideal speech situation, a dialectical approach based on communicative action assumes transparency of motive, undistorted disclosure of information, and absence of power differentials.Yet, in contrast to an ideal speech situation, it can fall short of these ideals and still be useful as a method of reconciling knowledge gained from different sources. In fact, according to Forester’s (1993) exposition on communicative action, being able to anticipate constraints on communicative action can protect the quality of planning by attuning planners to the possibilities of criticism and consensual acceptance underlying rational action. As people who link knowledge to action, planners may be both social learners and facilitators, helping to manage and address the multiple interests. Those acting in a public capacity are to serve as guardians or caretakers of the public interest, and as such, serve to organize individual interests in such a way that action is possible (Friedmann, 1993, p. 191). By facilitating learning for the masses, planning could devolve to the people, where they

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would lead a rational political life of self-realization. This view suffers from the same disillusion that Rousseau suffered from—that through a process of education or self-realization, people might come to subordinate their own will to that of the collective and be willing to act on its behalf, rather than their own. We certainly see that not to be the case in the United States in the new millennium.

Engaged research to address environmental change To solve problems of the magnitude with which we are now dealing, scientists—particularly those is the natural, environmental, and physical sciences—cannot rely on obviously ineffective techniques of change stemming from rational and positivistic ways of knowing. We need models and modes of practice, which systematically and rationally consider and weigh different interests, values, and principles to develop more responsive and appropriate solutions for intransigent problems. These modes of practice must successfully address how to know existing needs, how to evaluate alternative courses of action, and how to resolve conflicts. The intransigent problem of climate change may be the most difficult humans have ever faced. The survival of our species depends on our ability to not just understand the causes and consequences of climate change, but on our ability to act to arrest the rate of change and adapt to those consequences we can no longer avoid.

References Braybrooke, D., & Lindblom, C. (1970). A strategy of decision. New York: The Free Press. Forester, John (1993). Critical theory, public policy, and planning practice: Toward a critical pragmatism. Albany: State University of New York Press. Friedmann, J. (1993). Planning in the public domain. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rittel, H. W., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy sciences, 4(2), 155–169. Sager, T. (1994). Communicative planning theory. Aldershot: Avebury. Wilkinson, K. P. (1991). The community in rural America. New York: Greenwood Press.

CHAPTER 3

Resilience is Rawlsian Shannon Van Zandt

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline References

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Resilience becomes important in an era of climate change because it reflects an understanding that we’re no longer in a position to stop change from occurring, or to completely avoid impacts. Change is already happening, impacts are increasing. So, what does it mean to be resilient to these kinds of storms and events? The concept of resilience emerged out of ecology, and these origins offer some important insights to it (Table 3.1; Mayunga & Peacock, 2010). First, and perhaps most widely understood, is that resilience refers to an ability to absorb, withstand, and bounce back. It implies elasticity and flexibility, as well as endurance and durability. Bluntly, it means that we know impacts will occur, and, to survive, we must learn to bounce back from them. Ecological definitions of resilience also suggest a need to adapt. Adaptation takes things a step past absorption and past endurance. It suggests a need to change ourselves; change the way we live, the way we use the land, or what we put on it. Adaptation is one of the key terms that climate scientists and climate change planners use to describe the kinds of activities that may be undertaken to avoid further impacts—particularly related to retreating, migrating, or elevating structures above levels of expected sea level rise. Disaster planners, on the other hand, often refer these types of adaptation measures as “hazard mitigation,” as in mitigating the potential impacts of a disaster by reducing damage. Adaptation measures are a means of mitigation, but climate scientists also use the word “mitigation” to refer to efforts to reduce CO2 emissions and attenuate global warming (In our experience, this has sometimes resulted in confusion as to what types of activities are being referred to, and points to the importance of clarifying and defining terms as part of interdisciplinary work). Ultimately, however, we are talking about the need to consider alternatives to the ways we are currently living to make ourselves less vulnerable to impacts from a changing climate, including the increasing frequency and severity of natural disasters. Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00003-0

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Table 3.1  Selected definitions of the concept of resilience from the field of ecology. Source

Definition

Holling (1973)

Resilience of an ecosystem is the measure of the ability of an ecosystem to absorb changes and still persist. Resilience is the speed with which a system returns to its original state following a perturbation. Resilience is a buffer capacity or ability of a system to absorb perturbation, or the magnitude of the disturbance that can be absorbed before a system changes its structure by changing the variables and processes that control behavior. Resilience is the potential of a particular configuration of a system to maintain its structure/function in the face of disturbance, and the ability of the system to re-organize following disturbance-driven change and measured by size of stability domain Resilience is a potential of a system to remain in a particular configuration and to maintain its feedbacks and functions, and involves the ability of the system to reorganize following the disturbance driven change. Resilience for social-ecological systems is related to three different characteristics: (1) the magnitude of shock that the system can absorb and remain in within a given state; (2) the degree to which the system is capable of self-organization, and (3) the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances, to undergo changes, and still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks. Ecosystem resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to tolerate disturbance without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by different set of processes. Thus, a resilient ecosystem can withstand shocks and rebuild itself when necessary. Resilience in coupled socialecological systems, the social systems have the added capacity of humans to learn from experience and anticipate and plan for the future.

Pimm (1984) Holling et al. (1995)

Lebel (2001)

Walkers et al. (2002)

Folke et al. (2002)

Walker & Salt (2006)

Resilience Alliance (2007)

Source: Mayunga and Peacock, (2010). The Development of a Community Disaster Resilience Framework and Index. In: Advancing the Resilience of Coastal Localities: Developing, Implementing, and Sustaining the Use of Coastal Resilience Indicators. Final report to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) under NOAA Award No.: NA07NOS4730147. Unpublished.

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Finally, ecological definitions of resilience refer to ecological systems— ecosystems—as the unit, which is doing the absorbing, enduring, and adapting.The significance here is the recognition that systems are made up of many parts (both plants and animals) that function together, and that, as part of resilience, some of these constituent parts may have to disappear, work differently, or adapt to the needs of the system as a whole. It is also significant that the parts have to work together as a community, and that they are dynamic. We adopt this conception to describe community resilience. Resilience is a concept that may be applied to individuals or to households, but the community-level is most relevant to natural (and technological) disasters. Understanding that a community is an ecosystem in its own right helps us apply these ecological concepts to human communities, and how they can be made more resilient. Like ecosystems, human communities are made up of constituent parts, and include structures, infrastructure, and people, as well as the connections between them, which include local economies, neighboring, social support, and other institutional structures. Like ecosystems, some of these parts may be naturally strong, hardened, and rigid, while others may be weak, flexible, adaptive, or fleeting. Some of these parts can be expected to fail when subjected to a threat or hazard. In purely environmental ecosystems (not human societies), allowing certain parts to fail—and not recover—may be acceptable or even desirable, as part of evolutionary change. In human communities, however, allowing weak or brittle human elements to fail and not recover is not a desirable or humane option. Social vulnerability refers to the variation in sub-populations’ ability to resist, absorb, cope with, respond to, and recover from external threats such as natural disasters or more chronic threats such as the sea level rise associated with climate change (Blaikie, Cannon, Davis, & Wisner, 2005). Social vulnerability arises from demographic characteristics such as gender (Enarson and Morrow 1997, 1998; Fothergill, 1999), race/ethnicity (Peacock et al. 1997; Bolin and Stanford 1998; Fothergill, Maestras, & Darlington, 1999; Lindell & Perry, 2004; Highfield, Peacock, & Van Zandt, 2014), age, income (Peacock et al., 1997, Dash et al., 1997; Fothergill and Peek, 2004), education, and household composition, as well as characteristics such as housing tenure— whether one rents or owns (Lee & Van Zandt, 2019, Peacock et al., 2015). Over the course of history, these factors have interacted with structural racism such as discrimination in real estate and housing markets, as well as zoning and NIMBY (Not-In-My-BackYard) behavior to segregate communities and locate the most socially vulnerable populations into lowquality and structurally unsound housing in the most physically vulnerable locations (Van Zandt, 2019).

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The disaster literature demonstrates that social vulnerability factors influence outcomes at every stage of disaster, from preparedness (Lindell and Prater 2000; Peacock, Brody, and Highfield 2005), to evacuation (Lindell & Perry, 2004; Gladwin and Peacock 1997) and damage and casualties (Zahran et al., 2008; Highfield et al., 2014), and finally to recovery (Van Zandt et al., 2012). The most pronounced impacts are on damage incurred (Highfield et al., 2014) and recovery trajectories (Peacock,Van Zandt, Zhang, & Highfield, 2015), which of course are related. Socially vulnerable populations constitute the weak and brittle parts of human communities. They are the parts that “give” when a community is threatened by an external threat. They are the weak link in a chain, or the part of the rubber band that has been stretched so far or become so brittle that it cannot bounce back. These weak parts render the whole organism—the community—unable to function as it was intended. While better-off parts may recover more quickly and return to normal function, the community as whole will suffer—through loss of jobs, loss of population, decreases in housing values, and permanent disruption of neighborhoods and institutions. The long-term result is that preexisting inequities are exacerbated rather than attenuated, and resilience is eroded rather than augmented. In the real life of our engaged research in communities in Texas, this is what we have seen, both empirically through careful research, as well as anecdotally, through observation and lived experience. The potential consequences of not increasing resilience—of letting the weak parts of our communities fail and disappear—are pretty dire. While many in our communities fail to recognize it, these weak parts are critical to the functioning of our communities. They are our service workers, our manual labor, the ones who clean up after us, who serve us in restaurants and hotels, who take care of our children and respond to our emergencies. They are often invisible, and elites and politicians tend to believe that we are better off without them. But as communities quickly learn, it is hard to return to normal when this segment of the population has been displaced. Service-oriented businesses like hotels and restaurants cannot reopen without custodians, wait staff, kitchen staff. Rebuilding cannot occur without manual and skilled laborers. Families struggle to return to normal without childcare, public transportation, and so on. So, if this is our current reality, how do we change it? How do we build resilience, particularly in the face of growing threats? If we think about resilience as something that can be distributed across different segments

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Table 3.2  Descriptions of theories of justice. Theory of justice

Basic premise

Utilitarian

Maximizes outcomes for the community as a whole, regardless of socioeconomic status Each socioeconomic group should receive equal benefits from a program or policy Benefits should be distributed so as to minimize differences between socioeconomic groups Benefits should be distributed so that the leastadvantaged group receives the most

Equal shares Egalitarian Rawlsian (named for philosopher John Rawls)

of the population, then theories that guide distribution may be relevant. Theories of justice offer alternative ways of thinking about how different components of our communities are treated or attended to, and how goods or qualities are distributed within and across communities [This discussion of theories of justice is adapted from Beatley (1984)]. Table 3.2 summarizes several of these theories of distribution. While different types of goods may address different types of subcomponents within a community, with social goods, they are most often thought of as being distributed to different socioeconomic groups within a community.The discussion and examples that follow attempt to discuss how resilience as a social good might be distributed under these different theories.

Figure 3.1  Comparison of alternative theories of justice.

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Utilitarian approaches, originated by Jeremy Bentham (1996), attempt to maximize outcomes for the community as a whole, without regard to different income groups. In Fig. 3.1A, we can stack the bars to get a high level of benefit. As we work through our examples, we will see that this total is the highest among our different theories of justice. In our application, the outcomes are resilience. Maximizing resilience for the community as a whole may mean a focus on the total amount of spending related to mitigation or adaptation efforts. In a post-disaster context, a utilitarian approach might be exemplified by emphasizing the total amount of federal aid coming into a state or city. Utilitarian approaches tend to be favored by state or local politicians whose concerns are with impressing their constituency. The emphasis is on the magnitude of the good, with a “more is better” mindset, and without regard to what the resources are spent on, their effectiveness or the extent to which it addresses real needs within the community. Where resilience is concerned, utilitarian approaches are more likely to favor structural mitigation—hardening of structures, and the installation of highly visible protective features such as seawalls, dams, levees, and other engineered structures. They might also be investments in facilities, which serve or address the entire community, such as an educational program or community facility. Such “big ticket” items tend to give the impression to residents that lots is being done to protect them, without requiring behavioral changes by residents. However, because utilitarian approaches pay little attention to the distribution of goods within communities, existing political economies and power structures will tend to favor powerful groups—typically the affluent socioeconomic groups. Practically speaking, this means resources will be spent in areas and ways that provide protection to the more affluent, even if they are technically available to other residents. For example, resources may be spent on constructing a sea wall or dike that protects coastal homes and beach houses, which tend to be the homes of the rich (often even second homes), while still being portrayed as a community-wide benefit. The long-term outcome will be that preexisting inequities will continue to grow, as affluent groups hoard resilience resources and low-status groups continue to be deprived. Equal shares approaches distribute resources equally across different socioeconomic groups (Fig. 3.1B) (Rawls, 2009).The underlying premise is that each group should receive equal benefits from goods that flow into a community. Resilience programs are those that convey the same benefits to each household or neighborhood, regardless of need. In a disaster context, these might be emergency distribution efforts that provide water, food, or

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gift cards. In a climate change context, equal shares programs might be those that offer fixed-value mitigation grants to all households within a community, regardless of income or risk exposure. Equal shares approaches are easy to justify and easy to implement. They are often seen as the most “fair.” They typically do not raise an eyebrow. Because everybody receives the same benefits, equal shares programs do not require needs assessments, income qualifications, or discretion generally. And they do not elicit conversations around who “deserves” assistance and who does not. Politically, they are simple and straightforward. Equal shares programs perpetuate inequalities within a community— they do nothing to close the gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged. They might increase resilience of some by raising them above a minimum threshold of resilience, but they might not achieve the most efficient distribution of resources, as those already quite resilient just gain greater advantage. Egalitarian approaches try to minimize differences between socioeconomic groups (Rawls, 2009; Cohen, 1989). It is based on the belief that all people (or households or neighborhoods) are equal, and that the distribution of resources should seek to restore that balance. As seen in Fig. 3.1C, the egalitarian approach tries to reduce the gaps between groups. For those interested in equity and justice, egalitarian approaches are appealing, as they tend to raise up more disadvantaged groups. In a resilience context, egalitarian approaches are going to require vulnerability analyses and means testing, to determine who is most exposed to climate threats, and who will benefit most from mitigation and adaptation efforts. Rather than giving equal amounts to each household, egalitarian approaches will give more to households who received more damage, in proportion to the value of the home, for example. In a climate change context, egalitarian programs may emphasize adaptation for the most exposed, through relocation or elevation, for example. They may withhold assistance from those who can afford adaptation efforts themselves, again to minimize differences between resources appropriated to the most and least advantaged. Such an approach could point out the strong capitalist forces that increased the exposure of the vulnerable—explicitly segregation and housing markets that drive land values, which relegate more vulnerable populations to hazardous areas by virtue of lower housing prices. Low-income people live in low-quality homes in low-lying areas, I like to say, as a convenient heuristic for pointing this out. Egalitarian approaches are perhaps the most difficult, both politically and practically, to implement. Their emphasis on minimizing differences

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can be interpreted as the redistribution of wealth, penalizing the affluent in favor of the “undeserving” poor. Accordingly, they are also the most likely to be gamed by the well resourced and powerful. In disaster response contexts, a notable example of the differences between equal shares and egalitarian approaches has been decision-making around the distribution of gift cards in the days following a natural disaster. In the rush to get assistance out, in some cases, such as Hurricane Katrina, authorities took an equal shares approach, essentially distributing gift cards on a first come, first serve basis (Millions in Katrina Aid, 2006). This would be considered an equal shares approach. Subsequent outcry of abuse of the gift cards, and the use of gift cards by households who evidently had little need caused a reaction in the disaster that followed Katrina, Hurricane Rita. After Rita, households were forced to demonstrate need in order to receive assistance, and, as a result the distribution of aid was much slower, and aid did not make it to many families who desperately needed it. A fourth approach to the distribution of resources is the Rawlsian approach (Fig. 3.1D). This approach is named after philosopher John Rawls, whose work focused on achieving justice. Rawls (1958) draws a distinction between fairness and justice, where treating everyone (“one” being an individual, household, community, state, nation, or some other unit of society) “fairly” may only be appropriate if everyone starts from the same position, or the possibility of the same position. Recognizing that society has sorted individuals in a variety of ways, Rawls also recognizes that a “fair” distribution of goods, services, or resources is not likely to bring about justice. Instead, he holds that benefits should be distributed so that the least advantaged receives the most, regardless of the overall amount of resources, or even the existing gap between the least advantaged and other groups of advantage. Practically speaking, egalitarian and Rawlsian approaches may be functionally quite similar, but in principle, they are not the same. In a Rawlsian approach, the largest amount of resources might go to the least advantaged, but a substantial amount may also go the most advantaged. Rawls is not so concerned with closing the gap as he is with helping the less advantaged achieving a baseline of resources. In a disaster or climate change context, Rawlsian approaches would be about ensuring that every person could achieve some standard of resilience. For example, given the spatial distribution of coastal homes, it is entirely possible that an adaptation strategy that relocated vulnerable homes from a coastal would include large numbers of both working class homes and vacation homes. If this strategy ensured that the working class households decreased

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the likelihood of flooding to an acceptable level, it would be a Rawlsian solution even if more affluent households also benefited from the program. Housing recovery in the United States is largely funded through a special allocation of the Community Development Block Grant for disaster recovery (CDBG-DR). This funding stream comes out of the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), and is subject to Fair Housing laws. The CDBG program, whether the regular program or the disaster recovery allocation, has a requirement that 70% of the funding must benefit low- and moderate-income households, defined as households making under 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI). On the surface, these restrictions on allocation would suggest a fairly Rawlsian approach to housing recovery by directing the majority of the funding to low- and moderate-income households and requiring spending to “affirmatively further” fair housing.Yet the ad hoc nature of CDBG as a disaster recovery program is part of the program’s design. CDBG funding is not a formal part of the federal statutory disaster recovery framework (As of this writing, federal legislation, the “Reforming Disaster Recovery Act of 2019” is currently under consideration in the Senate, and has passed out of the House. It would create a regular stream of funding for disaster recovery, and no longer would require a special allocation of CDBG funding for disaster recovery), and so HUD deals with a new set of rules for each appropriation. The informal nature of these appropriations often leads to confusion, and can result in multiple disaster recovery programs operating concurrently under different rules. Further, it leaves the process vulnerable to political pressure, as seen in the disparities in federal appropriations to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita (Sloan and Fowler, 2015). State and local officials also frequently ask for, and sometimes get, waivers of that requirement. Even when they are not successful at receiving waivers, state recovery plans often play fast and loose with this requirement by submitting hastily written and vague recovery plans which give lip service to low- and moderate-income households and neighborhoods. Once the funding streams begin flowing, the lack of specificity in the plan, coupled with a lack of oversight or accountability from HUD, means that funds end up flowing along the same old streambeds, with a distribution that more closely resembles a utilitarian distribution that reinforces and exacerbates existing inequalities, rather than a Rawlsian distribution. Without careful monitoring and aggressive advocacy, it is difficult to change the path of these flows of resources.

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Fighting for accountability Texas Housers, previously known as the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service is a Texas nonprofit public interest research and advocacy organization (full disclosure: the author is a board member). Texas Housers aggressively monitors government housing and community development programs, and how funds are distributed within the state. These programs include the Community Development Block Grant Program. When natural disasters like Hurricanes Katrina, Ike, and Sandy strike, the federal government uses special allocations of CDBG funds and Housing Choice Vouchers (HCVs) to address housing needs. HCV are used to help displaced households to find temporary housing in the weeks and months after a disaster, while CDBG disaster relief funds are used to address housing recovery and rebuilding. These special allocations are held to the same fair housing mandates as other funding for housing and community development coming out of HUD. In the summer and fall of 2008, the Texas coast was struck by multiple hurricanes, including Gustav, Dolly, and Ike. These followed the summer of 2005, when Texas was affected by Hurricanes Katrina and particularly Rita, from which many areas were still not fully recovered. Soon thereafter, the State of Texas submitted their plan for disaster recovery, required before CDBG disaster recovery funds can be appropriated. The plan effectively funneled all $3 billion of the awarded aid to local councils of government (COGs), but did not specify how the money would be distributed to units of local government served by the COGs. It also relied on flawed data, and would result in a low percentage of funds designated for activities benefiting low- and moderate-income households (Texas Appleseed and Comment, 2009). Following an administrative complaint filed by Texas Appleseed, a civil rights and fair housing advocate, which highlighted the plan’s inadequacy, HUD took the unprecedented step of rejecting both the original plan as well as its first amendment (Marquez, 2009). The letter cited the judgment against Westchester County as evidence that inadequate AIs could result in False Claims allegations. In February 2010, Texas Appleseed, another public interest justice organization (including a staff of civil rights lawyers) joined the Texas LowIncome Housing Information Service in filing a Fair Housing Complaint with HUD. The complaint alleged that the Texas Department of Rural Affairs permitted subrecipients to steer CDBG funds away from the housing needs of very low, low, and moderate income specifically to avoid the integrative effect such housing would have on overwhelmingly white communities, particularly in East Texas, an area with a long history of racial tensions (TxLIHIS, 2009). In May 2010, HUD signed the Conciliation Agreement negotiated between the State of Texas, Texas Appleseed, and

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the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service. Under the agreement, a minimum of 55 percent of the $3 billion in CDBG disaster relief funds would be targeted to rebuild housing and benefit low-income people (HUD, 2010). Included in the agreement was a commitment from the City of Galveston to rebuild all 529 units of public housing that were demolished shortly after Hurricane Ike in late 2008, a particular point of contention locally. Texas Housers and its partners have worked diligently to monitor and influence distributive outcomes of disaster funding in Texas. Their aggressive approach has been instrumental in a number of small victories, as well as some larger ones, such as the conciliation agreement, that have achieved better (although not nearly perfect) outcomes for socially vulnerable populations.

As researchers in a land grant university (Land grant universities were created by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 to focus on science, agriculture, engineering, and other “practical” studies to serve the needs of the state. Most land grant universities are public or state universities, and include Texas A&M University. Originally, “A&M” stood for “Agricultural and Mechanical”) who are seeking to apply our knowledge to critical environmental and social problems in our state’s communities and beyond, we believe that a Rawlsian approach to mitigation, adaptation, preparedness, response, and recovery will lead to increasing levels of community resilience. While both egalitarian and Rawlsian approaches seek to overcome gaps in resilience between the most- and least-advantaged subpopulations in our communities, Rawlsian approaches focus on the most expeditious ways to help the leastadvantaged in our communities to reach a minimum standard of resilience. Our interest in Rawlsian resilience is what leads us to work almost exclusively with low capacity and disadvantaged neighborhoods and communities. In our urban planning program, we have been working with low-capacity communities for nearly four decades, through a program called Texas Target Communities (TTC, renamed from Texas Target Cities in 2013). It has been a signature part of our professional master’s degree in urban planning, giving our students an opportunity for a “high impact service learning” experience of working with a real-life community to produce a comprehensive plan. What’s a comprehensive plan? A comprehensive plan is exactly what it sounds like—a written plan guiding all aspects of development, usually for a 20– 30 year horizon. For most of its history,Texas Target Communities conducted applied urban (and rural) planning for small communities across the state, pro-

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ducing plans for more than 40 communities.These plans were not specifically for addressing climate change, building resilience, or even avoiding disasters, necessarily. Some early plans might have even encouraged development in hazardous areas. Certainly many were small communities near the coast. In 2013,TTC expanded, initially through work with AgriLife extension agents. Like most if not all states with Land Grant universities, Texas has an agricultural extension service that places extension agents in nearly every one of the 254 Texas counties. These extension agents serve as liaisons between the resources of the university, and the local officials and stakeholders. Working with AgriLife,TTC expanded the scope of services offered, as well as the depth of the relationship developed with communities. This relationship with AgriLife allowed TTC to begin to act as a broker between the university and the communities, to pair courses from multiple colleges with specific community needs, providing students with high impact service learning experiences, while simultaneously providing knowledge and services (although not necessarily professional) to low-capacity communities. Building on research conducted by the College of Architecture’s Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center faculty researchers and others, teaching faculty were more aware of incorporating vulnerability assessments and land suitability analyses to identify appropriate locations for development, and communities were working with classes not only from urban planning, but also landscape architecture, environmental engineering, and other disciplines to address issues related to both sustainability and resilience. Still, the work we were doing was primarily service learning. We were practicing community engagement, a critical skill for urban planners, but we were not identifying research questions, nor collecting data, other than that necessary to do the planning work we were doing. And while we were beginning to involve other disciplines, we were not really working interdisciplinarily. In 2015, the Institute for Sustainable Communities was created, out of an effort from the University to identify areas of synergy within the university—strengths that the University had and could leverage, where the result could be more than the sum of the parts, called the Grand Challenges. The Institute arose from the Environmental Grand Challenge, coupled with the presidential investment hire of Dr. Phillip Berke. Dr. Berke is one of the nation’s foremost scholars on land use planning, plan evaluation, and hazard mitigation. His hiring catalyzed the synthesis of all our activities. The Institute has leveraged TTC to become a tool by which deep, relational engagement can be coupled with rigorous interdisciplinary research to

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identify and respond to real and complex problems facing low-capacity communities. By partnering with disadvantaged urban and rural neighborhoods, we have found that we can identify more relevant research questions, generate answers faster due to the ability to collect and analyze primary data in partnership with residents, develop evidence-based solutions, initiate change almost immediately, and empower residents by training citizen scientists. It is our hope that this level of engaged research and applied work can positively influence the level of resilience of these most physically and socially vulnerable communities. Through such work, we believe we are changing, and can influence even more widespread change to bring Rawlsian solutions, which are the essence of resilience. The subsequent chapters delve deeper into the practices we’ve developed, and the results—both scientific and capacity-building that we have seen.

References Beatley, T. (1984). Applying moral principles to growth management. Journal of the American Planning Association, 50(4), 459–469. Bentham, J. (1996). The collected works of Jeremy Bentham: An introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I., & Wisner, B. (2005). At risk: natural hazards, people’s vulnerability and disasters. New York, NY: Routledge. Bolin, R., & Stanford, L. (1998). The Northridge Earthquake: Vulnerability and Disaster. New York: Routledge. Cohen, G. A. (1989). On the currency of egalitarian justice. Ethics, 99(4), 906–944. Dash, N., Peacock, W. G., & Morrow, B. H. (1997). And the poor get poorer: A neglected black community. In W. G. Peacock, B. H. Morrow, & H. Gladwin (Eds.), Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, gender and the sociology of disaster, (pp. 206–225). London: Routledge. Enarson, E., & Morrow, B. H. (1997). A Gendered Perspective: The Voices of Women. In W. G. Peacock, B. H. Morrow, & H. Gladwin (Eds.), Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, gender, and the sociology of disasters. Psychology Press. Enarson, E. and Morrow, B.H., (1998). The gendered terrain of disaster: Through women’s eyes. Westport: Praeger. Fothergill, A. (1999). Women’s roles in a disaster. Applied Behavioral Science Review, 7(2), 125–143. Fothergill, A., Maestras, E., & Darlington, J. D (1999). Race ethnicity and disasters in the US: A review of the literature. Disasters, 23(2), 156–173. Fothergill, A., & Peek, J. A. (2004). Poverty and disasters in the United States: A review of recent sociological findings. Natural Hazards, 32(1), 89–110. Gladwin, H. (1997). Warning and evacuation: A night for hard houses. Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, gender and the sociology of disasters, 52–74. Highfield, W., Peacock, W. G., & Van Zandt, S. (2014). Mitigation planning: Why hazard exposure, structural vulnerability, and social vulnerability matter. Journal of Planning Education & Research, 34, 287–300. doi: 10.1177/0739456X14531828. HUD steps up in Texas. New York Times Editorial, June 13, 2010. Lee, J. Y., & Van Zandt, S. (2019). Housing tenure and social vulnerability to disasters: A review of the evidence. Journal of Planning Literature, 34(2), 156–170.

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Lindell, M. K., & Perry, R.W. (2004). Communicating environmental risk in multi-ethnic communities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Lindell, M. K., & Prater, C. S. (2000). Household adoption of seismic hazard adjustments: A comparison of residents in two states. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 18(2), 317–338. Marquez, M. M. (2009). Letter to Governor Rick Perry. Available at http://www.texasappleseed.net/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=226&Itemid. Mayunga and Peacock, (2010). The development of a community disaster resilience framework and index. In: Advancing the Resilience of Coastal Localities: Developing, Implementing, and Sustaining the Use of Coastal Resilience Indicators. Final report to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) under NOAA Award No.: NA07NOS4730147. Unpublished Available from: https://www.researchgate. net/publication/254862206_Final_Report_Advancing_the_Resilience_of_Coastal_ Localities_10-02R. Millions in Katrina Aid Wasted. (2006). MSN. Available from:http://www.nbcnews.com/ id/11326973/ns/us_news-katrina_the_long_road_back/t/audits-millions-dollars-katrina-aid-wasted/#.Xhi0BfZFyUk. Peacock, W. G., Brody, S. D., & Highfield, W. (2005). Hurricane risk perceptions among Florida’s single family homeowners. Landscape and Urban Planning, 73(2-3), 120–135. Peacock, W. G., Morrow, B. H., & Gladwin, H. (1997). Hurricane Andrew: Ethnicity, gender, and the sociology of disasters. Miami: Laboratory for Social and Behavioral Research, Florida International University. Peacock, W. G., Van Zandt, S., Zhang, Y., & Highfield, W. (2015). Inequities in long-term housing after disaster. Journal of the American Planning Association, 80(4), 356–371. doi: 10.1080/01944363.2014.980440. Rawls, J. (2009). A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard university press. Sloan, M., & Fowler, D. (2015). Lessons From Texas: 10 Years of Disaster Recovery Examined Texas Appleseed. Unpublished. Retrieved April 18, 2020 from https://www.texasappleseed.org/sites/default/files/TexasAppleseedHurricane_WhitePaper_02c_Final.pdf. Texas Appleseed and Comment, Texas Appleseed Comment. January 5, 2009. Accessed May 2013 at http://www.texasappleseed.net/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_ view&gid=65&Itemid=. Texas, Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service Complaint to HUD. February 7, 2010. Accessed May 2013 at http://www.texasappleseed.net/index.php?option=com_ docman&task=doc_download&gid=291&Itemid=. Van Zandt, S. (2019). Impacts on socially vulnerable populations. In Lindell (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Urban Disaster Resilience: Integrating Mitigation, Preparedness, and Recovery Planning. Routledge. S.,Van Zandt, Peacock,W. G., Henry, D.W., Grover, H., Highfield,W. E., & Brody, S. D. (2012). Mapping social vulnerability to enhance housing and neighborhood resilience. Housing Policy Debate, 22(1), 29–55. Zahran, S., Brody, S. D., Peacock, W. G.,Vedlitz, A., & Grover, H. (2008). Social vulnerability and the natural and built environment: A model of flood casualties in Texas 1997-2001. Disasters, 32(4), 537–560.

CHAPTER 4

Origin of the Institute for Sustainable Communities Galen D. Newman

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Introduction Director and founder of the IfSC TAMU environmental grand challenge The Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP) From RCCP to IfSC Living laboratories Conclusion References

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Introduction As a land, sea, and space grant university,Texas A&M University (TAMU) has a commitment to serving the people of Texas, the nation, and the world. As a university striving to be in the Top 20 public universities in the United States, TAMU has been making bold efforts to strengthen its research reputation and funding level, and to invest in initiatives that capitalize on its current strengths to lead strongly into the future.The University, in the late 2010s, began identifying strategic areas for such investment. They issued a series of “Grand Challenges” that were intended to break down disciplinary silos to address complex societal and environmental problems facing Texas and the world. The Grand Challenge approach, driven by the then-Provost Dr. Karan Watson, involved a series of crosscollege faculty workshops, subsequent white papers, and strategic hires of high-level, award-winning, star-caliber faculty researchers within areas that the university felt it was well-positioned to make a move. These hires included start-up funding intended to catalyze efforts around the Grand Challenge. Those researchers hired were expected to bring together existing faculty from across the university to engage on approaches and solutions to these complex problems facing our world. The Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) was born of this effort, emerging from what was called the environmental grand challenge (EGC), and catalyzed through the hiring of Dr. Phillip Berke. Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00004-2

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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There have been more than 150 weather disasters (e.g., tropical cyclones, droughts and floods) where damages have exceeded $1 billion in the United States since 1980, due to increased risk, frequency of number and severity natural hazards and vulnerability (Ross & Lott, 2000). Loss of biodiversity is one of the most vexing and serious problems ever to face humanity (Worm et al., 2006). The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that there has already been a substantial loss of diversity of life on Earth and between 10% and 30% of the mammal, bird, and amphibian species are threatened with extinction due to human activities and changes in global temperature ranges (Carpenter et al., 2006). The global decline in water availability and quality is another critical issue, which is important in Texas and other rapidly growing arid regions globally. If Texas does not implement new water supply projects or management strategies, then homes, businesses, and agricultural enterprises throughout the state are projected to need 8.3 million acre-feet of additional water supply by 2060; annual economic losses of approximately $11.9 billion are expected from the projected shortfall, with over a million lost jobs (Venkataraman, Tummuri, Medina, & Perry, 2016). These negative trends will likely accelerate due to climate change.The IfSC addresses these threats from weather disasters, loss of biodiversity, and the decreasing availability of clean water by building interdisciplinary teams of faculty that have the expertise and experience to develop and implement novel solutions directly through collaboration. The IfSC has always, even at its origins, been based on enhancing resilience through the connection of people, communities, and ecosystems. The ultimate vision of IfSC is to produce transformative research that offers solutions for more sustainable and vibrant communities, translate the research to action through engagement, and create high impact learning experiences. In a time where society is facing increasing threats from weather disasters, loss of biodiversity, and the decreasing availability of clean water, cross-disciplinary resilience-based research, which integrates community engagement, is a necessary and timely undertaking.The following sections describe the origin of the IfSC and how it evolved from an idea embedded within a presidential faculty hire at TAMU into a small group of similar project minded research faculty, and ultimately into a highly organized university-scaled institute.

Director and founder of the IfSC Dr. Phil Berke was brought in as a presidential hire in 2013, after 19 years at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Presidential Hires are faculty members who have achieved a distinguished level

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of recognition, and widely recognized to have made significant contributions in scholarship in their fields. Prior to the UNC position, Berke was an associate professor at TAMU for 6 years. Dr. Berke’s work focuses on methods, theory, and metrics of urban resilience planning with a specific focus on interactions among networks of policy institutions, networks of land use, and development plans produced by such institutions, and social, ecological, and physical vulnerability to hazards and climate change. He played a leading role in the evolution and success of the Institute of the Environment (IE) at UNC over a 10-year period. The IE is a university-wide institute at UNC that serves to act as the public face of all environmental programs on the campus, and brings these programs together to investigate interdisciplinary environmental problems. Prior to its creation, Berke served as chair of the environmental studies curriculum (2004-08) at UNC and was active in the creation of the IE in 2007. On the basis of his involvement, he was nominated as director of the newly established Center for Sustainable Community Design (CSDC) and appointed by the provost at UNC. The CSDC’s primary activities included developing funded research on complex planning and design problems of communities that spanned across multiple units on campus, supporting teaching courses that emphasized experiential learning, and creating an active community engagement program.The center consistently generated about $300,000-$400,000 annually in research funding from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, and other environmental foundations. By 2008, the provost appointed Berke as the deputy director of IE. Examples of his core responsibilities included developing the IE’s strategic plan and IE performance indicators, and interacting with donors and the institute’s Board of Visitors. When he left UNC in 2013, the IE had four centers, a series of engagement and communication programs, and 52 staff with an annual research budget of about $6 million.

TAMU environmental grand challenge The EGC at TAMU was intended to focus activity around the many and significant environmental problems currently faced by our planet. The EGC’s initiation began during the presidential hiring process of Dr. Berke. Human activity is straining the planet’s resources, and degrading our environment and ability to adaptively respond and reverse the growing threats (Berke et al., 2015); the EGC’s focus was to develop solutions to this situation. Its mission was to enhance the quality and impact of resiliency research,

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engagement, and experiential learning at TAMU, in service to the people and communities of Texas, the nation, and the world. The EGC called for solutions to natural and built environment issues, public health crises, increasing threats from disasters, poverty, and ecosystem decline, and decreasing availability of clean water. An emphasis was placed on both identifying and developing answers to current negative trends and their likely acceleration due to climate change. Berke quickly developed a plan to move the EGC forward with its goals and became an active leader in the university wide initiative (Table 4.1). Berke posited that living more sustainably was one of the grand challenges of the 21st century, and one which necessitates a fundamental shift away from the current societal approaches to managing hazards and

Table 4.1  Berke’s sustainability plan for the environmental grand challenge. Activity

Steps

Build organizational capacity for effective management of the organization and engagement activities associated with the EGC

Develop staff and resources to enable coordination and budgeting activities needed to develop research and engagement proposals, and manage funded projects. Integrate projects with other programs and operations at the university. Identify opportunities to share staff and physical resources across departments and programs. Cultivate internal leaders who will nurture collaborative initiatives and advocate EGC capabilities and activities. Develop capabilities that actively convey the goals, successes, and necessity of the organization to a variety of internal and external audiences. Create a brand and use consistent messaging. Make use of social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) to reach different audiences and gain support.

Communicate successes and activities internally and externally about program effectiveness to gain visibility and build support from stakeholders Establish a consistent financial base for funding stability

Develop funding through a variety of sources, including federal and private foundations. Build funding sources in ways that allow for adaptation to trends, new opportunities, and unanticipated shortfalls. Formulate program to work with Development Foundation staff at the university. Setup procedures to access indirect funds.

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Table 4.1  Berke’s sustainability plan for the environmental grand challenge (Cont.). Activity

Steps

Conduct evaluation to monitor outcomes and evaluate performance of project activities

Routinely assess project outcomes based on measurable indicators. Use the results to ensure the ongoing quality of research, engagement and educational activities of projects, and to correct deficiencies and enable adaptation of project activities to become more effective. Report measurable outcomes to demonstrate the value of the organization and EGC to funders, as well as internal and external stakeholders. Set goals based on the vision that is derived from values and from internal and external stakeholders. Formulate strategies to guide actions to achieve goals. Develop implementation program that identifies roles and responsibilities to administer plan implementation, and determine current and future financial needs. Monitor progress based on measurable indicators of outcomes. Evaluate performance of projects to identify successes and enable corrections. Formulate a long-term program to work with Development Foundation staff. Seek support to sustain seed funding for high-quality interdisciplinary research. Develop a collaborative program across colleges that support engagement staff to translate research to solve pressing resiliency and broader sustainability problems linked to the environment.

Develop a strategic plan to formulate vision of the organization that is consistent with the broader vision of the university’s EGC, and develop a mission to guide actions to achieve the vision Seek ongoing support after year-4 for the core administrative structure (part-time director, project leaders, engagement staff, and research manager) to meet the purpose and values articulated in the mission

finite resources (e.g., water, air, energy, ecosystem services) that are often uncoordinated and reactive toward a more proactive, intentional, and holistic approach aimed at enhancing resilience. According to the National Research Council, resilience is the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to adverse events (Cutter et al., 2013). These events may be infrequent, short-duration and high impact such as hurricanes and floods, or they may be the result of business-as-usual practices that create a trajectory for approaching crises. Rather than waiting

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for these adverse events to occur and suffering the financial, social, and environmental costs, enhanced resilience promotes better anticipation and planning, thereby avoiding catastrophic losses (Newman et al., 2019). Through the EGC, TAMU committed to enhancing the resilience of people, communities, and ecosystems by advancing our understanding of the complex interactions among physical, social, economic, and ecological systems. A campus-wide team of faculty, staff, and students became engaged in efforts related to the EGC, and six primary colleges that led the effort (Agriculture & Life Sciences, Architecture, Engineering, Geosciences, Science, and the Bush School of Government and Public Service). The EGC began to build partnerships with a broad range of university, state, and national entities including existing TAMU research centers and programs, such as the Texas Center for Climate Studies, the Institute for Sustainable Coastal Communities, the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, the Center for Housing and Urban Development, and Texas Target Communities. It also included state agencies, such as the Texas Water Development Board, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality,Texas Agrilife Extension Service,Texas Forest Service, and numerous River Authorities and Water Conservation Districts.

The Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP) In January 2014, using $600,000 start-up funds provided by TAMU, Dr. Berke initiated a collaborative research and engagement working group called the Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP), as a reaction to assist the EGC. This collaborative organization would eventually blossom into the IfSC. The goal of RCCCP was to create a fundamentally different way of identifying and addressing critical resiliency and climate change challenges that threaten communities and ecosystems, as a response to the EGC. A core group of faculty and graduate students from the Colleges of Architecture, Engineering, Geosciences and Public Health meet bi-weekly to collect new data and synthesize existing information on how coastal social and biophysical systems work. A demonstration project was initiated based on the principal of active engagement and co-learning in two neighborhoods in Houston with a history of hazard vulnerability and environmental justice issues: Manchester and Sunnyside. These neighborhoods would eventually become living laboratories for the IfSC (explained later). The objectives of the RCCCP were: (A) to improve knowledge of how to build the adaptive capacity of communities to proactively plan for and

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manage coastal environments as resilient systems and (B) to translate the knowledge to local action.The RCCCP team examined community exposure to storm surge, storm water runoff flooding, and climate change from a coupled systems perspective in Manchester and Sunnyside, and assessed the effectiveness of community engagement strategies on the strength of local plans and social, ecological, and physical vulnerability outcomes in these neighborhoods. In addition, approximately 25 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students from the local high school were trained to assist RCCCP researchers in various data collection and monitoring activities focused on local vulnerability to flooding and public health impacts. During the time of the RCCCP, six interdisciplinary proposals for awards totaling more than $8 million were submitted to the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Funding was acquired focusing on development of resiliency indicators for monitoring postdisaster recovery and to assess the effectiveness of local networks of plans in reducing risk, the development of simple and efficient software for communities to use to prepare for and recover from natural disasters, and disaster resiliency planning and reduction of coastal community risks in Texas and Holland. The RCCCP model combined research, engagement, and experiential learning to offer a strategy for building capacity to achieve the broader vision of TAMU’s EGC. It initially consisted of three initiatives focusing on core components of the EGC. • Biodiversity and natural resources: investigating how changes in rural land use, urban development patterns, and climate will affect crop productivity (food security), and ecosystem services (e.g., nutrient cycling, climate mitigation, pollination, biodiversity loss); developing integrated management approaches to maximize biodiversity, agricultural and livestock productivity, and water resource conservation. • Climate change: linking impacts of predicted changes in climate to future precipitation patterns, sea level rise and storm surge at the community level, and how these changes influence community hazard exposure; and developing new tools that enable local hazard mitigation planning practitioners to improve local climate adaptation plans • Public health: exploring the public health impacts of coastal hazards and climate variability; developing linkages between natural disaster and environmental hazard exposure and the effects of exposure through public health surveillance systems; improving tools and training in citizen science to build local capability to be resilient.

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A core contribution of the RCCCP model was to collaborate with other EGC initiatives such as the Texas Water Observatory and the Texas WaterFood-Energy to build and increase capacity to translate research for environmental problem solving through community engagement. The proposed administrative structure for the RCCCP included a director (Berke), three project team leaders with expertise in biodiversity, climate change, and public health (eventually to become discovery leads), two community engagement coordinators, a research manager, and an administrative assistant. The administrative structure was put in place to foster synergistic activities within and across project teams, and enable teams to expand collaboration with other programs and faculty. Training and assistance by RCCCP engagement coordinators focused on building capacity of EGC Initiatives to translate new knowledge from research to solving problems in communitybased settings.

From RCCP to IfSC The RCCCP under the TAMU EGC initiative progressively built interdisciplinary teams of faculty with the expertise and experience to develop and implement novel solutions to complex resiliency problems. The success of the RCCCP led the university to increase investment to further stimulate interdisciplinary research. This allowed for increased funding of affiliates as well as the ability to reorganize its structure. In a move to broaden the impact and capabilities of the RCCCP, Berke envisioned a university-wide platform, which could produce transformative research that offers solutions for more sustainable and vibrant communities, translate the research to action through engagement, and create high impact learning experiences for students. Borrowing from the success of the IE at UNC, Berke, as Director, transformed the RCCP into a highly structured institute, now known as the IfSC. To achieve this transition, Berke set up a 4-year plan with actionable and achievable goals embedded within each year. Table 4.2 describes this plan. The IfSC quickly became TAMU’s focal point of interdisciplinary sustainable community-related research, engagement, and high impact service learning; it was the go-to place for A&M faculty, staff, and students to collaborate on work that crossed sectors and disciplines, advanced solutions that linked knowledge to action, and solved critical societal challenges. Its core belief is that sustainable communities and cities should (1) seek balance between human and environmental needs of people today and of

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Table 4.2  Actions aimed at achieving the vision and implementing the core strategies of the environmental grand challenge. Year Level

Actions

Year 1

Build organizational capability by searching for and hiring a project manager and increase full time employment of current engagement staff. Identify faculty with an interest in the environment. Conduct a university-wide workshop to identify expertise on critical emerging environmental research, education, and engagement topics. Create and meet with a faculty advisory council. Set up a communication program to convey successes and activities to internal and external audiences. Become lead focus area on biodiversity at the university level. Develop new lead focus areas. Prepare a strategic plan. Develop performance indicators to gauge progress of lead focus areas/engagement efforts. Formulate program to work with Development Foundation staff at Texas A&M. Initiate partnership program through engagement that connects TAMU’s environmental community with local communities, classrooms, government agencies, foundations, and businesses. Continue year 1 actions associated with enhancing lead focus areas, engagement, and communication efforts. Assess progress and viability of lead focus areas. Establish development program to support research, education and engagement. Continue year 2 actions associated with enhancing lead focus areas, engagement, educational, and communication efforts. Assess progress and viability of lead focus areas. Assess need to adjust and/or expand administrative organization capacity. Continue year 3 actions associated with enhancing lead focus areas, engagement, educational efforts, communication, and development efforts. Update strategic plan: assess trends, new opportunities, and shortfalls for all efforts (focus areas, engagement, educational efforts, communication, and development). Initiate updated plan implementation actions.

Year 2

Year 3

Year 4

Year 5

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Table 4.3  Core themes and strategies for the IfSC. Core theme

Strategies

Transformative research

Nurture and expand collaborative networks of interdisciplinary faculty and students from different colleges and departments. Create and sustain research-practitioner teams from around the world to identify and explore core questions of sustainable communities. Foster and test new and emerging citizen science and participatory methods. Cultivate partnerships to build trust and community capacity to translate knowledge to action. Provide place-based urban design studios, capstone courses, and domestic and international field site programs. Stimulate development of new interdisciplinary degree and certificate programs.

Community engagement High-impact service learning

generations to come (2) provide fair and equitable access to resources to improve the development of human capabilities and well-being (3) engage in civil engagement and participatory, democratic decision making, and (4) include adaptive capacity to survive, respond and grow in the face of expanding physical, social and economic threats. Crucial to the IfSC’s success was the integration of transformative research, community engagement, and high-impact service learning (Table 4.3). By integrating research, education, and engagement to derive practical solutions, the IfSC works to help guide a broad range of human activities onto a path toward sustainability. Creating resilient people, communities, and ecosystems is accomplished through an understanding of the intricate tapestry and interrelatedness between human and environmental processes. The director of the IfSC reports directly to the provost and is counseled by both a faculty advisory and administrative steering committee (see Fig. 4.1). Underneath the director’s oversight, the IfSC’s associate director handles many of the basic administration duties and the engagement coordinator orchestrates most of the community engagement actions and meetings with residents and stakeholders. The IfSC also includes a series of focus areas led by highly regarded researchers with support from engagement staff with expertise in translating knowledge to action, known as discovery leads. The IfSC organizes its research through five discovery initiatives: coastal risk reduction and resilience, community infrastructure,

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Figure 4.1  IfSC organizational structure.

water security, community resilience, and health and environment (Table 4.2). Each initiative is managed by a discovery lead-a high-impact researchoriented faculty member with an expertise in the specific topic investigated, and a background in collaboration and engagement. Working across multiple disciplines, the IfSC studies and creates solutions for problems in ecological decline, public health, climate change, natural hazards, and the location and design in urban land use and infrastructure systems. Within each focus area, some of the world’s leading researchers study community adaption to coastal hazards and climate change, disaster recovery, green infrastructure and landscape design, and environmental governance. IfSC researchers conduct undertakings from mapping the vulnerability of cities to measuring household access to potable water and disaster recovery rates of diverse populations and assessing public health impacts from floods and the resiliency of neighborhood infrastructure systems. They actively involve citizens in the collection and analysis of data about their own communities. The fundamental knowledge created from these research projects is critical in addressing the greatest EGCs (Table 4.4). If SC experts work in partnership with the public, nonprofits, government agencies, and the private sector. They advise the international and national scientific organizations, the legislature of state governments, and local communities on issues related to urban growth and land use policy, water security, and housing for low-income households after disasters. Simultaneously, its related experts are educating the next generation of leaders in sciences, public health, urban planning and design, resilient infrastructure systems, and environmental governance. With a focus on the protection of

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Table 4.4  Discovery initiatives and their respective objectives. Discovery initiative

Objective

Coastal risk reduction and resilience

Seeks to provide solutions to today’s most pressing coastal issues through holistic research that explores the interconnections of the natural, built, and sociopolitical environments. Focuses on creating innovative ways for addressing infrastructure problems and seeking novel solutions in local communities. This project targets key threats to water security, including poverty, climate change, governance and social marginalization, to better address the water security challenges in the coming years. The program integrates community engagement and research on developing strategies to mitigate natural hazards within flood vulnerable neighborhoods to develop strategies to mitigate disasters. Concentrates on improving environmental variables and understanding the interactions between individual level health outcomes and the built environment, health systems, and community level factors.

Community infrastructure Water security

Community resilience Health and environment

natural and built environments, and the expansion of social and economic opportunities for all people, the IfSC belief is that dealing with EGCs must involve taking on issues such as ecological degradation, poorly planned human settlements, under representation of disadvantaged populations, and lack of access to healthy living environments and educational opportunities. Working with communities, the IfSC has even developed laboratories within active built environments.

Living laboratories To assist in fostering engagement, the IfSC has set up living laboratories, a fundamentally different way to view the relationship that researchers have with the people and organizations they interact with in communities. This concept is based on cocreating approaches to research activities and information dissemination within regions. The IfSC’s living labs were established through the RCCCP and create long-term change through colearning with communities around strategic needs related to coastal hazards and climate change, and supporting communities to actualize their own

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resilience. The living labs provide a platform to train and promote the next generation of scientific leaders. Training the next generation of interdisciplinary, engaged researchers is a key goal of the IfSC. To meet this goal, an authentic learning education model is utilized to provide opportunities for students to approach complex real-world problems and apply methods from specific fields of study to develop interventions to address them. Through high-impact interdisciplinary learning experiences that include active and service-based learning, students involved with the IfSC are prepared to succeed in the classroom and beyond. The two living laboratories are located in Manchester and Sunnyside,TX, two neighborhoods in south Houston (see Fig. 4.2). Houston Ship Channel communities such as the Harrisburg/Manchester super neighborhood are

Figure 4.2  Layout of Manchester and Sunnyside living laboratories and their respective floodplains.

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at particularly high risk of impacts from the nexus of exposure to hazardous substances and natural disasters. In fact, Manchester residents bear some of the highest cumulative cancer risk among all of Harris County (Linder, Marko, & Sexton, 2008). Within 1 mile of the Manchester neighborhood, there are 21 facilities that report to the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory, 11 large quantity generators of hazardous waste, 4 facilities that treat, store, or dispose of hazardous wastes, 9 major dischargers of air pollution, and 8 major storm water discharging facilities (City of Houston Department of Health and Human Services, 2003). The population of the Harrisburg/ Manchester Super Neighborhood is 98% minority, with a median income that is one-third less that the City of Houston. Only 6% of residents have obtained a bachelor’s degree (2017b). Floodplains along Sims Bayou have increased by 15% since 1980, due to increases in development and pervious cover like concrete and asphalt, while expected sea-level rise could expose another 35,000 residents along the ship channel to flooding (Muñoz Ordoñez, 2015). Sunnyside (tangent to Southpark), the oldest African-American community in southern Houston, is located south of downtown Houston between Loop 610 and Beltway 8. Approximately 93% of the neighborhood’s population is African-American, and nearly 40% live in poverty. Lacking public support and city-wide buy in, the neighborhood is characterized by its lack of civic services, grocery stores, and safe walkable streets. Environmental concerns are at the forefront of communal concerns, according to the City of Houston’s Department of Health and Human Services, within one mile of Sunnyside, there are 8 toxic release inventory reporting facilities, 3 large quantity generators of hazardous waste, 2 major dischargers of air pollutants, and 1 facility which treats, stores, or disposes of hazardous waste.

Conclusion As noted, the vision of IfSC is to produce transformative research that offers solutions for more sustainable and vibrant communities, translate the research to action through engagement, and create high impact learning experiences. Currently, the IfSC is engaging more than 20 communities, many of which are (1) recovering from Hurricane Harvey, (2) experiencing chronic flooding and climate change impacts (along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and the Netherlands), and (3) suffering from ecologically distressed watersheds (in Brazil). Since 2016, over 50 undergraduate and 40 graduate

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students have been placed in experiential research and educational projects in low-capacity communities that offer expertise and training opportunities primarily to low-capacity, poor communities. The institute has nearly $10 million in active research projects that are interdisciplinary in nature. These projects range cover a broad range of research projects including (but not limited to) (1) developing new landscape performance tools to link green infrastructure changes with increased public health outcomes, (2) the creation of innovative methodologies for plan quality assessment aligning networks of plans (e.g., comprehensive plans, hazard mitigation plans, future land use plans, etc...), (3) understanding and developing methods and metrics to assess and examine water insecurity, (4) utilizing proven performance indicators and citizen science to assess local infrastructure conditions, and (5) developing comprehensive plans for increasing resilience in local communities. While this is only a broad overview of some of the accomplishment of the IfSC in achieving its mission, in the chapters that follow, the authors describe how relationships both within and beyond were built and maintained to develop innovative and transformational approaches to addressing some of society’s most intractable environmental and climate-related challenges. Future chapters compile some of the major research successes that the institute has spawned, discuss how the IfSC’s partners and partner communities have been impacted, discuss the tools developed through IfSC research and engagement, and discuss the ways in which IfSC affiliates are evaluating progress toward milestones.

References Berke, P., Newman, G., Lee, J., Combs, T., Kolosna, C., & Salvesen, D. (2015). Evaluation of networks of plans and vulnerability to hazards and climate change: a resilience scorecard. Journal of the American Planning Association, 81(4), 287–302. City of Houston Department of Health and Human Services. (2003). Community health profiles: 1999-2003. Office of Surveillance and Public Health Preparedness - Harrisburg/Manchester Super Neighborhood. Available from: https://www.houstontx.gov/ health/chs/Harrisburg-Manchester.pdf Accessed 20.06.19. City of Houston Planning and Development Department. (2017a). Super-neighborhood resource assessment No 65: Harrisburg/Manchester. Available from: http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Demographics/docs_pdfs/SN/65_Harrisburg_Manchester.pdf Accessed 20.06.19. City of Houston Planning and Development Department. (2017b). Super-neighborhood resource assessment No 71: Sunnyside. Available from: http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Demographics/docs_pdfs/SN/71_Sunnyside.pdf Accessed 20.06.19. Carpenter, S. R., DeFries, R., Dietz, T., Mooney, H. A., Polasky, S., Reid, W.V., et al. (2006). Millennium ecosystem assessment: research needs. Science, 314(5796), 257–258. doi: 10.1126/science.1131946.

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Cutter, S. L., Ahearn, J. A., Amadei, B., Crawford, P., Eide, E. A., Galloway, G. E., et al. (2013). Disaster resilience: anational imperative. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 55(2), 25–29. Linder, S. H., Marko, D., & Sexton, K. (2008). Cumulative cancer risk from air pollution in Houston: disparities in risk burden and social disadvantage. Environment Science and Technology, 42(12), 12–22. Muñoz Ordoñez, L. (2015). The Effect of Urbanization on the Streanflows of the Sims Bayou Watershed. Doctoral dissertation. Newman, G., Malecha, M., Yu, S., Qiao, Z., Horney, J. A., Lee, J., et al. (2019). Integrating a resilience scorecard and landscape performance tools into a Geodesign process. Landscape Research, 1–18. Ross, T., & Lott, N. (2000). A climatology of recent extreme weather and climate events. Technical report 2000-02, National Climatic Data Center, US Dept. of Commerce. Venkataraman, K., Tummuri, S., Medina, A., & Perry, J. (2016). 21st century drought outlook for major climate divisions of Texas based on CMIP5 multimodel ensemble: Implications for water resource management. Journal of hydrology, 534, 300–316. Worm, B., Barbier, E. B., Beaumont, N., Duffy, J. E., Folke, C., Halpern, B. S., et al. (2006). Impacts of biodiversity loss on ocean ecosystem services. Science, 314(5800), 787–790.

CHAPTER 5

Discovery initiatives Galen D. Newman

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Introduction Coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative Community infrastructure initiative Water security initiative Community resilience initiative Health and environment initiative Cross-pollination across discovery initiatives References

57 58 61 62 64 65 67 70

Introduction The development of solutions to community resilience issues and the production of transformative research co-led by community members and academic researchers is the core of the mission of the Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC). As noted throughout this book, the effects of climate change coupled with the increasing severity and frequency of flood disasters globally necessitate new approaches to address concerns related to resilience (Folke et al., 2010). Worldwide, cities face challenges of becoming more resilient in lieu of sea level rise, environmental degradation, and deteriorating infrastructure (Reja, Brody, Highfield, & Newman, 2017). Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary collaboration such as partnerships between research universities and communities (Ehlenz, 2017). In the IfSC, translation of research into actionable goals through participatory processes occurs through university faculty, staff, and organizations/units, allowing for high-impact learning experiences for students and impacting real change at the community level. Collaborations occur across disciplines to advance knowledge about solutions to resilience issues and link this knowledge to actionable strategies. This approach allows the IfSC to support the development of sustainable communities and cities, create a balance between both human and environmental needs, pursue fair and equitable access to resources for residents, and help improve adaptive capacity. Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00005-4

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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The IfSC is structured around interdisciplinary teams which both identify and explore core issues related to resilience based on specific topics arranged as “discovery initiatives.” This chapter focuses on each discovery initiatives within the IfSC. Thorough nurturing and expanding collaborative networks of interdisciplinary faculty and students from different colleges and departments—rather than disciplinary-specific foci or teams, the IfSC develops scientifically sound and impactful research working with real communities and solving real issues. Trust and capacity is built with neighborhood stakeholders, organizations, and residents through the long-term cultivation of local partnerships. Deep community engagement occurs that allows for developed knowledge to be translated to action. New and emerging citizen science and participatory methods are tested simultaneously.The research draws in higher education courses through the use of place-based urban design studios, capstone courses, and domestic and international field site programs to operationalize these networks and engagement processes. Overall, constituents within the IfSC, from 2016–18, produced over 19.6 million dollars in external funding, over 3.1 million in internal funding, and more than 70 peer-reviewed publications. Simultaneously, over 320 undergraduate and graduate students have worked on projects related to the IfSC and 22 funded projects have including members from at least 3 separate colleges within the IfSC. To help achieve this success, the IfSC organizes its resilience-based research through five discovery initiatives: coastal risk reduction and resilience, community infrastructure, water security, community resilience, and health and environment. Each initiative is managed by a discovery lead—a high-impact research-oriented faculty member with an expertise in the specific topic investigated, and a background in collaboration and engagement. Table 5.1 describes the interdisciplinary nature of the IfSC and relates this collaborative nature to each discovery initiative and their number of related publications from 2016 to 2018.The following sections describe the need for the development of each initiative, define each initiative’s scope (citing related research developed from each initiative), and integrate the broader impacts that each initiative has had on both the body of knowledge in each field as well as community policy and growth.

Coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative The coastal risk reduction and resilience discovery initiative of the IfSC seeks to provide solutions to today’s most pressing coastal issues. The shared focus of this team is coastal hazard reduction and resilience with specific

Table 5.1  Discovery initiatives, their related publication counts, and interdisciplinary collaboration (2016–18). Discovery initiative

Publications

Coastal risk 4 reduction and resilience

Departments involved

Institutes and centers involved

• • • • •

• • • •

• Center for Housing & Urban Development • Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center • Institute for Science Technology and Public Policy • Texas Target Communities • Geochemical and Environmental Research Group • Texas A&M Transportation Institute • Center for Texas Beaches and Shores • WEF Nexus Research Group • Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station

• • • •

School of Public Health College of Engineering College of Architecture College of Geosciences Texas A&M University at Galveston College of Science Bush School of Government and Public Service AgriLife Extension College of Law and College of Liberal Arts

• • • • • • • • • • • •

Geography Civil Engineering Marine Science Epidemiology & Environmental Health Environmental and Occupational Health Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning Civil Engineering Ecosystem Science and Management Oceanography Anthropology Maritime Administration Chemistry Electrical Engineering Public Service and Administration Chemical Engineering Anthropology

Discovery initiatives

Colleges involved

59

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emphasis on coastal flooding. The IfSC’s coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative provides solutions to current coastal issues through holistic research that explores the interconnections of the natural, built, and sociopolitical environments. This initiative builds upon the work of the Texas Center for Beaches and Shores, driven by an interdisciplinary team of faculty, professional staff, and students with backgrounds in urban planning, geography, economics, ocean engineering, coastal ecology, marine biology, marine sciences, environmental science, coastal planning, and political science (TAMU-GCBS, 2019). This type of research is important in that, globally, populations are growing in high flood risk coastal areas (Cutter & Finch, 2008). In fact, coastal counties comprise 17% of the land area in the United States (Beatley, 2009). The Texas coast is one of the areas most frequently impacted by coastal storms globally (Berke et al., 2015), and Houston, TX, has one of the highest numbers of coastal flood-related fatalities in the last 50 years (Highfield, Norman, & Brody, 2013). The focus of the coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative is coastal hazard reduction, with a specific emphasis on coastal flood resilience. Coastal flooding is driven by heavy precipitation, storm surge, and sea level rise, which is the most costly, disruptive, and life-threatening hazard worldwide. These conditions make it imperative to develop research solutions which seek to reduce flood risk and mitigate the negative impacts of storm events. Research teams dedicated to this initiative tackle issues related to flooding by studying the association of hazard events, risk reduction, and public policy with the interaction of urban development, anthropogenic changes, local economies, and community/cultural knowledge. Innovative structural and nonstructural approaches to mitigate coastal flooding are also explored and tested. This work has been supported by numerous funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, and Texas Sea Grant. Several key research projects are linked to this initiative. One representative example is the Coastal Flood Risk Reduction Program. As part of the National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education Program, the Coastal Flood Risk Reduction Program investigates integrated, multiscale approaches for understanding how to reduce vulnerability to damaging events. The Program is an international collaboration between the United States and the Netherlands involving multiple institutions including Texas A&M University at College Station, Texas A&M University at Galveston, the University of Houston, Rice University, Jackson State University, and Delft University. Multiple case studies in both

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countries integrating faculty from engineering, architecture, economics, and planning research the underlying characteristics of physical flood risks, why and how human communities and the built environment are vulnerable to flood impacts, and the structural and nonstructural mitigation techniques which are most effective in reducing the adverse impacts of floods. Each case is an in-depth interdisciplinary assessment of physical flood risk, modeling techniques for measuring said risk, socioeconomic conditions, land use/built environment changes, and flood mitigation techniques. Binational graduate and undergraduate students from all participating campuses, placed in interdisciplinary teams, are guided by faculty and travel to one of six research sites to conduct case study analysis.

Community infrastructure initiative The IfSC’s community infrastructure initiative focuses on creating innovative ways for addressing infrastructure problems in local communities. Led by civil engineering faculty, it is interdisciplinary in nature and its scope of research spans across multiple infrastructure systems (e.g., water, stormwater, transportation, buildings). These systems are essential for the well-being of local communities. By drawing social science and community members into often highly technical engineering research on infrastructure, the community infrastructure initiative is able to transform the methods and resulting impacts of this research. The term community infrastructure is used to refer to small-scale structures, facilities, and systems built at the local level (Meyer et al., 2018). Community level micro-infrastructure ensures basic services to its population and is economically, socially, and operationally linked with community livelihood and overall quality of life. Community infrastructure is usually subject to severe damage by disaster events, making it a primary variable contributing to how vulnerable a neighborhood is to flood disasters (Newman et al., 2016). Infrastructure types can, however, be diverse and vary from neighborhood to neighborhood, much of this variance depending on physical, geographical, economic, and sociocultural factors. Infrastructure types range from structural (engineered) to nonstructural (natural), but hybrid versions also exist. The community infrastructure initiative primarily promotes the increased utility or integration of nonstructural flood storage solutions in disaster protection systems, although structural mechanism is also heavily studied. For example, research from this initiative has found that protecting open space in floodplains significantly

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reduces the adverse effects of flooding (Muñoz et al., 2018). A national study of localities participating in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) Community Rating System demonstrated that they save, on average, approximately $200,000 per year in flood-related losses by protecting open space in the 100-year floodplain (Brody & Highfield, 2013). Areas prone to flooding can also benefit from green space preservation as naturally occurring or human generated open spaces and wetlands have the potential to help attenuate floodwaters.This is because as impervious surface amounts increase, so does stormwater runoff volume (Gharaibeh, Oti, Meyer, Hendricks, & Van Zandt, 2019). Well-conditioned green infrastructure has been shown to increase the amount of nondeveloped space in a neighborhood to allow for more stormwater absorption/infiltration (Hendricks et al., 2018). For example, researchers (led by civil engineering professors/graduate students) from the community infrastructure initiative conducted an analysis on the effect of urbanization on the stream flows and floodplain of the Sims Bayou Watershed in Houston. The research associates increases in impervious cover due to urbanization with increases in both stormwater runoff generation and flooding. Examining the evolution of land development, impervious cover, annual runoff volume, annual peak flow, and floodplain extent in the Sims Bayou watershed between 1980 and 2000, land use change was tracked and assessed through time. It was found the impervious cover fraction evolved from 15% to 18% between 1980 and 2000; this is significantly above the recommended 10% documented in the literature (Muñoz, 2015). Hydrologic and hydraulic analyses are also conducted. Using these models; it was found that annual runoff volumes increased over time, but annual peak flows did not. Surprisingly, the increase in annual runoff volume was associated to small storm events that, under previous levels of impervious cover, did not generate runoff. Despite annual peak flows not showing a statistically significant change, their variability did increase, leading to more severe, although less frequent, potential flood events. Further, due to rapid development in the 1980s and 1990s, around 3500 homes were actually added to the 100-year floodplain (Muñoz, Olivera, Giglio, & Berke, 2018).

Water security initiative The IfSC’s water security initiative provides data-driven, analytically sound assessments of water security based on consideration of the coupled natural-human systems. Water security can be defined as an acceptable level of

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water-related risks to humans and ecosystems (Zeitoun, 2011). The availability of sufficient water quantity and quality to support livelihoods, human health, and ecosystem services is the water security initiative’s primary focus. Nearly 80% of the global population faces either high water security or biodiversity risk (Vörösmarty et al., 2010). However, the majority of academic research on water security has been relatively poorly integrated with the needs of local communities (Bakker, 2012). For example, threats to drinking water supply systems from contamination, as a result of human impacts on hydrologic ecosystems, have become a major resent concern in water security research. The water security initiative is led by geographers and targets key social and environmental threats to water security, including poverty, climate change, governance, environmental justice, and social marginalization, to better address future water security challenges. The water security initiative both develops and applies metrics, models, and analytics related to human and natural systems to improve society’s long-term water challenges while seeking a better understanding of the complex dynamics of socioenvironmental systems. It seeks (1) to establish a robust, multi-scalar crossregional comparative context in which to develop key analytics and standardized assessments to benchmark current water security situations and (2) to develop water insecurity models which evaluate the progress and performance of policy, program, and technical interventions, as well as how these interventions impact natural and human systems. Critical to the goals of the initiative is to create a research and teaching community to support individual research water security interests and foster teams that address processes related to questions of water security for present and future needs based on a fundamental understanding of the hydrological cycle and their environmental impacts. Researchers related to the water security initiative have begun developing metrics to measure micro-level waster insecurity. This also supports the translation of research outcomes into meaningful and useful products and results for stakeholders, communities, and decision-makers. Researchers within this initiative have found that, despite an overarching emphasis on water for human well-being in the current research, there are few tools to quantitatively measure, evaluate, and compare household and individual water insecurity across both social and climatic disparities (Jepson, Wutich, Boeteng, Collins, & Young, 2017). While a myriad of definitions for water insecurity exist, tools for measuring household-level water insecurity are still in their embryonic stages.Through the advancement of micro-level metrics,

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communities are provided with necessary tools to untangle the complex determinants and outcomes of water insecurity (Switzer & Teodoro, 2017). Relatedly, to help address water insecurity, initiative researchers also examine the corporate and finance sectors of global desalination and water reuse. Legal frameworks for unconventional water production across water-stressed urban regions in Texas, California, Australia, and Israel are used as case study sites. Previous research from scholars within the initiative have found that desalination of seawater and brackish groundwater and wastewater reuse act as potential major interventions that can address the increased pressure on water resources in the context of growing global demand for freshwater for domestic and productive uses (Jepson & Vandewalle, 2016). While offering new sources of water, critics highlight several impediments to their sustainable implementation and negative impacts across regions and environments.

Community resilience initiative The IfSC’s community resilience initiative both generates and applies research on the impact of natural hazards to communities.This research is then utilized to develop strategies to help local communities develop provisions to mitigate and adapt to disasters. The community resilience initiative integrates community engagement with research within neighborhoods physically vulnerable to various hazards to develop solutions to help mitigate disasters, based on citizen science identified issues. It extends the missions of the Texas A&M University (TAMU) Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center and Center for Housing and Urban Development by exploring new and transformative directions to create and disseminate research findings to communities and practitioners to better alleviate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from flood events. Led by urban planning and landscape architect faculty members, this initiative integrates faculty, professionals, staff and students with backgrounds in urban planning, landscape architecture, sociology, landscape ecology, urban hydrology, and urban regeneration. The community resilience initiative’s work is strongly focused on issues related to social vulnerability to disaster, social inequity in disaster impacts and resilience, organizational response to hazard and climate risk, land use change, urban development, ecosystem services, water resource conservation, stormwater flooding and storm surge, green infrastructure, and climate change. Its research has been supported by many funders, including the Department of Homeland Security, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences, and Texas Sea Grant.

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The community resilience initiative works with local residents, stakeholders, and grassroots organizations through data-driven feedback loops to both create and disseminate data on community conditions as well as to develop master plans, provisions, and solutions to address local issues. This initiative supports sociodemographic analyses and impact projections for solutions for proposed future plans for neighborhoods using social vulnerability and economic analytics and performance models to test the feasibility of different scenarios. For example, master plans were developed for three marginalized, flood-prone neighborhoods in Houston, TX, suffering from high proportions of vacant properties: Manchester, Sunnyside, and South Park. Much research within this initiative has been conducted which explores the economics of repurposing vacant land with green infrastructure in such marginalized communities (Newman, Li, Ren, & Guo, 2018). It has also been found that many underserved urban areas affected by flood disasters are also becoming increasingly ecologically and socially fragmented due to the accumulation of vacant properties (Meyer et al., 2018). These unused lots can potentially provide land for ecological/hydrological land uses. Despite overall population in-migrations in flood-prone regions, lower-income urban neighborhoods tend to be characterized by more excessive amounts of vacancies than more affluent communities (Masterson et al., 2019). Rather than chasing development-based incentives for regenerating vacant lots in these areas, a balance is typically sought between new developmental land uses and green infrastructure to help counteract stormwater runoff and flood effects to develop plans within this initiative’s approach (Newman, Brody, & Smith, 2017).To explore the economic costs and benefits of retrofitting green infrastructure into underserved communities as a strategy for vacant land regeneration, community resilience initiative researchers used landscape performance models to evaluate the effects across the three master plans for the lower-income, minority dominant, flood-prone neighborhoods in an effort to evaluate the economic and hydrologic impacts. Results suggest that, when using this approach, (1) flood risk significantly decreases, (2) short-term, upfront economic costs increase, but (3) the long-term economic return on investment is much higher (Newman et al., 2018).

Health and environment initiative The IfSC’s health and environment initiative links applied public health research and community engagement to the improved measurement of environmental variables to better understand interactions between individual

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level health outcomes and the built environment, health systems, and community level factors. Built environment conditions significantly impact public health outcomes in communities. Regarding individual health, researchers have found that built environment conditions can have significant impacts on cardiovascular health, patterns of cortisol secretion, pregnancy outcomes, and physical health benefits, specifically in urban areas (Suppakittpaisarn, Xiangrong, & Sullivan, 2017). Levels of stress hormones, heart rate variability, skin temperature, mental fatigue recovery capabilities, attention span improvements, mental illness rates (e.g., depression, anxiety, etc.), and social activity rates have also all been linked to changes in built environmental characteristics (Jiang, Li, Larsen, & Sullivan, 2014). Relatedly, decreases in imperious surface amounts have been shown to improve human health through air and water quality improvements and increased recreational opportunities. For example, increased exposure to open space has been found to be significantly related to public health outcomes. Specific health benefits, such as reduced mortality, morbidity, stress, and mental fatigue, have been documented (Kondo, Low, Henning, & Branas, 2015). In fact, having 11 more trees in a city block decreased cardio-metabolic conditions in ways comparable to an increase in annual personal income of $20,000, moving to a neighborhood with $20,000 higher median income, or being 1.4 years younger (Kardan et al., 2015). The health and environment initiative is led by public health scholars and comprised faculty, professional staff, and students with backgrounds in toxicology, epidemiology, public health, medicine, and food science. Its work is strongly focused on issues related to disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery, and is supported by many funders, including the Department of Homeland Security, the National Academies of Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and the Texas Department of State Health Services. Working with local community organizations, interest groups, and individuals, the health and environment initiative has taken a series of local air, dust, and water samples in flood-prone neighborhoods proximate to industrial or hazardous land uses in an effort to potentially improve health outcomes for at-risk populations. Through sample analysis of toxicants in neighborhoods characterized by industrial sites, unimproved infrastructure, nuisance flooding, and poor air quality linked with a data obtained for community surveys, both resident concerns and actual conditions can be integrated into research outputs (Sansom et al., 2017). For example, results

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from surveys and samples in Manchester, TX, showed that the majority of respondents were concerned over proximity to industry and waste facilities, as well as exposure to standing surface water; barium was discovered in every sample and many of the zones showed alarming levels of certain metals including arsenic, chromium, lead, and mercury (Sansom, Berke, McDonald, Shipp, & Horney, 2016). Linked to this initiative is the Community Engagement Core (CEC) of the TAMU Superfund Center. The TAMU Superfund Center examines comprehensive tools and models for addressing exposures to mixtures during environmental-emergency-related events (Horney et al., 2018). Under this purview, the CEC, working with local community members, seeks to enhance neighborhood public health conditions by identifying, understanding, and reducing adverse environmental health risks. The CEC facilitates communication of community environmental health concerns to researchers, while at the same time supporting translation and dissemination of environmental health research results to residents of environmental justice neighborhoods and broader populations of stakeholders. Communities are engaged to identify local scaled problems and prioritize environmental health concerns. Citizen science, community design, and social media then integrate validated tools that can be used to scale-up successful research translation.

Cross-pollination across discovery initiatives The discovery initiatives provide a space for specific focus on particular aspects of community resilience. But, the IfSC itself fosters cross-pollination between these initiatives. As noted, many factors affecting community resilience cannot be easily located fully within one discovery initiative. Faculty, students, and community members commonly interact with multiple discovery initiatives within one specific project. This effort allows for community members to be less burdened by research, a concern common to socially vulnerable neighborhoods in which the IfSC works. Further, it allows students and faculty to expand their interdisciplinary networks and see further synergies between research questions. An example of one such focus that crosses the discovery initiatives is low-impact development (LID) To help attenuate floods and mitigate their impacts, LID, through the incorporation of increased green infrastructure types, appears to be an approach which crosses each discovery initiative’s focus. LID installs more natural methods of absorbing, redirecting, retaining, and filtering water, through green infrastructure installations such as rain gardens, detention

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ponds, and the reduction of impervious surfaces. It is the singular chord of commonality uniting each initiative. The use of green infrastructure facilities within a low-impact-based framework shows capabilities to help assuage surge and flooding conditions related to coastal hazards, support the collection and conveyance of floodwaters and runoff when utilized as a part of community-scaled infrastructure system, assist in groundwater recharge in areas threatened by water insecurity, help decrease the flood-related impacts of runoff increase due to impervious cover increases at the community and city scale, and help decrease pollutant levels through natural remediation processes, thereby lessening exposure levels and improving public health outcomes. Adopting low-impact approaches to increase resilience may require long-term strategies, forward thinking, and larger upfront social/economic costs, but can have extremely positive public health, water security, local economic, and flood attenuation effects in the long term.This is important in that climate change and related factors are increasing the frequency of hurricanes, coastal storms, and urban flooding (Thiagarajan, Newman, & Van Zandt, 2018). Conventional stormwater management consists of a system of pipes, tunnels, gutters, pumps, culverts, basins, and other engineered infrastructure which help to capture and convey runoff from urban areas into watersheds and rivers. Interconnected networks of low-impact urban green spaces include natural/ecological features, landscaped areas, trees, vegetation, and small-scaled stormwater facilities (Matthews, Lo, & Byrne, 2015) such as green roofs, porous pavement, rain gardens, vegetated swales, detention ponds, retention ponds, and riparian buffers (Julian, Wilgruber, de Beurs, Mayer, & Jawarneh, 2015). LID techniques have been shown to help address flood issues, improve water quality improve groundwater recharge capacity, and help mitigate the effects of changing climate and water scarcity (Thiagarajan et al., 2018). LID is also regarded as an effective approach to reduce human exposure to pollutant contamination (Martin-Mikle, de Beurs, Julian, & Mayer, 2015). Sparkman, Hogan, Hopkins, and Loperfido (2017) predicted that a low-impact watershed integrated with green infrastructure annually removed 78 kg more nitrogen, 3 kg more phosphorus, and 1592 kg more sediment per square kilometer compared to a traditional watershed. There are numerous documented benefits to LID, but it has been shown to particularly benefit flood risk management (Carter, Handley, Butlin, & Gill, 2017). For example, runoff volume reduction, peak discharge decrease and delay, pollution prevention, and increases in groundwater recharge have

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all been shown to be positive effects of LID. A national study of cities participating in the National Flood Insurance Program Community Rating System demonstrated that they save, on average, approximately $200,000 per municipality per year in flood-related losses by protecting open space in the 100-year floodplain (Brody & Highfield, 2013). Damodaram et al. (2010) demonstrated that the use of LID yielded significant stormwater control for both flood and frequent rainfall events. Schubert, Burns, Fletcher, and Sanders (2017) showed that LID facilities could reduce downstream flooding by 91%. Relatedly, wetlands store, hold, and disseminate floodwater, wetland preservation as part of an LID approach has been shown to help reduce peak riverine flows, suppress storm surge, and mitigate the adverse impacts of flooding events (Borsje et al., 2011). In coastal Texas, Brody, Zahran, Highfield, Grover, and Vedlitz (2008) found that the loss of wetlands across 37 coastal counties from 1997 to 2001 significantly increased the amount of property damage from floods. The loss of an acre of naturally occurring wetlands from 2001 to 2005 along the Gulf of Mexico coast increased property damage caused by flooding by an average of $7,457,549, which amounts to approximately $1.5 million per year (Brody, Peacock, & Gunn, 2012). Research from the IfSC has shown that LID is a sustainable solution to urban flooding. This is important in that certain communities, because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, and economic status, can be unequally protected by green infrastructure (Wolch et al., 2014). Many underserved urban communities face issues of flood resiliency in that they tend to experience larger amounts of damage during flood events than other communities (Highfield et al., 2013). In these neighborhoods, flood impacts can be amplified by a lack of access to healthcare and public transportation, insufficient infrastructure, and higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and crime (Berke et al., 2015). For example, neighborhoods with higher poverty or greater percentages of minorities have been found to be underexposed to green spaces (Wen, Zhang, Harris, Holt, & Croft, 2013). In minority neighborhoods where green space is abundant, it has been found that these park spaces then to be in areas of higher congestion (Sister, Wolch, & Wilson, 2010). Simultaneously, many of the green space types are not set up for reducing flood risk; therefore, most green infrastructure in these neighborhoods is considered ineffective. For example, Vaughan et al. (2013) found that in Kansas City, Missouri, low-income census tracts contained more parks with basketball courts, but few parks with trails and other ecological features. Also, many minority neighborhoods have been found to have lower

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tree density and leaf area index, tree and shrub cover, and tree and shrub diversity compared to nonminority neighborhoods; this results in decreased ecosystem services (Flocks, Escobedo, Wade,Varela, & Wald, 2011). Much of the research from the IfSC has shown that sprawl and the replacement of natural areas with impervious surfaces can further exacerbate vulnerability (Pyke et al., 2011; Sohn, Kim, & Newman, 2014). Evidence from a growing body of evidence suggests that LID can reduce the chronic risk of coastal flooding that stems from stormwater runoff or rises in sea level (Newman et al., 2016). LID increases the amount of non-developed space in a neighborhood which allows for more stormwater absorption/infiltration. Hence, negligent undervaluing of LID and green infrastructure services can compromise the safety of many flood risk communities.

References Bakker, K. (2012). Water security: research challenges and opportunities. Science, 337(6097), 914–915. Beatley, T. (2009). Planning for coastal resilience: Best practices for calamitous times. Washington, DC: Island Press. Berke, P., Newman, G., Lee, J., Combs, T., Kolosna, C., & Salvensen, D. (2015). Assessing networks of plans and vulnerability to coastal hazards and climate change. Journal of the American Planning Association, 81(4), 287–302. Borsje, B., van Wesenbeeck, B., Dekker, F., Paalvast, P., Bouma, T., van Katwijk, M., & de Vries, M. (2011). How ecological engineering can serve in coastal protection. Ecological Engineering, 37(2), 113–122. Brody, S., & Highfield, W. (2013). Open space protection and flood mitigation: a national study. Land Use Policy, 32(1), 89–95. Brody, S., Peacock, W. G., & Gunn, J. (2012). Ecological indicators of flood risk along the Gulf of Mexico. Ecological Indicators, 18(1), 493–500. Brody, S., Zahran, S., Highfield,W., Grover, H., & Vedlitz, A. (2008). Identifying the impact of the built environment on flood damage in Texas. Disasters, 32(1), 1–18. Carter, J. G., Handley, J., Butlin, T., & Gill, S. (2017). Adapting cities to climate change—exploring the flood risk management role of green infrastructure landscapes. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 61(9), 1535–1552. Cutter, S. L., & Finch, C. (2008).Temporal and spatial changes in social vulnerability to natural hazards. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 105(7), 2301–2306. Damodaram, C., Giacomoni, M. H., Prakash Khedun, C., Holmes, H., Ryan, A., Saour, W., & Zechman, E. M. (2010). Simulation of combined best management practices and low impact development for sustainable stormwater management. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 46(5), 907–918. Ehlenz, M. (2017). Gown, town, and neighborhood change: an examination of urban neighborhoods with university revitalization efforts. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 39, 1–15. doi: 10.1177/0739456X17739111. Flocks, J., Escobedo, F., Wade, J.,Varela, S., & Wald, C. (2011). Environmental justice implications of urban tree cover in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Environmental Justice, 4(2), 125–134.

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Folke, C., Carpenter, S. R., Walker, B., Scheffer, M., Chapin, T., & Rockstrom, J. (2010). Resilience thinking: integrating resilience, adaptability and transformability. Ecology and Society, 15(1), 20. Gharaibeh, N., Oti, I., Meyer, M., Hendricks, M., & Van Zandt, S. (2019). Potential of citizen science for enhancing infrastructure monitoring data and decision-support models for local communities. Risk Analysis https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ risa.13256. Hendricks, M., Meyer, M., Gharaibeh, N.,Van Zandt, S., Masterson, J., Cooper, J., Jr., Horney, J., & Berke, P. (2018). The development of a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure: neighborhood-level monitoring towards sustainable infrastructure systems. Sustainable Cities and Society, 1(38), 265–274. Highfield,W., Norman, S., & Brody, S. (2013). Examining the 100-year floodplain as a metric of risk, loss, and household adjustment. Risk Analysis, 33(2), 186–191. Horney, J., Casillas, G., Baker, E., Stone, K., Kirsch, K., Camargo, K., Wade, T., & McDonald, T. (2018). Comparing residential contamination in a Houston environmental justice neighborhood before and after Hurricane Harvey. PloS One, 13(2), e0192660. Jepson, W., Wutich, A., Boeteng, G., Collins, S., & Young, S. (2017). Progress in household water insecurity metrics: a cross-disciplinary perspective in the social sciences. WIREs Water, 4(3), e1214. Jepson, W., & Vandewalle, E. (2016). Household water insecurity in the global North: a study of rural and peri-urban settlements on the Texas-Mexico border. The Professional Geographer, 68(1), 66–81. Jiang, B., Li, D., Larsen, L., & Sullivan, W. (2014). A dose-response curve describing the relationship between urban tree cover density and self-reported stress recovery. Environment and Behavior, 48(4), 607–629. Julian, J., Wilgruber, N., de Beurs, K., Mayer, P., & Jawarneh, R. (2015). Long-term impacts of land cover changes on stream channel loss. Science of the Total Environment, 537(1), 399–410. Kardan, O., Gozdyra, P., Misic, B., Moola, F., Palmer, L. J., Paus, T., & Berman, M. G. (2015). Neighborhood greenspace and health in a large urban center. Scientific Reports, 5(1), 11610. Kondo, M. C., Low, S. C., Henning, J., & Branas, C. C. (2015).The impact of green stormwater infrastructure installation on surrounding health and safety. American Journal of Public Health, 105(3), 114–121. Martin-Mikle, C. J., de Beurs, K. M., Julian, J. P., & Mayer, P. M. (2015). Identifying priority sites for low impact development (LID) in a mixed-use watershed. Landscape and Urban Planning, 140(1), 29–41. Masterson, J., Meyer, M., Ghariabeh, N., Hendricks, M., Lee, R. J., Musharrat, S., Newman, G., Sansom, G., & Van Zandt, S. (2019). Interdisciplinary citizen science for hazard and disaster education. International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, 37(1), 6–24. Matthews, T., Lo, A., & Byrne, J. (2015). Reconceptualizing green infrastructure for climate change adaptation: barriers to adoption and drivers for uptake by spatial planners. Landscape and Urban Planning, 138(1), 155–163. Meyer, M., Hendricks, M., Newman, G., Horney, J., Berke, P., Masterson, J., Sansom, G., Cousins, T., Van Zandt, S., & Cooper, J. (2018). Participatory action research: tools for disaster resilience education. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, 9(4/5), 402–419. Muñoz, L. (2015). The Effect of Urbanization on the Streanflows of the Sims Bayou Watershed. Doctoral dissertation. Texas A & M University. Muñoz, L., Olivera, F., Giglio, M., & Berke, P. (2018). The impact of urbanization on the streamflows and the 100-year floodplain extent of the Sims Bayou in Houston, Texas. International Journal of River Basin Management, 16(1), 61–69.

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Newman, G., Li, D., Ren, D. D., & Guo, R. (2018). Resilience through regeneration: the economics of repurposing vacant land with green infrastructure. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 6(6), 10–23. Newman, G., Brody, S., & Smith, A. (2017). Repurposing vacant land through landscape connectivity. Landscape Journal, 36(1), 37–57. Newman, G., Kim, J. H., Berke, P., Merrill, J.,Wang,Y., & Li, Q. (2016). From idle grounds to ecological infrastructure: the resilient design of Manchester neighborhood in Houston. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 4(5), 68–84. Pyke, C., Warren, M. P., Johnson, T., LaGro, J., Jr., Scharfenberg, J., Groth, P., ..., & Main, E. (2011). Assessment of low impact development for managing stormwater with changing precipitation due to climate change. Landscape and Urban Planning, 103(2), 166–173. Reja, M.Y., Brody, S., Highfield,W., & Newman, G. (2017). Hurricane recovery and ecological resilience: measuring the impacts of wetland alteration post Hurricane Ike on the upper TX coast. Journal of Environmental Management, 60(6), 1116–1126. Sansom, G., Parras, J., Parras, A., Nieto, Y., Arellano, Y., Berke, P., McDonald, T., Shipp, E., & Horney, J. (2017).The impacts of exposure to environmental risk on physical and mental health in a small geographic community in Houston, TX. Journal of Community Health, 42(4), 813–818. Sansom, G., Berke, P., McDonald,T., Shipp, E., & Horney, J. (2016). Confirming the environmental concerns of community members utilizing participatory-based research in the Houston neighborhood of Manchester. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(9), 839. Schubert, J. E., Burns, M. J., Fletcher,T. D., & Sanders, B. F. (2017). A framework for the casespecific assessment of green infrastructure in mitigating urban flood hazards. Advances in Water Resources, 108(1), 55–68. Sister, C., Wolch, J., & Wilson, J. (2010). Got green? Addressing environmental justice in park provision. GeoJournal, 75(3), 229–248. Sohn,W., Kim, J. H., & Newman, G. (2014). A blueprint for stormwater infrastructure design: implementation and efficacy of LID. Landscape Research Record, 2(1), 50–61. Sparkman, S. A., Hogan, D. M., Hopkins, K. G., & Loperfido, J. V. (2017). Modeling watershed-scale impacts of stormwater management with traditional versus low impact development design. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 53(5), 1081–1094. Suppakittpaisarn, P., Xiangrong, J., & Sullivan, W. (2017). Green infrastructure, green stormwater infrastructure, and human health: a review. Current Landscape Ecology Reports, 2(4), 96–110. Switzer, D., & Teodoro, M. P. (2017). Class, race, ethnicity, and justice in safe drinking water compliance. Social Science Quarterly, 99(2), 524–535. Texas A&M University-Galveston Center for Beaches and Shores (TAMU-GCBS). (2019). The Center for Texas Beaches and Shores (CTBS) at Texas A&M University at Galveston website. Available from: http://www.tamug.edu/ctbs/. Thiagarajan, M., Newman, G., & Van Zandt, S. (2018). The projected impact of a neighborhood-scaled green infrastructure retrofit. Sustainability, 10(10), 3665. Vaughan, K. B., Kaczynski, A. T., Wilhelm Stanis, S. A., Besenyi, G. M., Bergstrom, R., & Heinrich, K. M. (2013). Exploring the distribution of park availability, features, and quality across Kansas City, Missouri by income and race/ethnicity: an environmental justice investigation. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 45(1), S28–S38. Vörösmarty, C., McIntyre, P., Gessner, M., Dudgeon, D., Prusevich, A., Green, P., Glidden, S., Bunn, S., Sullivan, C., Liermann, C., & Davies, P. (2010). Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity. Nature, 467(7315), 555.

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Wen, M., Zhang, X., Harris, C. D., Holt, J. B., & Croft, J. B. (2013). Spatial disparities in the distribution of parks and green spaces in the USA. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 45(1), S18–S27. Wolch, J. R., Byrne, J., & Newell, J. P. (2014). Urban green space, public health, and environmental justice: the challenge of making cities ‘just green enough’. Landscape and Urban Planning, 125(1), 234–244. Zeitoun, M. (2011). The global web of national water security. Global Policy, 2(3), 286–296.

CHAPTER 6

Breaking down the walls: challenges and lessons learned in interdisciplinary research Katie Rose Kirscha, Jennifer A. Horneyb, Garett T. Sansomc, Galen D. Newmand

Texas A&M University, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, College Station, USA University of Delaware, Epidemiology Program, Newark, USA c Texas A&M University, Department of Environmental & Occupational Health, College Station, USA d Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA a

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Chapter outline Introduction Engaging graduate students Developing a common language and shared conventions Overcoming barriers and challenges What does an interdisciplinary career look like for the next generation of researchers? Where do interdisciplinary scholars seek professional development opportunities, apply for grants, and publish their research? Going slow to go fast? Finding collaborators for interdisciplinary research What happens next? References

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Introduction It is widely accepted that interdisciplinary research is required to tackle complex problems facing the modern world such as climate change (Ledford, 2015; Masterson et al., 2019; Rylance, 2015). However, attempts to form and maintain long-lasting and meaningful collaborations across disciplines have proven to be difficult due to differences in expectations, academic culture, and approaches to research and engagement. For example, requirements for tenure and promotion related to research, teaching, and service vary widely across departments while the hierarchical organization of universities typically rewards or incentivizes activities undertaken within the silo of a single college or department. There are additional barriers for early career faculty. For example, in one study of 588 climate change Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00006-6

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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researchers engaging in interdisciplinary research, more than half of the respondents viewed interdisciplinary work as more difficult in the early career phase and inconsistent with tenure performance standards (Hein et al., 2018; Klein & Falk-Krzesinski, 2017). In another, 16% of respondents reported negative career impacts from participation in five university-based interdisciplinary research programs (Rhoten & Parker, 2004). External funding cycles are shorter and successful grants frequently require the inclusion of pilot data or prior joint publications by proposed teams of interdisciplinary principal investigators, activities that may not be possible without internal funding support. The idea that nurturing sustainable interdisciplinary teams of researchers, graduate students, and community partners over a period of several years can be an appropriate vehicle for advancing impactful research and aligning the goals and interests of academics and communities was at the forefront of forming the Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC). For example, as noted, the IfSC is organized around a director which leads a series of different Discovery Leads. Each Discovery Lead examines resilience and its related aspects from a slightly different lens, and each has a background in a different discipline. Discovery Leads for the IfSC have been related to disciplines such as landscape architecture, sociology, hydrology, public health, civil engineering, geography, urban planning, and other related fields. This strategy, in conjunction with the creation of a common language and shared convictions that are necessary for stakeholder-engaged interdisciplinary research (Taebi et al., 2014), launched early successes and provided proof of the efficacy of the model established by IfSC. The strength of these linkages between researchers and communities meant that teams had the ability and flexibility to address barriers and challenges—such as Hurricane Harvey’s impacts on partner communities—as they arose, preventing differences from derailing the goals and mission of the institute. The IfSC was oriented toward interdisciplinary research in part to ensure sustainability. Although initially funded by the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President at Texas A&M University, securing external research support was essential to the sustainability of IfSC. An increasing number of funding agencies now require an interdisciplinary research approach for proposals to be competitive for funding. For example, in addition to explicit interdisciplinary programs, the National Science Foundation (NSF) seeks to fund interdisciplinary research as part of their Areas of National Importance, Education and Training, and Workshops, Conferences, and Symposiums portfolios (NSF, n.d.). Most centers funded by NSF are now required to bring together interdisciplinary teams since, according to

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the NSF’s strategic plan, “… the benefits of research are maximized when a wealth of different fields and research questions are supported” (NSF, 2018, p. 17). A study of hazards and disasters research funded by NSF over the last 4 decades shows how increasingly common the funding of multidisciplinary projects in this research area are becoming (Behrendt et al., 2019). One example of IfSC’s focus on this was the selection of four researchers from IfSC at part of NSF’s Interdisciplinary Methods for Disaster Research Workshop, which was focused on advancing the science and practice of interdisciplinary research for hazards and disasters (Natural Hazards Center, n.d.). Outcomes of the workshop include a special issue of Risk Analysis and a forthcoming book.

Engaging graduate students Student engagement was a key focus of IfSC from its inception in 2014. Internal IfSC funding provided to faculty was designated for the support of graduate student researchers, and graduate student research was frequently featured at IfSC meetings. Involvement of students quickly grew over the years, as the IfSC was recognized as an avenue to gain meaningful experiences with an interdisciplinary team dedicated to improving the lives of vulnerable communities and valuing the experiences and knowledge of local residents as important inputs in the research process (Meyer et al., 2018; Newman, Li, Ren, & Guo, 2018; Yeh, 2016). In 2017, student involvement in the IfSC was 75; by 2018, the number of students who actively participated in IfSC events had grown to 248, compared to the 5 students that attended the first meetings with their faculty mentors.The ambitious nature of the research endeavors placed students in critical roles within projects that allowed for active-learning opportunities for them and expanded the reach and depth of university (e.g., the university’s agenda for addressing the “Grand Challenges” of the 21st century) and individual faculty-level research agendas. Involvement of students went beyond traditional research roles, as students participated in outreach and charitable events which deepened their appreciation of the needs and abilities of the communities IfSC operates within. Examples include providing free meals to Houston Ship Channel communities that were devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, attending community breakfasts in the South Houston neighborhoods and living laboratories including communities such as Sunnyside and South Park, and participating in numerous community meetings and public events across Texas. Community engagement has been shown to improve public health

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research as well as a community’s ability to address its own needs (Ahmed & Palermo, 2010). IfSC participation also allowed for a deeper understanding of the issues and experiences of the populations being impacted by natural and anthropogenic disasters now. IfSC students were afforded the opportunity to achieve the dual goals of extending scientific knowledge and building local capacity to enact positive change. Interdisciplinary student research in higher education has become increasingly common in recent years, a trend that will likely continue. For example, an interdisciplinary dissertation was reported by 32% of public health doctoral graduates who responded to the Survey of Earned Doctorates from 2003 through 2011; this percent increased to between 39% and 43% from 2012 through 2015, respectively (Golembiewski, Holmes, Jackson, BrownPodgorski, & Menachemi, 2018). Although there are a growing number of explicitly interdisciplinary graduate programs, such as the Geospatial and Environmental Analysis doctoral program at Virginia Tech or the Applied Physics Program at the University of Michigan, the focus on the IfSC-supported graduate students was less formal. Graduate students were enrolled in degree programs housed in a single school or college, but were encouraged to work on research related to emerging interdisciplinary research areas— such as the intersections of public health, environmental sciences, and toxicology—which would prepare them for the expectations and opportunities in interdisciplinary postdoctoral fellowships and early-career faculty positions shared across departments or in cluster hires (Newing, 2010). Examples of graduate student research conducted at IfSC included an assessment of stormwater and transportation infrastructure from an environmental justice and public health perspective (Hendricks, 2017) and an assessment of self-reported mental and physical health exposures of concern with environmental sampling and analysis of surface water (Sansom, 2016).

Developing a common language and shared conventions One of the biggest barriers to funding, conducting, and publishing from interdisciplinary research is the development of a common framework, language, and terminology (Faber et al., 2014). Basic terms frequently used by researchers, such as modeling, significance, and assessment, can mean different things to researchers depending on their training and their specific area of expertise. In the early development of the IfSC research and engagement collaborations, several challenges arose with regard to the development of a common language. These challenges were overcome in part by frequent

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networking opportunities, such as the biweekly lunches where IfSC faculty and graduate students presented in-progress research. This provided a space in which conversation and debate could be freely expressed to gain a deeper understanding from a variety of perspectives. For example, scenario planning is a technique used by urban planners and residents engaged in plan development to consider a set of potential multiple futures or scenarios and develop policies and plans that may help communities accomplish a preferred future (American Planning Association, n.d.). In scenarios developed to assess the potential for the use of green infrastructure for both improving stormwater management and increasing access to green space in Los Angeles, Meerow and Newell (2019) compare two scenarios, or potential futures, and assess their impacts on the priorities on city agencies, nonprofits, and residents. However, for climatologists, scenarios provide the basis for the range of different futures that vary depending on changes in population, use of fossil fuels, technology, emissions, atmosphere, global temperature change, and many other variables (Hayhoe et al., 2017, p 135). Rather than using scenarios for policy development, climatologists test models against climate conditions observed in the past and then run these models to project future climate conditions (NOAA, n.d.). While both fields use scenarios to improve their understanding of future conditions and inform decision-making, subtle differences in meaning can challenge the success of research collaborations (Kim & Newman, 2019). Through IfSC participation several projects were born that included an interdisciplinary team and, in keeping with NSF’s goals of integrating information from multiple disciplines, external success in funding was achieved. For example, by strategically leveraging IfSC work as pilot data for larger interdisciplinary projects, IfSC investigators were awarded funding from the NSF (Citizen Science for Infrastructure Monitoring at the Neighborhood Level) and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences (Community Engagement Core of the Texas A&M University Superfund Research Center).

Overcoming barriers and challenges Despite its inherently interdisciplinary membership and organizational structure promoting interdisciplinarity, the IfSC had to overcome many challenges from this type of approach to research faced by most organizations or persons attempting a similar undertaking. The following sections are organized around key challenges faced by the IfSC and then explanations are provided on how said challenges were overcome.

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What does an interdisciplinary career look like for the next generation of researchers? Working effectively as part of a team of scholars from different disciplines will increasingly be an essential skill for graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty (Bridle, Vrieling, Cardillo, Araya, & Hinojosa, 2013) although it is viewed as particularly challenging by early-career researchers (Hein et al., 2018; Klein and Falk-Krzesinski, 2017). Part of the challenge is that there are many differences in the conventions that prevail in different fields of study that may impact the competitiveness of doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars as they go on the academic job market and junior faculty as they work toward tenure and promotion. For example, stark differences exist across disciplines as to the number of authors typically included on a manuscript, the annual number of publications expected, and the measures of impact, such as the h index, a widely used metric of impact and productivity.To overcome some of these barriers, specific opportunities that foster interdisciplinarity among junior faculty can include both formal conferences and workshops as well as less-structured “encounters” or “research circles” facilitated through the careful selection of participants, design of sessions, and selection of locations for meetings and conferences (Bridle et al., 2013; Gillespie et al., 2005). The IfSC’s structure sets up a framework which scholars can replicate to conform to this push toward future interdisciplinary research. Its structure is set up so that multiple disciplines deal with similar issues, but each discipline provides a different set of methodologies in which to examine said issues. The triangulation of research findings from multiple angles across multiple fields of interest increases scientific soundness. Through this process, each discipline must understand other discipline’s analytical approaches in order to effectively disseminate information and/or link it into their own unique findings. Once overlaps are found across fields related to the same issue, each discipline involved can then place itself within a specific, often reoccurring role; its outlook is that the more inclusive research can be, the better.

Where do interdisciplinary scholars seek professional development opportunities, apply for grants, and publish their research? There is anecdotal evidence to support the claim that interdisciplinary research takes longer to publish in the peer-reviewed literature. This may reflect many things, including the typically narrow focus of many high impact, peer-reviewed journals, the challenge of identifying reviewers qualified and

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willing to review interdisciplinary research for publication, and the long-term planning required to coordinate and complete the writing and revision of manuscripts (Pohl et al., 2015). Once published, however, the impact of interdisciplinary research is often greater than that of single fields in isolation. An analysis of over 32,000 articles published in cognitive science and education journals by Kwon, Solomon, Youtie, and Porter (2017) revealed that those containing references from multiple disciplines were cited at a higher frequency, but were less likely to include funding acknowledgments than those with references in a single field. Leahey, Beckman, and Stanko (2017) similarly observed that the work of interdisciplinary scientists tended to be cited more often, but comprised a smaller number of published articles. Yegros-Yegros, Rafols, and D’Este (2015) also identified a positive association between the number of disciplines referenced in a publication and citation frequency, but this association did not hold when a high proportion of seemingly unrelated disciplines were referenced. In addition, several studies of papers published in the natural, engineering and social sciences over the last 50 years found that the number of authors per article has steadily increased, reflective of more “team science” and more multi-university research teams (Jones, Wuchty, & Uzzi, 2008;Wuchty, Jones, & Uzzi, 2007). Finally, research also points to consistent long-term benefits for those willing to engage in the early-career challenges associated with interdisciplinary research; while leaving a disciplinary home department may at first be “complex and difficult,” in the long run it can be more engaging and rewarding, allowing researchers to address large, interconnected, real-world problems (Blackmore & Kandiko, 2011). Professional societies such as the American Geophysical Union (AGU) are launching new interdisciplinary initiatives such as GeoHealth (https:// connect.agu.org/geohealthconnect/home) to facilitate connections between earth, space, and health scientists. Specifically, the IfSC has utilized external funding outlets such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, State Sea Grant funders, the Department of Homeland Security, and Fellowships such as the Gulf Research Program to advance its interdisciplinary research related to resilience. Internal seed and pilot grants provided by the university through competitive opportunities as well as IfSC-related funding have also been used to develop proof of concept research for larger external outlets. Conference venues such as the National Academy of Sciences, the Natural Hazards Workshop, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture also allow for new disciplines to be present at traditionally more discipline-focused venues.

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Going slow to go fast? Finding collaborators for interdisciplinary research Taking advantage of opportunities for training and development, taking time to build a team of interdisciplinary research collaborators, and forming engaged partnerships with policy-makers and community stakeholders can seem like a risk, particularly for graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty (Bridle et al., 2013). However, the importance of creating long-term change through co-learning with other disciplines cannot be overstated. In the last 2 decades, successful research endeavors have increasingly, if slowly, become interdisciplinary as expertise from a variety of fields are required to answer complex research questions (Porter & Rafols, 2009). While this approach has proven to be a successful model, there are still barriers in place that slow, or prevent, adoption. This is especially true as early-career researchers as intradisciplinary collaborations have been shown to contribute more to a career than interdisciplinary collaborations (van Rijnsoever & Hessels, 2011). It is clear that a cultural change needs to occur within departments to encourage, and reward, these efforts. The IfSC has highlighted the success of such cultural changes at Texas A&M University, serving as a focal point of sustainable community research and engagement with high impact service-learning and, in doing so, advancing interdisciplinary solutions that link knowledge to action to address critical challenges. For example, the IfSC’s connections with communities not only allow for multiple disciplines to interact with a single community, but its interdisciplinary structure also allows for faculty to make new partners that they may not have had contact with. The IfSC’s approach to fostering interdisciplinarity combines a multidisciplinary structure (Discovery Leads related to individual disciplines) with both structured and unstructured interactions. Structured interactions included biweekly presentations and lunches with faculty and students working in different fields of research. At its origins, the IfSC director also researched different faculty backgrounds across campus to find productive scholars with resilience-related interests. Typically, one-onone conversations were then coordinated with interested parties following this background research, and follow-up projects were used to form partnerships and test capabilities of interaction. Once the number of IfSC fellows, members, and affiliates grew, a listserv was created and profiles were made for each. Unstructured interactions included more student-related undertakings. At its origins, the IfSC meetings had graduate students present work on behalf of professors. This allowed for academic egos to be put aside and encouraged more faculty interaction and feedback. Simultaneously, students

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who presented in IfSC meetings take classes related to their research, sometimes with uninvolved faculty members and will invite their instructors to join IfSC meetings; many of these faculty eventually become affiliates and are involved with IfSC activities.

What happens next? The future of research will be increasingly interdisciplinary (Lyall & Meagher, 2012). Strategies to promote the advancement of interdisciplinary research and education are critically needed because “the most intractable problems in the scientific, technological, and social arenas require perspectives and approaches from multiple disciplines” (NSF, 2018, p. 18). Academic programs and institutions focused on interdisciplinary research, education, and community engagement activities should ensure that internal policies, performance metrics, and criteria for advancement appropriately capture the time and effort invested in development interdisciplinary collaborations (Hein et al., 2018). Given that graduate students and tenured professors are traditionally overrepresented in interdisciplinary programs (Rhoten & Parker, 2004), and recognizing the high-risk nature of interdisciplinary research (Benson et al., 2016; Campbell, 2005), tailored support for early career and pre-tenured faculty is also needed (Gillespie et al., 2005). Funding agencies, especially those calling for interdisciplinary proposals, must adapt traditional review processes to accommodate and objectively assess research involving multiple disciplines. Funding mechanisms must also be available to support the development of interdisciplinary teams and the nontraditional activities and timelines for this work in academic institutions where internal funds are not available (Lyall, Bruce, Marsden, & Meagher, 2013). It is imperative that future researchers are capable of easily transitioning between disciplines in order to respond to current and emerging issues around the globe (National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, & Institute of Medicine, 2005).While there are certainly a growing number of efforts toward building interdisciplinary research centers, few of these have involved student opportunities for service-learning and deep community engagement to the extent that the IfSC has. Seeing the interdisciplinary collaborations formed at the start of the IfSC come to fruition over the last 5 years has demonstrated the value of crossing boundaries and the contribution this type of research, education, and engagement can make to building community resilience to disasters.

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CHAPTER 7

The community in work Charles X. Whitea, Juan Parrasb, Juan Elizondoc, Jaimie Hicks Mastersond Charity Productions, Houston, USA Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s), Houston, USA c Furr High School, Houston, USA b Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA a

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Since 2014, the Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) has worked with community-based organizations and high schools in the Manchester/ Harrisburg and Sunnyside neighborhoods of Houston, Texas. The neighborhoods are highly socially vulnerable-more than 95% minority population with median incomes that are one third less than the City of Houston’s overall median income. They are also vulnerable in terms of inequitable or selective public policy enforcement related to tax-based service delivery, according to Charity Productions (CP). Service delays and low performing or no performing public service results in public disrepair with high opportunities for gentrification despite citizens filing capital improvement requests according to city guidelines and 311 phone reports and presenting their cases before city council. Additionally, large portions of the neighborhoods fall into the 100- and 500-year floodplains with frequent ponding issues after heavy rainfall or storm event (Harris County Floodplain Reference Marks, FEMA Flood Map, Misra, 2017). Additionally, Manchester/Harrisburg residents are within one mile have over 20 toxic facilities near the neighborhood (DHHS, 2009; EPA, 2015; Linder et al., 2008). Neglect and disinvestment have resulted in inadequate and aging drainage infrastructure and vacant parcels, along with abandoned toxic facilities (Newman, Smith, & Brody, 2017). Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00007-8

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Based on physical and social vulnerability analyses of Houston neighborhoods, the IfSC reached out to community institutional knowledge sources in Houston who knew community concerns and had a track record of trusted community engagement in Sunnyside and Manchester/Harrisburg. Two community-based organizations and two high schools emerged as willing and active participants and the IfSC was invited to the communities to explore project possibilities. The Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s) and CP are nonprofits that engage community members in addressing various environmental and social inequities and the persisting problems that have come from city neglect and disinvestment resulting in physical vulnerability. The IfSC had previous connections with Juan Parras, executive director of t.e.j.a.s. Parras, who has been organizing environmental justice communities since the signing of executive order 12898 in 1994. He is an environmental justice Ambassador for the Gulf of Mexico Alliance and received the CEC Synergy Award in 2008, the Sealy Center for Environmental Health & Medicine HERO Award in 2009, and the Sierra Club’s Robert Bullard Environmental Justice Award in 2015. IfSC also reached out to Charles X White, founder of CP. Members of the IfSC, Phil Berke, and John Cooper, originally met White in the early 2000s after they received a grant from FEMA to engage underserved communities in recovery planning. While Parras and White had concerns about a number of areas across Houston, and Texas more broadly, but in particular, Parras was concerned about Houston’s East End and White was concerned about Houston’s 27 most neglected zip codes citywide and the team eventually developed projects for the South Side.The following describes the partnerships in Houston. Texas Target Communities The Texas Target Communities (TXTC) Program at Texas A&M University is the community engagement arm of the IfSC. TXTC cultivates partnerships, codesigns projects, and enhances community capacity translating highly technical research to community action. The Texas Target Cities Program, formally began in 1993 under the direction of Dr. David Pugh, though service-learning projects were undertaken since 1980. The purpose and intent of this program was to work with low capacity communities to address land use planning needs through urban planning courses, especially the urban planning capstone course. In 2012 in an effort to better serve these low capacity places, the directors of the Center for Housing and Urban Development and Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC), the College of Architecture, and the Office of Multicultural Services hired a leading community engagement scholar and practitioner. In conversations with these departments and our network of

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practitioners and community contacts, it became clear that low capacity communities needed community planning support. We learned that people making a difference in their communities (citizens, professionals, extension agents, etc.) needed up-to-date support and training informed by research and practice in community planning. The HRRC, one of the oldest and most established national research centers on disaster planning and housed in the College of Architecture, continued to discover the lack of planning in communities exacerbating vulnerabilities. As a way to refocus on the most vulnerable people and places, the HRRC invested in and hired TXTC’s first fulltime staff person to manage service-learning projects and community engagement. During that time, the team established a vision “to facilitate the transformation of communities from high risk or low opportunity to more equitable, resilient, and adaptive by mitigating the threats to the economy, environment, and culture.”TXTC set goals to train cadres of community members, assist communities with planning, assessments, data collection, and equip communities with tools and through coaching. In 2014 TXTC changed its name to Texas Target “Communities” as a way to broaden the scope and flexibility to work with communities of all types, whether varying geographical scales, organizational communities, collectives, or, however, a group chose to identify and define themselves.The program was elevated to a “college-level” program with the intent to work across all departments within the College of Architecture (including architecture, construction science, and visualization). Further, the College of Architecture developed a two-year partnership with Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service to unite the common interests of service learning and extension work. It was a natural fit because TXTC learned that extension agents were being asked to assist communities with community planning and they lacked the capacity and skills to assist them. Additionally, the partnership with extension connected TXTC to the Texas Rural Leadership Program, which uses an assetbased approach to train emerging local leaders. The leadership training curriculum proved the right focusing work needed prior to engaging with students and courses in service-learning projects. In 2017 TXTC was elevated to a “provost-level” program of the public partnership and outreach office with the intent of leveraging the capacity of faculty and students across the university system.

The east end story The Manchester/Harrisburg super neighborhood of Houston is at particular risk and is one of the most polluted communities in the Houston area. It is encircled by the Houston Ship Channel, including two oil refineries, a fertilizer plant, a tire factory, a metal crushing facility, a railyard, and an interstate. A study by the University of Texas School of Public Health found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of contracting leukemia than children living ten or more miles away (Coker, Lupo, Symanski, & Walker, 2006).The community

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is 98% minority, 82% Latino/a, and 41% of the population earns less than $25,000 annually (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000). According to the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, Manchester qualifies as a food desert. These social factors combined with the proximity to heavy industry mean that the community will be disproportionately impacted by any disaster in the region. T.e.j.a.s. has been actively engaged with the Manchester community for over 15 years. T.e.j.a.s. is a community-based organization and 501 (C) (3) nonprofit and aims to address the inequitable adverse health outcomes resulting from exposure to toxic industrial emissions among low-income, minority area residents.T.e.j.a.s. is dedicated to providing community members with the tools necessary to create sustainable, healthy communities by educating individuals on health concerns and implications arising from environmental pollution, empowering individuals with an understanding of applicable environmental laws, and offering community building skills and resources for action and public participation. Their guiding principle is that everyone, regardless of race or income, is entitled to live in a safe and healthy environment (http://tejasbarrios.org/). T.e.j.a.s. conducts neighborhood surveys, hosts community meetings and events, and meets informally with community members to understand their concerns and what is important to them. Additionally, t.e.j.a.s. conducts “toxic tours” around the neighborhood and greater Houston to immerse learners in environmental justice issues. During the campaign against the siting of Cesar Chavez High School, t.e.j.a.s. met several Manchester residents who had leukemia. In 2002 t.e.j.a.s. petitioned the EPA to highlight Manchester as an environmental justice community and led a collaborative effort to conduct an air monitoring project called the Houston/Galveston-Citizen Air Monitoring Project. The project brought partners from several nonprofit organizations and city agencies together to compare “bucket-brigade” type air sampling devices and EPA canisters. The process allowed for community groups to better understand the process of air monitoring and the need for hard scientific data to make better advocacy and policy decisions. Houston Chronicle reporter Dina Capiello also participated in the project, and she went on to conduct a critical series of reports detailing the high levels of benzene, 1-3 butadiene and other toxics in Manchester and surrounding areas.T.e.j.a.s.’s work influenced policy makers around the city, including Arturo Blanco at the Bureau of Air Quality Control and Brenda Reyes at the Bureau of Children’s and Community Environmental Health. T.e.j.a.s..’s groundbreaking alliance

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work and advocacy led to the Mayor’s “Dirty Dozen”Task Force and reductions of benzene and 1/3 butadiene emissions in East End Latino/a neighborhoods.T.e.j.a.s. has since hosted several events with Texas state legislators and forums like the EPA NESHAP hearing. They have brought national attention to the community of Manchester as seen in Planet in Peril and PBS’s series State of Tomorrow. In 2007 Manchester received the People’s Freedom Caravan as part of the United States Social Forum in which Houston Mayor Bill White spoke and made it clear that no company had a right to pollute the air and make it unsafe for communities living nearby. Active collaboration with the community is essential to t.e.j.a.s.’s work.

Furr High School T.e.j.a.s. introduced the IfSC to teachers at Furr High School (FHS) who had their own track record of project-based learning and community projects. FHS, a magnet school in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) on the East End, is considered the Green Hub of the community focused on environmental sustainability and real world applications. “Green Ambassadors,” supported by the U.S. Forest Service and Friends of the National Forests and Grasslands in Texas-Latino Legacy, are a linchpin of action in the community. The green ambassadors planted fruit trees throughout neighborhoods, implemented a green infrastructure project and started and maintains a community garden at Herman Brown Park, a 900acre site near the school. Because of their work, in 2015, the green ambassadors were awarded the highest honor of the United States Department of Agriculture with the Abraham Lincoln Award for Diversity, Outreach, and Inclusion. Since 2014 teachers and students at FHS have worked closely with IfSC researchers and t.e.j.a.s. trained on data collection methods to perform “citizen science” as described in Chapter X. Graduate students in public health, urban planning, landscape architecture, and engineering worked with FHS students to collect reliable and valid data in the neighborhood. Together, t.e.j.a.s., FHS, and Texas A&M University collected soil, air, and ash samples at various times from 2015 to 2019, including immediately after Hurricane Harvey and the ITC fire in 2019. Students mapped pooling and ponding water using a geographic information system smart phone application. Students collected water samples to test for heavy metals, evaluated the quality of stormwater infrastructure, and conducted health surveys (Hendricks et al., 2018; Sansom, Berke,

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McDonald, Shipp, & Horney, 2016; Sansom et al., 2017; Sansom, Kirsch, Stone, McDonald, & Horney, 2018). Landscape architecture students developed a master plan for the Manchester neighborhood to (1) inventory and locate flood-prone areas and on-site problems, (2) spatially locate new land uses, (3) develop desired functions for proposed open spaces, (4) suggest new job opportunities for enhancing the local economy, and (5) designate green infrastructure to mitigate pollution and flood issues. In cooperation with t.e.j.a.s. and FHS, the team met with residents to discuss on-site problems and identify floodprone areas. A series of meetings between community members and designers provided feedback loops to revise ideas and recommendations. These projects earned Texas A&M University students four state and national awards. Additionally, with support from the College of Architecture at Texas A&M and IfSC among many of other partners, FHS was awarded the XQ Foundation Grant of $10 million over 5 years. The goal of the grant is to rethink and reenvision high school. FHS is creating the first environmental justice high school in the nation. FHS’s vision is to envision a world in which all young people prioritize academic excellence and environmental sustainability becoming advocates for themselves and their communities. In 2018 Furr formed a partnership with the Schlechty Center, a national educational nonprofit committed to partnering with education leaders who are interested in nurturing a culture of engagement in their organizations, with the ultimate goal of increasing profound learning for students. Through the partnership, four milestones were established: • establish beliefs, vision, and mission; • develop a focus on students and the experiences designed for them; • design and implement a system of professional learning; and • foster and incorporate student voice in the design of learning experiences. Leveraging Furr’s beliefs, vision, and mission and accessing the XQ Design Principles and the Schlechty Center frameworks on engagement and design, FHS leaders are developing a school by building relationships with students and designing high-content engaging experiences. Central to these efforts is Furr’s long-standing relationships with local, state, and national partners and their expertise in providing content and professional learning to FHS teachers. TEJAS, for example, conducted three Toxic Tours with FHS teachers, students, administrators, support staff, along with other Furr partners (U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, Student Conservation Association, Lyndon B. Johnson-Harris Health System, Texas A&M University, Texas A&M Forest Service, City of Houston Parks and Recreation Department), during the

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Spring of 2018. As a result of the Toxic Tours,TEJAS worked collaboratively with teachers during professional learning communities, sharing expertise, providing resources, and developing content. As true collaborative partners, TEJAS consultants were attentive to learning the language of design thinking, particularly the Schlechty Center’s 10 Design Qualities. FHS teacher leaders were particularly attentive to student interests and motives as they designed experiences for students related to environmental justice and the East End community. Students were interviewed and asked about their interests and to share examples of work products that would have meaning and value to them and their community. Using the Schlechty Center’s design cycle, teachers used student reflections, aligned to important content (TEKS), to design experiences for students consistent with the school’s environmental justice focus and consistent with the school’s mission: through relationships with the environment and with the community, Furr graduates will be equipped with the skills and experiences to design their own futures and to positively impact the world. FHS students were moved by the Toxic Tour experience. One student said, “I am 16 years old; I never thought others had it worse than others. I saw the inequities. I always pass by but after the tour, I now see it in a different way. I never knew Houston had these problems.” Another student said, “It opened my eyes to what is going on in our community.” By May 2018 FHS convened a showcase of student work. Projects ranged from oral histories to terrariums, recreating ecosystems. Public service announcements and infographics focused on environmental justice were also designed and presented to students. In addition, combating malnutrition and the food desert epidemic in the community, students continue to maintain a community garden they established in 2016 at a 900-acre park across the street from the school and the planting and care of over 100 fruit trees on campus. Students shared their learning with their peers through protocols and guiding questions for reflection. In 2019 Texas A&M professors hosted professional development for over 50 educators and staff members of FHS. The focus was on the importance of citizen science-based projects and how they may be incorporated in the classroom.The topics included, impacts of green infrastructure regeneration projects, stories of communities fighting against environmental injustices and their involvement, or lack thereof, in the environmental decision making process, and research on airborne dust releases and characterization in the Houston Ship Channel area.

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As the 2019-2020 school year begins, FHS leaders anticipate even greater teacher and student engagement in designing systems and processes to prioritize academic excellence and environmental sustainability as students advocate for themselves and their communities. As part of FHS’s preservice professional learning in August, over 60 teachers took TEJAS’s Toxic Tour, learning more about the environmental impact of East End and surrounding communities. Working in grade-level teams, teachers will explore content aligned to their TEKS and connected to the community (what students need to know and be able to do) and design experiences for students that cause them to commit, persist, and learn important content and skills leading to profound learning. An exhibition of student work is scheduled for November 2019. Furr’s local, state, and national partners are integral to the school achieving its mission. As FHS transitions into an XQ Super School, Texas A&M University is our key partner in which empowers and promotes student agency through citizen science, civic participation, and mentorship. We wish to continue to foster the relationship and solidify a model high school in which promotes learning beyond the four walls of traditional schooling.

The south side story The south side neighborhoods of Sunnyside and South Park are some of Houston’s oldest African-American communities, where 93% of residents are minority and earn less than $25,000 in annual income. These neighborhoods are located along flood-prone Sims Bayou, with one of the highest river impairments, or lowest water qualities, in Texas. Adjacent to the community is an abandoned landfill and incinerator, not uncommon in communities of color (Bullard, 1983). Roughly 22% of parcels are vacant, 59% of streets do not have sidewalks for pedestrian use, while 25% of residents rely on public transportation, and 72% of all roads have open ditches for drainage infrastructure, as opposed to curb and gutter stormwater infrastructure. The IfSC began working on the south side of Houston because of CP. CP is a community-based organization with a reputable background in serving communities since 1984. CP, based in Houston and Beaumont/Port Arthur, has worked and consulted in research projects with local governments in Texas and across the nation, nonprofit organizations, and public universities to serve in the interests of public health, safety, housing, education, disaster preparedness, civic engagement.With projects concerning social issues, education, youth services, civic, job readiness, and law enforcement. They have

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delivered innovative solutions and impactful services to the community through conferences, seminars, transformative programs and workshops. Under National Priority 4.8 Community Preparedness: Strengthening Planning and Citizen Capabilities the federal government urges citizens, particularly those among vulnerable populations to be trained as “critical surge capacity to augment government efforts in a catastrophic incident.” CP utilizes the National Incident Management System guidelines to train community leaders to take extra steps to be informed about disaster readiness to minimize the loss of life and property, expediting the disaster recovery process. CP has provided three decades of services and training with clients such as: Dallas, Silsbee, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Galena Park, Texas City, Pasadena, and Houston ISDs (providing parent engagement, dropout prevention and gang intervention programs). Additionally, CP has been contracted to provide training services to number of police departments including Beaumont, Port Arthur, City of Houston, University of Houston, Metro, Jefferson County and Houston Community College Police Academies (providing cultural diversity classes). CP services have also broadened beyond Texas and have global impact including with the: • In 2009, attended a meeting for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, for a summit hosted by FEMA, R. David Paulison, presiding 2009 (Photo 7.1). I was asked by Richard Farris, of Houston LULAC to represent him and LULAC, at a round table discussion hosted by the National Red Cross, on how to engage marginalized communities better. FEMA hosted a National African American Leadership Summit, I was invited and participated, Craig Fugate presiding. (https://newpittsburghcourier.com/2010/05/12/fema-black-officials-work-toward); • A Sister City Project Haiti, raised funds and supplies for nonprofits; • Invited to represent La Raza at a National Red Cross (2008) meeting to improve strategies to include community-based organizations in the recovery process; • Attended FEMA’s African American Leadership Summit (2010) and the Emergency Management IfSC workshop for Historically Black Colleges and Universities with TSU in Washington DC; • Cohosted Public Policy Symposium with TSU, Barbara Jourdan Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs. A cornerstone of CP is its quarterly community partnership breakfasts, which began in October 2002 to improve civic engagement by information and mobilization enrichment. The locally broadcasted breakfast is known throughout Houston as “The Community Partnership Exchange Breakfast”

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and the “Largest of its kind in the state of Texas.” The first breakfast was held in Sunnyside at the Pentecostal Baptist Church with 135 attending. As of 2019 breakfasts were held on the south side and north side, serving 25 zip codes, 98,000 households, 60 civic clubs with an average attendance of 500 community members, with the highest attendance of 800 people in 2006. The breakfast is supported by cosponsors, which have included individuals, corporations, schools, universities, and others. Corporate sponsors for breakfast have included: St. Joseph Medical Center, Capital One, Fiesta Grocery store, Central Care, and Reliant Energy. The purpose is: • to serve as a format for civic issues that have been present over 20 plus years as well as current issues that continue to plague neighborhoods on a daily basis that are under addressed by elected officials; • to leverage the collective voice and knowledge on issues to address issues that are not being given the attention that stakeholders consider; • to provide membership and marketing for civic clubs and communitybased organizations; • to provide a forum for service providers to meet stakeholders to improve service delivery to the community. A GIS map provided by the City of Houston Department in 2010 carved out a county-wide footprint identifying vulnerable population areas. CP inserted the zip codes within that footprint that resulted in 27 zip codes. CP posited that these zip codes also had gaps in city services. CP described these zip codes as the “arch of service gaps” across Houston. Surveys conducted annually for 14 years with homeowners, renters and local businesses in vulnerable population areas, identify four community

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priority areas: education, economy, safety, and health. Each priority area identified in the survey was further analyzed using GIS applications by graduate students at Texas A&M University to expand on each of the issues faced by residents. Each area was broken into subtopics that were identified as indicators that contributed to the overall disparities present in communities. In the fall of 2017 IfSC was invited to participate in a quarterly community-wide breakfast with over 300 residents. During that meeting IfSC spoke about upcoming projects and asked residents to complete a survey on neighborhood problem areas they wished to tackle. The majority of residents were most concerned with flooding (39%). Another 36% were concerned about pollution; 15% were concerned about public transportation; and 7% were concerned with badly needed building repairs. Additionally, residents volunteered other pressing issues including public service issuesincluding pot-holes, tree trimming, trash pickup, and sidewalks-need for home repair, crime, and economic concerns. In a previous survey conducted in the fall of 2016, residents indicated a variety of similar concerns. Residents (44%) ranked infrastructure, 33% ranked sanitation and maintenance, and 25% ranked security as their top priorities. Additionally, landscape architecture and urban planning students developed a number of community-scaled master plans and infrastructure provisions for Sunnyside. The designs are community retrofits and infrastructure enhancements to support future flood mitigation. Integrated into the strategies are provisions for repurposing vacant land, walkability enhancement, and ecological services. The teams conducted participatory action with the Sunnyside Civic Club to develop a design program to manage stormwater and recover sites impacted by Hurricane Harvey in 2017. From the work with CP, university students have won seven regional, state, and national awards.

Jones Futures Academy Additionally, CP connected the IfSC to Jones Futures Academy (JFA), a magnet school focused on health and construction within the HISD. Students are able to obtain an associate of science, college credits, and industry certifications in the areas of health sciences, architecture, and construction science. The IfSC met teachers and students at a field exercise on emergency preparedness and hurricane readiness hosted by CP. Then, just days before the Hurricane Harvey made landfall, the IfSC facilitated a workshop with teachers at JFA. JFA sought to build on the success of a previous IfSC citizen science project.Teachers focused on project-based learning assignments

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to improve community conditions related to flooding and infrastructure. After Hurricane Harvey, HISD was closed for weeks and when teachers returned it became clear the project was timely and relevant for their students and community. With funds from the National Science Foundation, Grant No. 1645193, Dr. Nasir Gharaibeh, Dr. Marccus Hendricks, graduate student Isaac Oti, and others worked with students from JFA to develop a technique to identify the quality of neighborhood stormwater infrastructure. High school students were trained to evaluate infrastructure, which was then compared to professional inspections and LiDAR data. Because there is a lack of reliable data on stormwater infrastructure at the neighborhood level and an increased intensity of storms, this technique provides a method to obtain data communities so desperately need to mitigate flooding (Oti et al., 2019). Dr. Andrea Roberts trained 300 students at JFA on how to conduct an oral history. The project sought (1) to understand the impacts of Hurricane Harvey on students, teachers, and community elders and (2) to train young people as a means to document the untold histories in communities. Students wrote their experiences and impressions of media coverage during the hurricane. Students then practiced by interviewing community elders who volunteered their time at the school.

Conclusion The engagement and success of research projects are directly attributed to the community-based organizations and groups already working in and with the community. These groups know the strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats the communities face. In the following chapters we describe the way in which institutions should work with community groups to amplify their goals for greater impact. Hurricane Harvey While more than 300 miles of the Texas coast was impacted, few considered how far inland the hurricane would wreck havoc. Following Hurricane Harvey staff reached out to community partners and asked what we could do in support of current and past the community partners.The Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services asked if we could cook food at their donations drive. Faculty, staff, students, and the College of Architecture at Texas A&M cooked burgers for a Sunday lunch and handed out food, clothing, and supplies in the Manchester/Harrisburg neighborhood in Houston community. Many residents expressed their gratitude and spoke of stories of losing hourly paid jobs and being evicted from apartments because of damage from the hurricane. IfSC and TXTC also:

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• fielded calls and provided advice for next steps; • attended several community events at the invitation of our partners talk with residents and show support; • connected to disaster researchers which provided advice and a network of communities that have experienced a disaster in the last 5 years; • cohosted three workshops on community resilience with the Texas Rural Leadership Program, the Community Resilience Collaborative, and the American Planning Association; • analyzed the integration of plans as it relates to resilience, informing policy decisions for reconstruction; and • worked with the City of La Grange to incorporate resilience into the comprehensive city master plan, folding in recovery.

Rural Community Planning: The Liberty County Story In 2015 Liberty County (pop. 76,000) invited TXTC to the community. Three catalyzing events resulted in the county working collaboratively with its cities to develop an innovative plan for long-term resiliency. 1. Plans were drafted to build the third loop around Houston, or the Grand Parkway Highway 99. 2. Unincorporated land was subdivided into 900 small lots-only large enough for mobile and manufactured homes. 3. The county experienced five disaster declarations and over 100 days of flood waters within one year. Together,TXTC and the County designed a planning process.The project facilitated seventeen public forums and community engagement meetings to discuss the community’s vision and goals for growth and development (from 30 in attendance to over 200).The County Extension Agent, a trusted community leader, reached out to community members. The County Judge led the charge by organizing regular meetings with the cities to discuss priorities. Cities, once with fierce rivalries determined that “we are stronger as a county when we all work together.” Together the community decided they wanted to focus on a high quality of life that strives to be: 1) family-friendly, 2) resilient, 3) equitable, and 4) with sustainable growth. The community focused their efforts on ways to grow that they “would be proud for [their] kids and grandkids to live in.” Other service-learning courses targeted the community, including: • Engineering students analyzed areas expected to grow and provided guidelines to limit the amount of impervious runoff, incentivizing green infrastructure.

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• Students developed a logo design, also seen on the cover of the plan. The three lines of the river, three trees, and three rings of the sun represent the Trinity River. Additionally, the team developed a tourism map of assets and a website to support an online presence. • Three youth in the community began a blog called The Trinity Time Hop, http://trinitytimehop.weebly.com/, to document their concerns, perspectives from older residents, and history of the past to envision the history of the future. Since the completion of the project: • The County has adopted the plan. • County officials testified to the Texas Legislature about the need for greater land use controls in rural areas, particularly those on the urban fringe and in hazardous areas. • The cities within the county are developing their own plans in line with the region. • The planning committee continues to meet regularly. • The “Liberty County Strategic Plan” received the Current Planning Award from the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association in 2018 the first time a project moved from a student award category into the professional award category. • The “Liberty County Strategic Plan” received the Silver Achievement Award in Resiliency Planning from the American Planning Association at the 2019 National Planning Conference. “Local leaders are now trying to work together, which did not happen in the past. Together, the county and municipalities are thinking about the future. The county judge uses the maps and student work to explain growth, which is used at city council meetings. The City of Liberty has used the student work to apply for park grants. Also, the County continues to use the marketing materials and has adopted the logo. Working with TTC was a great experience and the students were so welcoming!” Alexis Cordova, County Extension Agent in Liberty County.

Rural Community Planning: The Nolanville Story The City of Nolanville (pop. 4,200), near Fort Hood Army Base, was a place people said could not be helped. When we met local community members and staff, we sensed a different energy-people longing to affect change. Soon after we began the process, the city manager resigned, leaving the remaining city staff, the city secretary and public works director, as the project managers.While disheartening to residents, it did not hinder the community planning approach.TXTC established a task force of community members that would represent the various communities within the community and act as a conduit to community concerns.With the task force and periodic public meetings, community members spoke of the lack of community identity, history, and culture.Through the engagement process facilitated by TXTC staff and students within courses, the city identified assets and a shared vision for the future, which resulted in a comprehensive plan.

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The plan documented the: • redesign of a derelict and crime-ridden park, including a new community center, which has since been constructed providing a space for the Boys and Girls Club; • conceptual designs of a revived Main Street, where streetscape improvements have since been constructed; • improved drainage, roads, and sidewalks in the manufactured home park; • proposed sidewalks and bike lanes for a healthy and active community and safe routes to schools; • concern for the train traffic that divided the community for long stretches of time; • desire for more community events to meet and connect with neighbors; and • focus on implementing a recycling program in the community. Since the completion of the project: • A community member on the task force, so impassioned by the effort, applied for and is currently Nolanville’s city manager. • The community adopted the plan. • The city has secured close to $2 million in grants to implement the students’ recommendations (prior to this the city hadn’t applied for any grants). • The city implemented a recycling program through the Keep Nolanville Beautiful program. • The city hosts regular annual events, including the 5 k Fox Trot, the Train Hop Jamboree, Keep Nolanville Beautiful Clean Up days, and more. • There are new businesses and just about everybody in town has updated building facades on Main Street with new businesses. • Residents are taking pride in their neighborhood. • State agencies are considering how to address the train that blocks the community. • Drainage improvements and new roads in the manufactured home park. • The city broke ground on the redesign of the park and new community center. “TTC was definitely a strength to foster collaboration. The final open house, where students presented recommendations, was a great example of this collaboration with over 100 residents and one of my best days as City Manager. Also, I framed and hung the community vision boards with goals (developed by the students) in my office. When people come into my office and ask what they want to do (in the city), I point to the boards and show them the community’s vision. The city was stagnant before and TTC helped reenergize the community” Kara Escajeda, Nolanville City Manager.

References Bullard, R. (1983). Solid waste sites and the black Houston community. Sociological Inquiry, 53(2/3), 274–288. U.S. Census Bureau (2000). American Community Survey, 2011-2015 estimates. Coker, A., Lupo, P., Symanski, E., & Walker, K. (2006). Epidemiologic investigation executive summary. Preliminary epidemiologic investigation of the relationship between the presence of ambient hazardous air pollutants (HAPs) and cancer incidence in Harris County.

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City of Houston and University of Texas Health Science at Houston, School of Public Health. Available from: http://www.houstontx.gov/health/UT-executive.html. Department of Health Human Services (DHHS). (2009). Community health profiles 19992003: Harrisburg/Manchester super neighborhood. Houston, TX: Department of Health and Human Services Available from: https://www.houstontx.gov/health/chs/HarrisburgManchester.pdf Accessed 12.03.19. EPA. 2015. Envirofacts. United States Environmental Protection Agency. Available from: https://www3.epa.gov/enviro/ Accessed 01.02.15. FEMA Flood Map. (n.d.). Available from: https://www.floodfind.com/fema-flood-map/. Harris County Floodplain Reference Marks. (n.d.). Available from: https://www.hcfcd.org/ Interactive-Mapping-Tools/Harris-County-Floodplain-Reference-Marks. Hendricks, M., Meyer, M., Gharaibeh, N., Van Zandt, S., Masterson, J., Cooper, J., et al. (2018). The development of a participatory assessment technique for infrastructure: neighborhood-level monitoring towards sustainable infrastructure systems. Sustainable Cities and Society, 38, 265–274. Linder, S. H., Marko, D., & Sexton, K. (2008). Cumulative cancer risk from air pollution in Houston: disparities in risk burden and social disadvantage. Environmental Science & Technology, 42(12), 4312–4322. Misra, T. (2017). A catastrophe for Houston’s most vulnerable people. The Atlantic. Available from: https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/08/a-catastrophe-for-houstons-most-vulnerable-people/538155/. Newman, G., Smith, A., & Brody, S. D. (2017). Repurposing vacant land through landscape connectivity. Landscape Journal, 36(1), 37–57. Oti, I., Gharaibeh, N., Hendricks, M., Meyer, M., Van Zandt, S., Masterson, J., et al. (2019). Validity and reliability of drainage infrastructure monitoring data obtained from citizen scientists. Journal of Infrastructure Systems, 25, 3. Sansom, G., Berke, P., McDonald,T., Shipp, E., & Horney, J. (2016). Confirming the environmental concerns of community members utilizing participatory-based research in the houston neighborhood of Manchester. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(9), 839. Sansom S G., Parras, J., Parras, A., Nieto, Y., Arellano, Y., Berke, P., et al. (2017). The impacts of exposure to environmental risk on physical and mental health in a small geographic community in Houston, TX. Journal of Community Health, 42(4), 813–818. Sansom, G., Kirsch, K., Stone, K., McDonald, T., & Horney, J. (2018). Domestic exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in a Houston, Texas, environmental justice neighborhood. Environmental Justice, 11(5), 183–191. USDA Food Access Research Atlas. (n.d.). Available from: https://www.ers.usda.gov/dataproducts/food-access-research-atlas/.

CHAPTER 8

Empowering learners Jaimie Hicks Mastersona, Michelle Annette Meyerb

Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

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Chapter outline Introduction Experiential education for wicked problems Interdisciplinary education for wicked problems Community-based education for wicked problems Projects that benefit all Toxic tour Stormwater infrastructure assessment and planning Surface water quality Green infrastructure designs Discussion: student feedback Diverse perspectives Principles of practice Conclusion References

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Introduction The increasing frequency and magnitude of disasters along with population growth in hazardous areas, such as along coastlines, emphasize the need for appropriate education and training in hazard and climate resilience. Furthermore, these physical risks—while increasing in all communities— are unequally distributed across population groups and neighborhoods. The most socially vulnerable populations, who have the least resources to prepare, respond, and recover to a disaster individually, often face the most risk (Cutter, Boruff, & Shirley, 2003;Van Zandt et al., 2012). Such communities often have research projects conducted “on” them rather than “with” them. But also, educational efforts especially service-learning projects in higher education can fail to support voice and agency of marginalized communities. To be successful in this community-engaged research, we also must change the way in which we educate learners. For 2 decades, the literature along with national organizations and foundations have called for community impact and reciprocity (Boyer, 1996; Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00008-X

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Bryne, 2006; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and CIRCLE, 2006; Morin, Jaeger, & O’Meara, 2016; National Academy of Sciences, 2004; Trencher, Bai, Evans, McCormick, & Yarime, 2014). Working alongside communities in place-based approaches, especially those most socially vulnerable whose voice is often left out of resilience leadership, is needed. Climate-related problems play out at the local level and community members are the first to observe and experience the impacts in real time, particularly in rural places and among indigenous populations (Crate & Nuttall, 2009). Working alongside communities is only a first change. Tackling these societal problems identified by disaster and climate science, as described in Chapter 2, cannot be addressed in silos, but requires other forms of knowledge and interdisciplinary approaches (Frank, 2015; Rittel & Webber, 1973; Rowe & Johnston, 2012; Silka et al., 2013). Those working in hazard management need to be skilled in multiple scholarly disciplines from social science to engineering to urban planning, for example. Interdisciplinary thinking and place-based approaches are required to better understand the wicked problems of disaster and climate justice, and necessary for effective educational outcomes for both university and high school students. In this book, we described our community partnerships and later how the IfSC authentically engages local communities (and focused on the community) with service-learning and citizen science projects to affect social change. This chapter focuses on the by-product of these efforts—authentic experiential learning for students of higher education and high schools alike (Stoecker, 2016). We provide a literature review on experiential education, interdisciplinary education, and community-based education, which our efforts draw upon, then describe four example projects. We conclude with the effects of these projects for pedagogy and interdisciplinary and community-driven understanding of hazards.

Experiential education for wicked problems How can we prepare students to rethink ways to address complex problems around disasters and climate change? How can students address these physical risks in ways that also promote equity and justice? We must engage in a joined education model between the local community and university community that “integrate[s], connect[s], confront[s], and reconcile[s]” (Rowe & Johnston, 2012, p. 54) the various perspectives from the community with data-driven approaches of the university (Wals & Corcoran, 2006). For more than a century, pedagogical best practices involve experiential learning that includes concrete experiences and active experimentation

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by students (Dewey, 1916, 1938; Kolb, 1984). Service-learning is a form of experiential learning where “students engage in activities that address human and community needs” in a reciprocal relationship (Barbara Jacoby and Associates, 1996, p. 5). Service-learning should ultimately promote learning for all and benefit all by placing equal weight on learning goals, as well as community goals through high-quality service with the community (Anderson, Swick, & Yff, 2001; Barbara Jacoby and Associates, 1996; Housman, Meaney, Wilcox, & Cavazos, 2012; Stoecker, 2016). There are marked positive learning outcomes for students involved in service-learning, including academic success and the development of critical thinking skills (Celio, Durlak, & Dymnicki, 2011; Eyler & Giles, 1999; Housman et al., 2012; Warren, 2012;Yorio & Ye, 2012); personal development, including improved leadership, citizenship, and communication skills (Astin & Sax, 1998; Celio et al., 2011; Einfeld & Collins, 2008; Furco, Jones-White, Huesman, & Gorny, 2016); and sociocultural gains and volunteering (Eyler, Giles, & Braxton, 1997; Furco et al., 2016; Yorio & Ye, 2012). Additionally, service-learning students in higher education are academically more successful than their nonservice-learning counterparts (Astin & Sax, 1998; Batchelder & Root, 1994; Celio et al., 2011; Lockeman & Pelco, 2013; Markus, Howard, & King, 1993). Service-learning is particularly impactful for students from underrepresented backgrounds, including racial minorities. African American, Latino, and Native American students typically have lower levels of academic preparation for college (Terenzini, Cabrera, & Bernal, 2001; Zalaquett, 1999) and are less likely to enter college (Witham, Malcom-Piqueux, Dowd, & Bensimon, 2015).When these underrepresented students are in higher education, they are more likely to have poorer academic achievement and drop out (Engle & Tinto, 2008). Service-learning helps reduce feelings of isolation among students—an often-critical piece to success among minority students (Kelly, 2013).While service-learning has been criticized as a largely White student model (Mitchell, Donahue, & Young-Law, 2012), there is evidence that service learning is positively associated with underrepresented students’ cumulative GPA, retention, and graduation (Song, Lopez, Furco, & Maruyama 2017). The IfSC sees service-learning as an avenue to support and retain academically underrepresented students from bachelors through masters and PhD. Service-learning can include many pedagogical approaches, such as “action research, critical theory, progressive education, adult education, social justice education, constructivism, [and] community-based research” (Butin, 2006, p. 490). Community-based research is like service-learning but

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involves students specifically in research, data collection, and/or knowledge generation with the community (Stoecker, 2016; Strand, Marullo, Cutforth, van de Sande & Schwartz, 2011). Ideally, all such learning efforts are participatory in nature with community-defined problems and needs (Stoecker, 2016; Stoecker et al., 2010; van de Sande & Schwartz, 2011). But service-learning is not perfect. Achieving local community impact has not come easy for research and teaching. The word “service” has been challenged in the literature because of connotations (and examples) of charitable power imbalances between universities and communities (Cruz, 1994; Kendall, 1990). We agree with Stoecker (2016) who champions liberating service-learning from shallow, top-down university practices and instead fighting for social change “around local issues and democratizing the social relations of knowledge production” (Stoecker, 2016, pp. 146–147). Researchers, even engaged researchers, are still mistrusted by overstudied and fatigued community members (Ross & Stoecker, 2016). Mistrust, in part, is due to researchers’ struggle with bottom-up, community-led approaches to define questions and solutions that address a community’s specific needs (Silka et al., 2013). Instead of universities dictating problems and solutions to and for communities, universities should cocreate projects alongside communities (Frank, 2015; Stoecker, 2016). (The IfSC’s model for democratizing the community–university partnership is described in more detail in Chapter 9.) Service-learning and community-based research fosters social change when it is (1) interdisciplinary and (2) grounded in the local context. Coincidentally, interdisciplinary and community-based approaches are also required to tackle such global challenges as climate change and increasing disaster impacts.

Interdisciplinary education for wicked problems Service-learning, and most university learning activities, is traditionally discipline-specific even though there are research and educational benefits to interdisciplinary education. The Tbilisi Declaration called for interdisciplinary approaches to environmental education in 1977 (Rowe & Johnston, 2012). The field responded. Much interdisciplinary education existing today focuses on sustainability-related issues (Johnston, 2012). The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), for example, led cross-disciplinary workshops to foster such problem-based approaches to environmental education (AASHE, 2010). The US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development has K-12

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education skills statements and performance elements. In contrast, while disaster research includes interdisciplinary methods and understanding (see, e.g., Slaymaker, 1999), little discussion of interdisciplinary educational approaches to disaster resilience has been discussed. Additionally, interdisciplinary educational activities support the development of critical thinking skills that themselves improve students’ ability to address complex challenges (Kilgo, 2015; Rowe & Johnston, 2012; Wals & Corcoran, 2006). Interdisciplinary thinking is a skill valued by employers more than specific degree programs (Hart Research Associates, 2015). Importantly, universities can use interdisciplinary curriculum as “building blocks that allow students to describe themselves not in terms of majors but as complete packages of knowledge and skills” (Stoecker, 2016, p. 159). Interdisciplinary education can also increase inclusivity and equity among diverse students through culminating or “signature work.” Signature work demonstrates a student’s effort and understanding of a topic, such as the projects in this chapter and described by Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U, 2015). This particular learning outcome provides a more level playing field for low-income students and students of color by synthesizing theory across a degree or program and applying it to a particular topic or area of interest, typically a real-world complex problem. While service-learning in the fields of psychology, education, and health is more prominent (Estrada, Durlak, & Juarez, 2002; Flanneray & Ward, 1999; Mayhew & Hernandez, 2007; Robinson & Bradley, 1997; RogersSirin & Sirin, 2009; Smith, Johnson, Powell, & Oliver, 2011), interdisciplinary service-learning is especially rare. “Soft-applied” fields more commonly include community-based projects and service-learning programs, such as the field of education (Campus Compact, 2004). Alternatively, communitybased projects and service-learning programs are less likely to be embedded in “hard-pure” fields (e.g., chemistry), “hard-applied” fields (e.g., engineering), and “soft-pure” fields (e.g., English) (Butin, 2006; Campus Compact, 2004).

Community-based education for wicked problems Secondly, pursuing climate justice requires community-based projects grounded in the local context and driven in pursuit of productive action and community outcomes. Understanding place is critical because indigenous knowledge changes local and global responses to climate change (Vinyeta & Lynn, 2013). Climate education with a strong place-based focus (CCEPA, 2017) improves environmental knowledge, awareness and appreciation, academic

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achievement, and critical thinking (Bertling, 2015). Place-based education is better than global approaches because the human scale is more relatable and culturally relevant where students can “see the connection between what they learn and how they live” (Barbara Jacoby and Associates, 1996, p. 20). Place-based education is particularly good for students in their own communities because it also positively impacts sense of place and place attachment (Bertling, 2015). Service-learning conducted with community-based projects should include experiences that integrate and expand varying perspectives or viewpoints (Rowe & Johnston, 2012; Wals and Corcoran, 2006) to promote diversity (Kilgo, 2015), as critical theory describes in Chapter 2. By listening to different perspectives we can get at addressing social inequities of differ­ ent groups for climate justice (Kendall, 1990; Smith et al., 2011) and foster multiculturally competent students (Smith et al., 2011, p. 1; Sperling, 2007). In fact, working with diverse communities in service-learning can reduce stereotypes (Boyle-Baise, 2002), enhance multicultural competency and social responsibility (Einfeld & Collins, 2008; Engberg & Fox, 2011), and increase “knowledge and skills to effectively work with diverse populations” (Housman et al., 2012, p. 270).

Projects that benefit all Researchers, students, and residents associated with the IfSC drew from experiential learning, interdisciplinary education, and community-based education to cocreate projects aimed at supporting local resilience for climate change and hazards. A variety of key stakeholders (e.g., key influential, formal educators, informal educators, and local communities) came together to develop innovative climate change educational projects by engaging across diverse communities (Fig. 8.1). We used citizen science as a technique to incorporate these three educational philosophies. Citizen science is a process by which volunteer members of the public, who commonly lack advanced or technical training in science, engage in scientific activities (e.g., data collection or analysis) that might otherwise be limited to professional researchers or practitioners (Conrad & Hilchey, 2011). Citizen science projects have grown in popularity across the world (Bonney et al., 2014). Yet, very few citizen science projects address disasters or hazards (CCS, 2018), even though successful participatory projects may increase hazard knowledge for both residents and experts (Berke, Cooper, Salvesen, Spurlock, & Rausch, 2011). Some

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Figure 8.1  Key stakeholders to empower learners. Adapted from the Alliance climate change education guide on strategies to engage a diverse range of communities (CCEPA, 2017).

research shows that trained residents and students can collect valid and reliable disaster data, such as damage assessments or risk information (Bonney et al., 2014; Lue, Wilson, & Curtis, 2014; Méheux, Dominey-Howes, & Lloyd, 2010). Citizen science, especially within a framework of communitybased participation between researchers and residents, fosters accountability, trust, transparency, and legitimacy in government responses to resident needs, highlights low-cost and effective solutions to community problems, and raises previously overlooked distributive justice issues (Corburn, 2005; Cutts, White, & Kinzig, 2011; McCall, 2003). The integration of university and high school students into citizen science research projects created a unique educational program that was interdisciplinary, supported cultural competence of students (Alexandrowicz, 2001; Amerson, 2010), and promoted further understanding of the

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intersection between physical vulnerability and social vulnerability by future urban planners, engineers, social scientists, and emergency managers. We describe four innovative projects that are academically interdisciplinary and community-driven, where the by-product is fully engaged residents and students.

Toxic tour The two neighborhoods, Manchester and Sunnyside, as described in previous chapters, are at risk to natural hazards (e.g., floods and coastal storms), climate change (e.g., sea level rise), and technological hazards (e.g., chemical and energy industrial facilities). They also are majority–minority (Hispanic and Black, respectively) and have lower median incomes and housing values than the rest of the city and state. Beginning each education project required introducing students to the “places” of these community-based education projects. Both university and local high school students started with a toxic tour of the areas to understand the compound risks to health and life in the neighborhoods. Our community partner organization t.e.j.a.s. conducts toxic tours as part of their environmental justice educational programming (http://tejasbarrios. org/toxic-tours/). Numerous neighborhoods experience extreme exposure to toxins, and are culturally, geographically, and socially isolated from other areas. “Toxic tours” are a common, noncommercial, educational, and advocacy tool of environmental justice groups (Pezzullo, 2009). Led by local residents and advocates, these tours aim to help outsiders experience life within communities exposed to such toxins. As t.e.j.a.s. states on their website, “Pictures cannot easily convey the surreal site of this massive petrochemical industrial complex, nor the thick polluted air.” Tour participants get to see and also hear, smell, feel, and sometimes taste what the neighborhood residents live with each day. The university’s enrollment trends result in noticeable cultural, racial, and economic contrasts between the university students in our service-learning classes and our neighborhood partners. In fact, Texas A&M University is a Predominately White Institution (PWI) like many research-intensive universities in the country. Nearly 56% of the entire student body (undergraduate and graduate) in Fall 2018 were White, 21% were Hispanic, and 3% were Black (Texas A&M University, 2018). The percent White increases if we focus just on undergraduates (60%). The Masters and PhD student body is not majority White (39%), but the difference is due to a large international student body (38%). Only 10% of graduate students are Hispanic and 4%

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are Black. The trends for the university do indicate increasing racial diversity of the student body, with Hispanic enrollment, in particular, increasing each year. But, the university still falls far short of being representative of the state as a whole. The White, non-Hispanic population of the state in 2018 was only 42%, whereas nearly 40% were Hispanic and 13% were Black (US Census Bureau, 2018).The university students are also commonly from middle and upper income families. Data on family income is limited, but among undergraduates where data are available only 31% are from families making $60,000 or less annually. The median income for Texas, as a reference, was $57,051 for the same time period, indicating that more affluent undergraduates are overrepresented in the student body. The toxic tour provides a community-led method of introducing these university students to issues they have never known or seen themselves. The students witness homes sandwiched between industrial facilities and playgrounds whose backdrop are active smokestacks (see photo) (Fig. 8.2). Meanwhile, local residents and activists narrate the tour identifying each facility, the amount of pollution generated, reported accidents and violations of scientifically acceptable toxic releases, and previous flooding and coastal storm impacts. They also hear the years and decades of effort from advocates trying to address these concerns. Local high school students also benefit from toxic tours of their own neighborhoods. Some research indicates that “hands-on approach helps the youth to consolidate local and technical knowledge” (Su & Jagninski, 2016, p. 111). Post-Hurricane Katrina, students experienced toxic tours alongside history courses on urban planning and segregation, as well as science classes on environmental problems which helped them see themselves as stakeholders in local community development. Students in Manchester at FHS acknowledged that they did not know much about the toxic facilities and did not realize how dangerous they were.

Stormwater infrastructure assessment and planning The tour of the neighborhoods highlights the risk of toxins as well as other community problems. Drainage issues are highlighted as the tour brings students past clogged ditches and broken storm sewers. Community partners expressed concern about the toxins and vectorborne diseases passed through mosquitoes held in the stagnant water and regular low-level flooding issues. Yet, arguing for increased municipal spending or repair of this infrastructure is difficult when relying on individual experiences or stories.

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Figure 8.2  Photo of playground in Manchester neighborhood, Houston, Texas, 2014 copyright Michelle Meyer.

Empirical knowledge about the continued capacity of installed stormwater infrastructure is a challenge across most communities. Communities require timely and complete data to understand potential flooding risks from damaged or missing stormwater infrastructure components. These risks may vary across neighborhoods as funding for infrastructure rehabilitation can be tied to new development or redevelopment, placing further physical risks in neighborhoods with concentrations of socially vulnerable populations (Van Zandt et al., 2012).

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One of our community partners,Tracy Stevens, a retired city of Houston employee and infrastructure expert, identified a need to accurately and regularly document poor neighborhood infrastructure conditions. To do so, graduate students worked with local high school students as citizen scientists to test protocols and techniques for collecting neighborhood stormwater infrastructure data. Moreover, the infrastructure monitoring project sought to understand the factors that influence the reliability and validity of citizen-generated infrastructure data so the tool could be used in communities across the country. Discovery Lead Nasir Gharaibeh, training in civil engineering, knew how to assess stormwater drainage (Gharaibeh & Lindholm, 2014). Graduate students from urban planning and engineering adapted his existing engineering-based assessment technique so that it could be easily understood and used by high school students and community residents. Urban planning and engineering students used focus groups, informal interviews, and classroom lecture sections under the supervision of sociology faculty members to understand the usefulness of the tool and what students were learning from the data collection process. Multiple iterations of the tool were tested to understand how the citizen scientists interpreted the metrics and how the metrics were able to capture stormwater attributes important to understand flooding (Hendricks et al., 2018). This iterative process ensured that the data are useful for the task at hand (i.e., informing stormwater infrastructure management decisions) and at the same time not overwhelming in its quantity and technicality to the volunteer collectors (i.e., high school students). Graduate students also worked regularly with teachers at both schools who were active participants in testing the tool and advising training sessions. The high school students expressed accurate understanding of complex stormwater management issues and consequences of poor drainage (e.g., vector-borne illnesses, chemical concentrations, etc.) in addition to issues related to disaster risk reduction, environmental justice, and neighborhood inequalities as it relates to stormwater infrastructure. For example, the students quickly identified how the quality and type of infrastructure varied across neighborhoods based on social characteristics such as the overall neighborhood quality and income of the residents. Additional research with the high school students demonstrated there was no statistically significant difference between data collected by citizen scientists and professionals (Oti et al., 2019). This demonstrates the reliability and validity of data collected by citizen scientists. Using such tools provides the framework for empirical

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documentation of stormwater needs in the community. Residents that see issues everyday can begin to identify problems quantitatively using engineering language.

Surface water quality Another issue raised by community residents was a concern that there may be contaminants present in the surface waters in their neighborhoods (such as standing water due to poor drainage). Previous research has shown that flooding is a consistent issue and is likely to be exacerbated in the coming years (Muñoz Ordoñez, 2015). The team collectively decided to gather both physical data (water samples) and perception data (surveys of residents) to fully understand the issue. Graduate, undergraduate, and high school students sampled surface water and conducted a community-wide health survey to assess the presence and concentration of select heavy metals and composite physical and mental health scores of residents. University students from public health, toxicology, and landscape architecture and urban planning participated. The interdisciplinary team promoted experiential learning by placing university students into field research that required technical skill, field training, and cultural competency. The findings of the water sampling confirmed community members’ fears and indicated that there were concentrations of several toxins in the water (Sansom et al., 2017). The health survey that accompanied the water sampling utilized the 12-item Short-Form Health Survey version 2 (SF12v2) to assess the general mental and physical health of the community (Ware, Kosinski, & Keller, 1996). Results showed a community with greatly reduced physical composite health scores that were increased over time despite adjusting for age in the analysis (Sansom, Berke, McDonald, Shipp, & Horney, 2016). Previous research has shown that marginalized communities offer unique challenges in collecting data, including low participation rates (Knight, Roosa, & Umana-Taylor, 2009; Yancey, Ortega, & Kumanyika, 2006). However, the project could not have been accomplished without a purposeful relationship with t.e.j.a.s. and the student and teacher organizations of FHS. The citizen scientists pinpointed locations that residents have noticed standing water following rainfalls by offering the physical address or general location of problem areas. Additionally, the survey collection received a high response rate due to the presence of the local high school students alongside the university students.

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Green infrastructure designs Citizens and community-based organizations worked with landscape architecture and planning faculty to develop green infrastructure design solutions to mitigate flooding and environmental toxins in both neighborhoods. Specifically, Sunnyside suffers from inadequate flood infrastructure as well as a significant amount of vacant parcels (Newman et al., 2016). Population loss between 2000 and 2010 and home ownership decline of 23% over the last 20 years has increased vacant land amounts; 346 tax delinquent vacant parcels occupying 461 acres of land now comprise 22% of the neighborhood’s total area (HoustonGalveston Area Council (H-GAC) GIS Datasets, 2016).To serve as a model for future development within the neighborhood, a 202-acre site in the southeast portion of the neighborhood was selected as the design/research study area. The project both develops and applies an innovative system to operationalize an engagement process utilizing feedback loops from engaged members and university affiliates (Fig. 8.3). A primary community partner assisted with coordinating all site visits and presentations. A participatory process was initiated combining university students, the IfSC, Charity Productions, and local community members to develop a set of solutions in response to the preexisting neighborhood conditions. University students were given tours through the neighborhoods, discussed existing issues with members and stakeholders, developed a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database, performed an inventory/analysis of existing conditions, and presented scenarios of visualized design solutions. An introductory meeting allowed residents to discuss community problems, initiating a discussion to identify flood vulnerable areas. At a second meeting, students presented site analyses; feedback on this presentation provided insight, identified unseen conditions, and generated ideas for future urban growth strategies. A third and fourth meeting involved feedback loops between community members and students in which a series of design scenarios were presented and critiqued by neighborhood members and stakeholders. Responses from the community to the team were then utilized to condense the scenarios into one singular revised master plan. At the communities’ request, PhD and master students then worked together to develop design impact projections using landscape performance tools. The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) has developed a series of Landscape Performance tools that provide the ability to measure the effectiveness with which existing or designed/planned solutions fulfill their intended purpose to help designers and planners assess community conditions (Yang, Li, & Binder, 2016). The LAF’s Benefits Toolkit offers a broad range of calculators to analyze social, economic, hydrologic, and economic

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Figure 8.3 Feedback loops for community engagement in learning outcomes.

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impacts of designs and plans.These tools were used to estimate construction and maintenance costs of green infrastructure provision, calculate stormwater runoff impacts, analyze land use changes, and project potential community employment opportunities.

Discussion: student feedback The planning and design projects and citizen science projects aimed to accelerate the production of high-quality data at the neighborhood level, benefiting multiple stakeholders, including high school students, local communities, particularly those with physical and social vulnerabilities, and undergraduate and graduate students of multiple disciplines, such as infrastructure engineers, urban planners, and social science researchers. The projects demonstrated the power of diverse perspectives, both interdisciplinary and community, as well as principles of practice to codesign, coproduce, and colearn, empowering new generations to tackle such complex wicked problems.

Diverse perspectives We asked for feedback from graduate and undergraduate students who participated and have now since graduated and moved into research or faculty positions. The project revealed the value of interdisciplinary and community perspectives (Fig. 8.4) as inputs to inform transformational learning and community outcomes.

Figure 8.4 Incorporating interdisciplinary perspectives and community perspectives in student learning.

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First, the interdisciplinary approach engaged students with fields they might not normally encounter within their degree program, providing firsthand experience working with researchers across disciplines. Students were able to recognize interdisciplinary research questions, understand other disciplines methods for addressing those questions, and learn to better communicate across disciplinary divides. One former graduate student stated, “The interdisciplinary nature forced me to get out of my comfort zone and created a great development opportunity for me. It made me think about my research from different perspectives and draw connections to research in other disciplines I would not have realized otherwise, which required delving into and understanding other disciplines’ work. I was also challenged in communicating highly technical information to those of other backgrounds. I essentially was able to learn how to present my work to those outside of my discipline.” Next, a community-engaged approach, as described by former students, demonstrated the importance of understanding community perspectives, which can impact the development of strategies to address complex hazards issues. For example, in speaking with community members, one student became aware that community members have an understanding of the issues in their communities, which some researchers often overlook or assume that residents are blind to community problems: “The ability of local members to correctly identify and diagnose certain issues within their neighborhood was truly eye-opening. My current research and projects revolve around community engagement precisely because I saw how beneficial it could be for the researchers, the community, and scholarship as a whole.”

Principles of practice Additionally, the project revealed principles of practice for transformational learning and community-engaged learning where students and communities codesign, coproduce, and colearn (Fig. 8.4). First, university faculty, students, and community-based organizations codesigned projects. In fact, research ideas and projects evolved and grew as more time was spent in the community and with residents. The community-based organizations had a long history of understanding and addressing community concerns and needs, while university students and faculty held knowledge related to scientific methods and best practices for data collection and strategies. Each held specific knowledge about hazards and were able to combine knowledge to create community-grounded research projects. Second, university students and citizen scientists, in this case community-based organizations and high school students, can coproduce data

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and information together. Feedback from pre-post surveys of student participants showed that many students actually wanted even more resident involvement in the process because the site visits and resident knowledge was invaluable information not available through typical analyses used for design and research decision-making. Many university students also commented that working within teams for the courses, having resident and stakeholder involvement, and also trying to respond to faculty feedback forced them to compromise some of their own original ideas, resulting in more of a real-world experience of the research process. Third, university students and high school students as citizen scientists can colearn together. Students worked alongside one another in a feedback loop of knowledge transfer. Specifically, university students were also able to take leadership roles in research projects by training, educating, and mentoring high school students, an experience not always available in traditional research projects. Differing levels of students took on more challenging tasks allowing each academic level to be effectively challenged. High school students were able to speak to localized knowledge of the place even where flooding issues play out in the community. Additionally, high school students of marginalized communities expressed that they feel more connected with a Research University and expressed that they could see themselves as not only undergraduate students but also as graduate students. The high school students even traveled to the university for school visits and engaged with enrollment opportunities and admissions staff.

Conclusion This collaborative experience presented numerous opportunities to enhance higher education student learning and community learning by engaging together across disciplines on disaster-related projects. Most student participants stated that the process was a great challenge to perform but one in which they became passionate about and learned an immense amount. The project shows how higher education can effectively incorporate “liberated” service-learning and community-based research (Stoecker, 2016). Most notably, educators can incorporate communitycentered curriculum as a mechanism to achieve student-centered learning at each academic level. With growing climate change impacts, students of higher education must be trained to listen to and work alongside physically and socially vulnerable communities to co-collect local scaled data to fully understand heightened risks.

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Acknowledgment We would like to thank Nasir Ghariabeh, Marccus Hendricks, Ryun Jung Lee, Saima Musharrat, Galen Newman, Garett Sansom, and Shannon Van Zandt for their support.

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CHAPTER 9

Integrated impact Jaimie Hicks Masterson

Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Community and university engagement process Identify the value proposition Recognize champions and discover leadership Invest in staff Establishing a core team and core faculty Connecting to a community task force and students Differences in partnerships Service-learning partnership Engaged research partnership Conclusion References

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To foster resilience and productive action, the IfSC amplifies the strengths of communities and universities through an integrated impact model (Fig. 9.1). As described in Chapter 8, promising strategies of student engagement and research grounded in the local context come from the theories of high-impact service-learning and engaged research (Meyer et al., 2018). Additionally, strategies for inclusive community engagement come from the philosophy of “collective impact” (Christens & Inzeo, 2015). In collective impact, a backbone organization (such as a university) coaches a community to effect change by establishing working groups of community members, or a task force. The IfSC’s philosophy around community engagement has evolved from collective impact and the inclusive plan-making process (Masterson et al., 2014). The IfSC joins these two approaches to effectively engage community members and students applied as “integrated impact.” The IfSC’s integrated impact approach leverages resources and processes to mobilize knowledge of the university and leverages resources and processes to mobilize action in the community. This chapter describes the IfSC’s community engagement process and university engagement process, or the ways in which we establish core teams and work with core faculty and then connect with a community task Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00009-1

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Figure 9.1  Integrated impact.

force and students.We describe the differences in community partnerships when projects are engaged research versus high-impact service-learning.

Community and university engagement process Before beginning the community engagement process, a few key considerations need to take place. To meaningfully establish partnerships, particularly with communities, universities must be invited to the community in order to start conversations, form relationships, and, hopefully, through time, establish partnerships. Developing a community partnership requires more than identifying a partner, as often described in the literature and by funders (Conrad & Daoust, 2007). Ultimately, the university must be invited to the community. If communities do not ask for help, leave them alone! In order to receive an invitation from a community, the university should reflect on the following: (1) the university has something to offer and can articulate a value-add from the community-perspective, (2) there is a champion in the community with a track record of success, and (3) there is university staff with the time to coordinate the effort and maintain relationships.

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Identify the value proposition The first step a university can take prior to beginning an engagement process is to identify what makes you credible to different groups. Ask yourself: what is the value proposition? What do I have that can benefit the community? What skills or resources do I have to bring to the table? A university should add value to a community and becomes credible as it demonstrates success, applies data-driven approaches, builds community capacity, names community assets, and invests time and people-power. The following are examples of what a community may value when working with a university. Demonstrating success First, know how your university is perceived by different groups and audiences. Corburn (2005) describes that “trust in experts must be found through external markers of credibility” (p. 67). A university’s reputation and/or track record can be leveraged to provide legitimacy for communities. A university will be seen as credible when there is a track record of success in working with other communities or on specific projects that have brought accolades to a community. For example, our work with Liberty County, TX, resulted in a state professional planning award from the Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association and later a national award in resiliency planning from the American Planning Association. A university’s success is a community’s success and a community’s success is a university’s success. Other community partners used these awards to demonstrate the value of our relationship and the work produced (Table 9.1). Even if your university center, program, or institute cannot point to specific or immediate accomplishments, your institution has a brand that demonstrates success in different ways to different audiences. For instance, in rural communities, Texas A&M University (TAMU) (as a land grant college) has more than a century-old trusted and established history. Inversely, TAMU can be perceived differently in more urban communities. Instead, our legitimacy comes from being a Tier One Research institution with rigorous scientific methodology, data collection, and analyses.These markers of credibility add value to and for communities. Applying data-driven approaches Rigorous scientific methodology and data-driven approaches are key attributes for adding value to products developed for communities. A university adds value when it investigates and understands existing conditions in a community. It can justify and legitimize community efforts by providing an

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Table 9.1  Service-learning project awards. Regional or state National

Community and servicelearning project

2015 Central Texas Chapter of APA Student Project Award 2015 Honorable Mention for TX-APA Student Project Award 2016 TX-ASLA Merit Award

X

La Grange Housing Needs Assessment

X

La Grange Housing Needs Assessment

X

2016 H-GAC Project Showcase: Outreach

X

Manchester Neighborhood; Grey to Green: For Healthy Communities Manchester Neighborhood; Neighborhood Detox: Enhancing Resilience in a Hazard Vulnerable Area Manchester Neighborhood; Neighborhood Detox: Enhancing Resilience in a Hazard Vulnerable Area Manchester Neighborhood; Idle Grounds: Maximizing Resiliency in the Urban Landscape League City; Climate Change Armor

Award

2016 National ASLA Honor Award: Student Community Service Category 2016 TX-ASLA Honor Award 2017 National ASLA Honor Award: Analysis and Planning Category 2017 TX-ASLA Honor Award 2017 TX-ASLA Award of Excellence 2017 TX-ASLA Honor Award 2017 TX-APA Student Project Award 2017 TX-APA Current Planning Award 2017 TX-APA Student Project Award Honorable Mention 2018 CELA Student Award for Creative Scholarship 2018 TX-ASLA Honor Award

X

X

X X

League City; Climate Change Armor League City; Nature as Catalyst League City; Re.S.T.O.R.E

X X X

Sunnyside Neighborhood Reclaiming Vacancies Liberty County Strategic Plan Grimes County Thoroughfare Plan

X X X X

League City; Climate Change Armor League City; Wetland P.R.I.D.E

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Table 9.1  Service-learning project awards. (Cont.) Regional or state National

Community and servicelearning project

2018 TX-ASLA Award of Excellence

X

2018 HGAC Our Great Region: The Opportunity Award Category 2018 TX-ASLA Honor Award

X

Sunnyside Neighborhood; Resilience through Regeneration Sunnyside Neighborhood; Resilience through Regeneration Sunnyside Neighborhood; Protecting Home: Strategies to Prevent Gentrification Liberty County Strategic Plan

Award

2019 National APA Silver Achievement Award in Resiliency Planning

X X

outside and unbiased technical expertise.A university’s technical expertise can help a community develop an actionable agenda and act on it. For instance, faculty and students can gather and analyze national datasets as well as collect localized data that would otherwise never be utilized or created. The IfSC applies valid research methodologies to collect localized data that are often not available. We do this with students and community members through high-impact service-learning and citizen science techniques. To start, we typically conduct a State of Community Report that compiles US Census data, the American Community Survey, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and so forth to describe trends in population, demographics, industries, land cover, etc. While such data are public and available, many communities do not have the time or capacity to collect and interpret that information. We also conduct a hazard vulnerability spatial analysis, overlaying map layers of hazards (such as floodplains, surge zones, hazardous material sites, etc.), physical vulnerabilities (such as locations of critical facilities, or hospitals, schools, police and fire facilities, etc.), and indicators of social vulnerabilities (such as single parent households, dependent populations, renters, English language proficiency, race and ethnicity, etc.) to identify hotspots (Masterson et al., 2014). The university can document issues and validate many of the things community members perceive through their lived experiences. Building community capacity A university can provide data, but its job is not to provide all the answers. Instead, universities provide, interpret, and visualize data so communities

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can find and think through their own solutions, thereby adding to and building capacity. Corburn (2005) also identifies the mobilization of residents as a key value proposition institution that can help provide for communities. In this role, the university can be an unbiased convener or meeting facilitator on behalf of the community. University staff, faculty, and students can listen to community concerns and help organize the information they are hearing back to community. Just as in community coaching, universities help draw out what is already present in the community.When data-driven approaches are paired with community-identified concerns, a holistic understanding on community needs emerges and can help communities to get to action. Highlighting community assets Universities add value when they highlight the existing assets present in the community. Just as in community development, universities can help (not lead) the community to discover and amplify solutions that already exist. In many of the communities we work with, it is easy to get stuck and focus on the data which may reveal a laundry list of community problems. Instead, we find that when a community is in a rut, it is far more effective to replace this negativity with stories that speak to strengths and opportunities.This asset-based community development approach is not new (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003) and communities can overcome challenges if assets are identified and mobilized (Haines, 2009). A common practice is to develop an SWOT analysis, to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Instead, we focus on the SO, the strengths, and opportunities. Alternative nomenclature such as “assets and capacities” or “opportunities and constraints” is also utilized. With the community, we can name the assets (in time, talent, treasures, etc.) that can be leveraged and invested to get to action. Investing time and people Finally, universities add value to communities by the sheer number of faculty and students involved. For example, a class of 12 students can work as much as 1600 hours in one semester for a community. Some of our projects have included as many as 200 students, or roughly 20,000 hours of work. Time and people-power are often a missing component in low-capacity communities. The community benefits when universities invest time and people to translate large amounts of data and information that point to quick, nimble, or shorter-term interventions. Coincidentally, communities

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also add value to students through such real-world projects where they are able to interact with clients, understand their values and needs, as described in Chapter 8.

Recognize champions and discover leadership The second step a university can take prior to community engagement is to recognize community champions and uncover or discover leadership capabilities in the community (Apaliyah, Martin, Gasteyer, Keating, & Pigg, 2012; Conrad & Daoust, 2007). Universities can recognize champions by first getting the lay of the land across a community or region. It is important to know the landscape of community groups that are already doing work. When you do get an invitation it will give you a better sense of who is inviting you and why.When the IfSC began thinking about issues within the Houston region, we developed a mental map of key groups already working at the intersection of hazards. The Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.) quickly floated to the top of the list as an active and longstanding organization working on reducing community exposure to hazards. We began learning about their work and used our university staff community development and disaster network to introduce ourselves to them. A community champion must have their ear to the ground and understand community concerns, while also being able to influence decisionmaking. A community champion is able to connect to other stakeholders and community members and is a trusted leader that has legitimacy among different groups. For example, in Liberty County, TX, the county extension agent was a community linchpin. She worked with all types of people of various incomes, ethnicities, and ages. She was able to wear many hats, which ranged from running the 4-H youth program to helping ranchers evacuate cattle during a flood event. She would laugh that she had so many keys on her key ring to different community facilities, offices, and churches, but it was an indicator of the level of trust she had in the county.The county judge, which is a quasi-judicial position and executor of the county, called her his “Texas tornado” because she would “blow him away” by all that she was able to accomplish. She was trusted because she was known for action, getting things done, and helping people. So when she was asked to convene county stakeholders to initiate the county’s first strategic plan, community members showed up, participated, and truly engaged in the project. She worked alongside Prairie View A&M (an HBCU) extension agents which provided additional credibility and trust within the black community. This

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connection is important, because a champion should be able to translate, communicate, and interpret information and knowledge from residents to researchers and vice versa. When working with community members that lack power in society, depending on ethnicity, class, and other factors, different groups have their own set of codes, verbal and nonverbal forms of communication and sets of “norms, values, and expectations for behavior” (Corburn, 2005, p. 65). Community champions can navigate communication styles and lessen the interpretation burden on residents. Gaining trust with this community champion will also go a long way to make you credible to different groups. For example, because of our relationship with t.e.j.a.s., they introduced the IfSC to Furr High School (FHS), another active group working in the community. Because we were working alongside high school students from the community, our trust continued to grow with residents. One instance, while collecting data in Sunnyside,TX (a marginalized community in Southeastern Houston), a hostile community member approached the research team. Researchers called our community champion with Charity Productions (an organization currently serving 60 distressed neighborhoods) and though he was not able to meet on site, he asked another trusted community member to assist. Upon his arrival the situation diffused when the community member understood our connection to the community organization.

Invest in staff The third step a university can take prior to community engagement is to invest in staff.The IfSC manages “high-touch” partnerships with communities and within the university by investing in university staff. High-touch (rather than high-tech) is a term used in community development that focuses on more face-to-face interactions. University staff are positioned to build trusted relationships and manage partnerships, externally within the community and internally within the university. Just as backbone organizations in collective impact (Raderstrong & Boyea-Robinson, 2016), university staff provide overall project management, data management, facilitation, and coordinate the interaction of the community with the university. University staff work effectively with communities by: • Building trusted relationships • Facilitating meetings • Envisioning a shared community future • Fostering civic governance through outreach efforts • Translating technical information for layperson audience

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• Coordinating projects with faculty and subject matter experts • Collecting and/or managing community data • Communicating regularly with community partners (email, phone, inperson) • Sitting down with community members if there is a need to discuss things more • Inviting community partners to campus for feedback, critiques, and presentations with students • Attending other community meetings or events as an observer or participant when asked by community • Debriefing meetings with all engagement staff and community partners University staff work effectively with faculty and subject matter experts by: • Codesigning courses to meet student learning outcomes • Codesigning research projects to refine hypotheses and methods • Translating community needs to faculty and students • Conducting cultural competency training • Coordinating projects with communities • Reviewing and refining deliverables • Disseminating faculty-collected data to the community • Debriefing meetings with all engagement staff, community partners, and faculty The IfSC manages strong relationships by partnering with other groups, programs, and organizations with shared missions and goals by providing campus program staff and community-embedded staff. Campus program staff provide overall project management and, specifically, facilitate high-impact service-learning and engaged research by managing relationships with faculty and students. The IfSC, along with the Texas Target Communities Program (TXTC), have a long tradition of service-learning projects in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning. Communityembedded program staff facilitate the collective impact process and manage relationships with each neighborhood. In partnership with Texas Sea Grant and Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, the IfSC is bridging an important gap to maintain high-touch relationships over the long-term by embedding university or extension staff in the community. Community-embedded staff facilitate the collective impact process and manage relationships with a core team and task force. Campus program staff facilitate the high-impact service learning and engaged research process and manage relationships with faculty and students.

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Establishing a core team and core faculty Once the university identifies its value proposition to communities, recognizes community champions, and invests in university staff, it can begin to engage with community leaders and faculty for integrated impact. Core team Our community engagement approach is co-led by the community partner and university. Within collective impact, a backbone organization first organizes with working group chairs, or a core team which includes two to three people responsible for seeing the project to completion (Masterson et al., 2014). Those recognized community champions and leaders are likely those that will be on the core team. The core team works closely with the university engagement staff and is typically composed of community staff personnel (or staff of whichever organization you are partnering with). Strong leadership by dedicated community staff provides continuity, elevates the project’s importance, provides authority to convene stakeholders, and yields public support. Core team members have included municipal staff, extension agents, and influential community champions. These champions are not financially influential, but, to many, are trusted leaders. It is important to identify and label the core team members on the community side ahead of time. Also, always establish regular biweekly calls as well as preferred time slots in the event regular meetings that need to be rescheduled. In our initial conversations we go through a community partner workbook which describes the process in full. We describe general information about working with faculty and students. Communication is coordinated through staff, instead of faculty and students, to avoid overwhelming partners with calls and emails. We explain that partners will need to orient students, particularly international students, with cultural or locally contextual information. We describe the semester schedule of courses and the faculty and student turnover that occurs and the need to reorient new faculty and students each semester to community needs and concerns. Even though we document the community engagement process, we find students still need hands-on experiences, tours, and face-to-face interactions with the core team. We explain that meeting dates and times need to accommodate the semester schedule, though we make every effort to prioritize the community’s schedules first. Unfortunately, students complete courses at specific times, and whatever is left undone could very well not get done if not effectively organized and folded into course content and schedules. To facilitate

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communication and coordination, we use online project management software (e.g., Basecamp, Slack, Trello, etc.) and provide tutorials to partners to help with their ease of use. To begin to understand the local context, we give the core team a checklist of data and plans to provide if applicable. We also ask core team members to name specific city staff and stakeholders to get an initial lay of the land and understand some of the local context before we dive deep into the projects. We have used those lists to conduct questionnaires and interviews with staff and stakeholders to further understand the range of community needs. We also ask the core team to identify meeting venues to accommodate not only smaller meetings, but also larger public meetings that could hold roughly 100–200 people (of community members, faculty, and students), check technology requirements and functionality, and coordinate refreshments at meetings. We also ask that core team members promote public meetings and utilize external communication channels. The core team works with the university staff to: • Plan meeting agendas • Coordinate meeting logistics (room setup, food, technology needs, etc.) • Commit to biweekly meetings • Commit to additional work and tasks up to 5 hours per week • Explain the process, report on progress, and translate results to key decision-makers in the community Core faculty Collective impact, though developed and applied within a community context, can also be applied within the university. Collective impact, and our “inclusive plan-making process” (see Fig. 9.2), align with, and is parallel to, how universities work with and engage faculty and students. Just as we set up a core team within the community, we also organize faculty that are ready and willing to be a part of an integrated impact approach.The faculty are also champions of the project on campus and to students. Faculty champions have strong leadership skills, inspire students, and share the broader vision and purpose of the project. Strong leadership by dedicated faculty provides continuity, elevates the project’s importance, and yields campus support. We conduct a faculty orientation meeting at the beginning of the project or semester to describe the process.Topics include data management and file storage (e.g., Google Drive, Microsoft Office Online), student deliverable expectations, and expectations for cultural competency and respect as

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Figure 9.2  Inclusive plan-making process. Data from: Masterson et al., 2014.

described in Chapter 8. We go through our community covenant, which describes the expectations for ethical, cultural, and scholarly principles when engaging community partner (described in more detail later and see Appendix). We ask faculty to sign a faculty agreement that documents key points within the faculty orientation meeting (see Appendix). University staff play a critical role in alleviating the logistical, coordination, and time pressures often associated with community work. University staff can also help faculty with course development and syllabus design, if requested. Some good practices within a syllabus include building in community meetings as a participation grade (we recommend 15%) as well as the specific products developed for community meetings, such as posters,

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models, booklets, and all data and files produced. Staff can also help write grant proposals where community engagement is built in. This university infrastructure goes a long way to support faculty that have research and writing expectations for tenure and promotion. Good practices for course structuring: • Build deliverables into the syllabus as a grade (i.e., chapters, posters, handouts, brochures, attendance at meetings, meeting materials, etc.) • Build reflection into assignments • Build the final presentation into the syllabus as a grade • Establish a structured rubric for group assignments so all are held accountable • Peer reviews throughout semester can keep groups accountable • Internal memos (documenting regularly) can help summarize work progress for community partners • Phase deadlines so partner sees progress and can provide feedback • Build final archival packet in as grade (see Archival Instructions)

Connecting to a community task force and students In collective impact, a backbone organization (like the university) organizes the core team, or working group chair, to then coach a working group of community members or a task force. After establishing a core team, the second step is to connect to the community task force. The task force, also referred to as a working group, steering committee, other names, acts as a conduit to broader community input guiding the planning process. We expect the task force members to represent and report back to different communities, agencies, or other groups within the community. The task force informs and validates each step of the process and therefore the final product. We seek active and willing partners as task force members. Active refers to their track record and level of involvement in the community. It could mean a track record of community organizing, planning efforts, coordinating and convening diverse stakeholders, or other indicators of success. Willing refers to their desire to participate.We cannot expect all community members to participate in community change efforts and processes. When they are willing, you can move forward to develop community covenants and memorandums of understanding. Fig. 9.3 describes the continuum of “active and willing.”We find that a community is composed of three groups of people. First, the “movers and shakers” are those in the community with wealth, power, or access to resources (e.g., business owners, large land

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Figure 9.3  Continuum of active and willing partners. Credit from: MDC, Inc.

owners, elected officials). The movers and shakers are the typical attendees that participate in community meetings. For a more participatory approach, we strive to seek those that may be considered “moved and shaken” or those that may lack power in the community and may feel disconnected (e.g., unemployed, low income). In order to tap into this group we seek out the middle third or those community members trusted by the moved and shaken and the movers and shakers (e.g., pastors, nonprofit leaders, local government staff, teachers, etc.). Of these three groups, we seek those that are willing and interested to participate. To assemble the task force, we seek a diverse group of community members, roughly 8–12 people, to provide guidance and feedback during the project. The planning task force represents various communities within the community (whether by neighborhood, interest or stake, age, race, culture, etc.) and acts as a conduit to communicate progress of the comprehensive plan, as well as the hopes and desires of the community.The participation of diverse stakeholders (not self-selected or with the elite) is meant to be multidimensional, not one-way communication, where we coevolve together (Innes & Booher, 2004). The task force strengthens the team’s capacity with their time, interest, ability, resources, or networks. We expect the task force to include different ages, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. The task force can also be influential in rallying the community around the project and developing community initiatives.The goals of the task force are to establish or affirm a community-wide vision, or the mental picture, for the future of the city, identifies community assets, strengths, and opportunities for expansion or growth, and determines community goals and priorities. The task force signs a contract (see Appendix) where they commit to monthly meetings approximately 1.5 hours each, during the duration of the project, to

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communicate with the group, and communicate progress with other community members and advocate for their interests. The task force with the core team takes time in the first few meetings to establish the culture of the work group and establish ground rules which come from Schwarz’s rules for effective working groups (Schwarz, 1994). Typically we do this by starting with a kick-off meeting to describe the project that will take place and invite community members to participate on the task force. This helps generate excitement in the community, inform community members of the public participatory process, seek participation from willing (but not always active) community members, and establish a culture of transparency and inclusivity. It also allows the university to validate initial data collected and begin to learn about community concerns and assets. An important outcome of the diverse makeup of the task force is an opportunity to build new or strengthen existing professional or personal networks (Innes & Booher, 2004; Innes, Gruber, Neuman, & Thompson, 1994). The monthly meetings and coming together to address community needs, funding shared goals, hopes and dreams for the community can build trust and social capital among groups that may have once been at odds within the community. Purposefully bringing these groups together, though sometimes difficult, goes a long way to long-term community change for after the project timeline. A list of possible stakeholders to include in the task force and process is including in the Appendix along with an example list of a task force from Liberty County. Connecting to students Collective impact, though developed and applied within a community context, can also be applied within the university and is parallel to engaging faculty and students. As in the community, the core team connects with the broader public to establish a task force. With high-impact service-learning and engaged research, university staff work with faculty to engage students (see Fig. 9.1). In the end, the students are the key stakeholder group within the university, with the potential to leverage the learning process and apply the knowledge and skills within a community. Ultimately, student learning and engagement can yield innovative ideas and fresh ways of doing things that community’s desire. While students are not always aware that they will be a part of a service-learning course, they are still a working group expected to produce deliverables. Both task force members and students produce deliverables, provide feedback and specialized information, and offer recommendations

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for advancing the final output’s quality. While a community task force signs a contract and sets ground rules for expectations and commitment, for students, expectations are provided within the syllabus. It is powerful when community members (whether the task force or the public) interact with the students. As discussed in Chapter 8, students desire input and feedback from the community and want experiences with real interactions. A by-product of working on wicked problems with community members is leadership skills and a passion to effect change alongside and with the community.

Differences in partnerships We have come to recognize that not all community partnerships are equal. As an IfSC, we broker relationships with community partners and connect communities to resources on campus. Some partnerships emerge to provide specific requested deliverables, what we refer to as a service-learning partnership. Other partnerships emerge to address localized data collection needs and research, or an engaged research partnership. We describe these two forms of partnerships and articulate the differences in their purpose, goals, project focus, as well as infrastructure, such as formal agreements and funding structure (Table 9.2).

Service-learning partnership Service-learning has been used as an experiential learning model in colleges and universities for several decades. Jacoby (1996) described service-learning where “students engage in activities that address human and community needs together with structured opportunities intentionally designed to promote student learning and development” (p. 5) and emphasized reflection and reciprocity as key to its success. Service-learning, while similar to other community-centered approaches, is primarily focused on student education, where research is oftentimes a secondary focus. Service-learning partnerships have a very specific intent that is project- and task-oriented. Communities invite the university to assist with specific deliverables, such as a plan, design, report, study, etc. Oftentimes, the community partnership is with a government body or municipality, but not always. Universities will also often partner with companies or nonprofit organizations. For the community engagement approach, the IfSC uses the inclusive plan-making process (Fig. 9.2; Masterson et al., 2014). The inclusive planmaking process is our interpretation and adaptation of collective impact. Just

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Table 9.2  Types of community partnerships. Service-learning partnership

Engaged research partnership

Invited by community for specific deliverables (i.e., plan, design, report, study) Project intent: Specific Goal: To accomplish tasks for particular community outcomes

Invited by community for localized research needs

University focus: Primary: service-learning in courses Secondary: research Outline expectations in: Memorandum of understanding Community engagement: Inclusive plan-making process, coled by partner and university Funding: Community investment to support travel, meals, student interns, material, supplies, student scholarships, faculty stipends, additional staff time, staff on soft money, etc. Example partnerships: Liberty County, City of Nolanville

Project intent: Exploratory Goals: To establish a long-term relationship To establish a desire to work together on future projects University focus: Primary: research Secondary: service-learning in courses Outline expectations in: Community covenant Community engagement: Designed and led by community partner Funding: Grants applied by and awarded to university or community partner

Example partnerships: Charity Productions, t.e.j.a.s., Furr HS, Jones Futures Academy

as in collective impact, the process first organizes a core team of community partners and, second, connects to a task force of community members and the broader public. The service-learning projects and courses perform the remaining steps (assess, envision, prioritize, implement, and monitor) of the inclusive plan-making process.The principle task of faculty and students are to assess, gather, and analyze data pertaining to the project. Then, the core team and task force interactively engage the public to envision future possibilities for the community.Typically, we stress at least four facilitated public community meetings spread throughout a project to emphasize the iterative feedback loop of investigation and community input. A full inclusive plan-making process takes two full semesters and typically 15 months in total. Once we develop a vision and set goals with the community, faculty

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and students assist by identifying a range of promising strategies to help the community prioritize different futures. Faculty and students then offer ways to implement recommendations by identifying manageable tasks and action steps. All of this is organized into a document or series of documents that the core team refines and then identifies a monitoring strategy as the community takes the product and implements it over the courses of several years. Service-learning partnerships formalize an agreement with a memorandum of understanding (MOU). The specific deliverables, scope, and expectations are outlined in a Memorandum of Understanding The MOU embeds the language of the inclusive plan-making process into the scope of work. The MOU also specifies funding requirements the partner commits to. Unlike, engaged research partnerships, service-learning partnerships expect communities to have some skin in the game and a degree of investment in themselves.The costs associated with these projects are used to support travel, meals, materials, supplies, student interns, student scholarships, faculty stipends, additional staff time, and some staff salaries that are on soft money. From 2013 to 2018, the IfSC and TXTC worked with 30 communities in almost 50 courses, with nearly 100 faculty members and 600 students. In that time, TXTC has authentically engaged communities by facilitating nearly 100 community meetings to ground place-based strategies that fit the local context. Examples of partnerships that fall in the service-learning partnership model include Liberty County and City of Nolanville described in Chapter 8.

Engaged research partnership When the IfSC was launched in 2016, the interdisciplinary team of faculty and staff already had the community engagement framework of the inclusive plan-making process within which to work. We began to recognize partnerships emerging with differing intent and goals. The IfSC also saw a need to evolve our community engagement framework to best suit research. The approach of the IfSC evolved from the framework of the inclusive plan-making process and TXTC’s tradition of community engagement. We find that the engaged research projects work less with municipalities or local governments and more with nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, neighborhood organizations, and civic clubs.Typically, the projects are more exploratory and have less concrete deliverables. At first, the relationship is more exploratory as the university is invited to the community to learn

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about localized community concerns and because there might not be a clear path forward. Sometimes the community needs a tailored approach. Such projects often do not fit nicely within a series of courses and require a more scientific and research focus. IfSC scholars also share a fundamental belief that early engagement of community partners to identify areas of concern and the most appropriate methods of collaboration is critical for transformative progress in reducing the impacts of hazards, climate change, poverty, and other issues related to critical or unmet needs. In the engaged research partnership, the community engagement process is led by the community partner. With collective impact and the inclusive plan-making process as the framework, it is modified and adapted for the partner’s needs. First, we organize a core team who help articulate research objectives, intellectual properties, and desired outcomes. Because the work is not a specific plan, report, study, sometimes a task force of community members is not necessary or used in the same way. Instead, the community partner of the core team is the lynchpin and community champion to identify when and where engagement needs to happen. The broader audience might be high school students, a civic club, or a quarterly community breakfast gathering. With these groups, we have trained and involved community members as a task force in data collection, manipulation, presentation, and interpretation. Community partners are already active in their community and have processes and networks they already utilize and work with. Instead of generating a new group and new process, we work within the community’s networks, groups, and processes. Additionally, instead of a formal contractual agreement, in the engaged research partnership, the university and community partners sign a community covenant. This document serves as a guide for the IfSC to ensure it upholds the highest ethical, cultural, and scholarly principles when engaging community partners. In addition, this document explicitly outlines a bundle of expectations community partners may hold the IfSC accountable to, as well as the expectations the IfSC has of its community partners. The community covenant identifies the roles and responsibilities of the IfSC, including faculty, staff, and students, and community partners. Within the engaged research partnership, funding is not an expectation of the community partner. Instead faculty and Discovery Initiative Leads within the IfSC fold community projects and needs into grant proposals and build in a small about funding support for community partner coordination and support. Examples of partnerships that fall in the engaged research partnership include Charity Productions, t.e.j.a.s., and FHS, described in Chapter 7.

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Conclusion If a university seeks to engage faculty and students in authentic community engagement, then they can utilize the IfSC’s integrated impact approach. Integrated impact seeks to effectively tap into the assets and potential of communities, faculty, and students alike. Academic institutions can set themselves up for success by identifying the value they add to a community and recognizing key community champions. The chapter described strategies to organize a core community team and core team of faculty, as well as, strategies for connecting to community members that are willing and active and connecting to students. Additionally, the chapter defined the differences in partnerships with communities, whether service-learning partnership or engaged research partnership. In Chapter 9, we describe ethical principles of community engagement.

References Apaliyah, G. T., Martin, K. E., Gasteyer, S. P., Keating, K., & Pigg, K. (2012). Community leadership development education: promoting civic engagement through human and social capital. Community Development, 43(1), 31–48. Christens, B. D., & Inzeo, P. T. (2015). Widening the view: situating collective impact among frameworks for community-led change. Community Development, 46(4), 420–435. Conrad, C., & Daoust, T. (2007). Community-based monitoring frameworks: increasing the effectiveness of environmental stewardship. Environmental Management, 41, 358–366. Corburn, J. (2005). Street science: Community knowledge and environmental health justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haines, A. (2009). Asset-based community development. In R. Phillips, & R. H. Pittman (Eds.), An introduction to community development (pp. 38–48). New York, NY: Routledge. Innes, J. E., Gruber, J., Neuman, M., & Thompson, R. (1994). Coordinating growth and environmental management through consensus building. CPS Report: A Policy Research Program Report. University of California, Berkley: California Policy Seminar, p. 270. Innes, J., & Booher, D. (2004). Reframing public participation strategies for the 21st century. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(4), 419–436. Jacoby, B. (1996). Foundations and principles of service-learning (Chapter 1) in servicelearning in higher education: Concepts and practices. In Jacoby, Barbara & Associates (Ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Masterson, J. H., Peacock, W. G., Van Zandt, S., Grover, H., Schwarz, L., & Cooper, J. T., Jr. (2014). Planning for community resilience: A handbook for reducing vulnerabilities to disasters. Washington, DC: Island Press. Mathie, A., & Cunningham, G. (2003). From clients to citizens: asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice, 13(5), 474–486. Meyer, M., Hendricks, M., Newman, G., Horney, J., Berke, P., Masterson, J., Sansom, G., Cousins, T., Van Zandt, S., & Cooper, J. (2018). Participatory action research: tools for disaster resilience education. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment, 9(4/5), 402–419. Raderstrong, J., & Boyea-Robinson, T. (2016). The why and how of working with communities through collective impact. Community Development, 49(2), 181–193. Schwarz, R. M. (1994). Ground rules for groups. Training & Development, 48(8), 45–52.

CHAPTER 10

Ethics of community-based research Jaimie Hicks Mastersona, John T. Cooper Jr.b

Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA Texas A&M University, Office of Public Partnership and Outreach, College Station, USA

a

b

Chapter outline Introduction Participation rules of thumb First, who designs projects? Second, who holds the knowledge? Third, who benefits? Finally, who stays? Conclusion References

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Introduction Community members and their communities benefit by participation in research, citizen science, and service-learning, such as through increased education and scientific literacy (Conrad & Hilchey, 2011) and environmental stewardship.While these are important community gains, many communities in most need of localized data, such as environmental justice communities, are distrustful of researchers (Reardon, 1998; Ross & Stoecker, 2016), do not participate (Conrad & Daoust, 2008), and are frustrated that research does not always benefit the community in the same way that universities benefit (Reardon, 1998). A very common method of universities and the method of extension have been to transfer university knowledge down to community members and local practitioners (Stoecker, 2016). In fact, there continues to be a lack of research that moves from “paternalistic notions of ‘knowledge transfer’ to communities, to a more collaborative paradigm of ‘knowledge creation with communities” (Scull & Cuthill, 2010, p. 62). Most challenges of community-based research have focused on methodology and validity of data collection and data use (Conrad & Hilchey, 2011), but the literature often glosses over the ethical challenges researchers encounter engaging diverse stakeholders. Ultimately, universities should not “exacerbate, Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00010-8

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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the emotional trauma of oppression, exclusion, and exploitation” (Ross & Stoecker, 2016, p. 7). To foster a more ethical approach and limit negative community impacts, we describe the rules of thumb researchers can use to coproduce projects with residents, engage residents (providing examples of citizen science and service-learning approaches), and make lasting connections with residents.

Participation rules of thumb The principles of community-based research and intentionally engaging community members in research are not new (Conrad & Daoust, 2008; Corburn, 2005; Stoecker, 2016). As researchers, how do we build trust and deepen relationships in a culturally competent way? In order to develop trust, researchers must listen to community needs and codesign projects around such needs. Though developing trust and strong partnerships is the most time-intensive component of communitybased research, if researchers and universities take time to focus on the community, the rest of the work is much easier (Sirianni, 2009). There are core principles of public participation in government that can be extended to research and university–community partnerships. For instance, the planning literature’s most referenced article describes a “ladder of citizen power” (Arnstein, 1969). Public participation depends on levels of power citizens have, which range from (1) nonparticipation in the forms of manipulation and therapy, (2) tokensim in the forms of informing, consultation, and placation, to (3) citizen power in the forms of partnerships, delegation, Table 10.1  Citizen participation in community-based research. Ladder of Citizen Participation (Arnstein, 1969)

CITIZEN POWER

TOKENISM NON PARTICIPATION

Levels of University Community Engagement

Researchers should strive to develop partnerships and promote citizen delegation of research needs for ethical communitybased research Some research informs communities and some consult with communities, but all research design comes from researchers Most research falls here, where researchers do not seek community participation, may only study the community and may seek to educate them

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and citizen control (Arnstein, 1969) (see Table 10.1). This ladder of citizen power extends beyond governance to research approaches in communities. Traditionally, researchers study communities with nonparticipation of community members. At best, community-based research has achieved tokenism by consulting with communities on research projects, where researchers formulate research questions, develop hypotheses and test methods with little input from the community. It is rare to see power imbalances shift toward citizens in research where there are differences in status, access to resources, education, and so on. To follow Arnstein’s model of participation, researchers should strive to develop true partnerships and even move toward delegation, where citizens have decision-making authority over research and delegate tasks to the institution for a more ethical approach in community research. As such, community members should participate and have a say in the research of their community (Corburn, 2005; Stoecker, 2016). To put it another way, Conrad and Hilchey describe four forms of participatory governance: consultative, or the public provides information to a central authority; functional, where the public is engaged in implementing decisions; collaborative, where the public works collaboratively with government in decision making; and transformative, where the public “make(s) and implement(s) decisions with support from” experts “where needed” (Conrad & Hilchey, 2011). If we extend these participatory governance forms to research, universities have often conducted research in a more consultative manner, instead of more collaborative and transformational approaches to meaningfully conduct community-based research. Nonparticipation in government is so culturally pervasive that public participation typically only occurs because it is required (Innes & Booher, 2004). While university–community partnerships are not the same as government–citizen relationships, the literature provides insight into best practices for more inclusive participation methods (see Table 10.2). Table 10.2 points to linkages between participatory governance benefits and participatory research benefits. For instance, participatory governance can facilitate decision makers understanding of public needs, improve decisions, advance fairness and justice, provide validation in decisions, and additionally, build civil society and create “an adaptive, self-organizing polity capable of addressing wicked problems in an informed and effective way” (Innes & Booher, 2004, p. 423). Replace “decision makers” for “researchers” and universities can foster numerous community benefits. Researchers can benefit from greater community participation because they will understand localized needs, identify new scientific questions worth exploring, improve

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Table 10.2  Benefits of participatory governance and research. Participatory Governance

Participatory Research

UNDERSTAND PUBLIC NEEDS IMPROVE DECISIONS ADVANCE FAIRNESS AND JUSTICE VALIDATE DECISIONS

Researchers understand locally driven scientific questions Researchers improve hypotheses Researchers advance fairness and justice by investigating community-identified concerns Researchers provide community-identified scientific research Researchers assist citizens through investigating community concerns Researchers codesign and coconduct with citizens, or citizens self-organize their own research

BUILD CIVIL SOCIETY SELF-ORGANIZING

Source: Adapted from Innes & Booher, 2004.

scientific hypotheses, advance fairness, and justice by investigating community-identified concerns, provide community-validated scientific research, and additionally, build a civil society where citizens investigate community concerns and promote self-organization where citizens design and conduct their own research. Such participation is a win-win scenario for communities and researchers. Community development literature also points to the need for increased participation and engaged citizens. Homan (2008) describes two types of communities, the benefit community and the action community. The benefit communities are those experiencing a problem and want change, typically those “researched.” The action community recognizes the problem and is willing to take action, typically advocacy groups and academics (Homan, 2008). Homan explains that benefit communities must give their consent and become active participants. Schwarz describes how groups can effectively work together by including people who have the “relevant information about the problem, its causes, its solutions, and potential effects”. Importantly, those affected directly can influence where a solution is implemented. Higher participation can foster more resilient communities better able to adapt to shocks, critical with a changing climate. Higher participation can refocus research on difficult and wicked problems as described in Chapter 2 (Innes & Booher, 2004). What are we doing here, if not to serve the public? Therefore community members need to be involved early and often in community-based research. Ask yourself, who is participating and how are they participating in the project? What voices are missing that can yield more collaboration? The

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following are a set of principles and questions to consider that academics and community partners can utilize to ensure ethical university–community partnerships and processes take place: Who designs projects, Who holds the knowledge, Who benefits, and Who stays?

First, who designs projects? In keeping with Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, researchers must ask, who designs projects? Corburn (2005) explains those that hold the power are those who “define problems, offer evidence, [are] heard, and design solutions” (Corburn, 2005, p. 64). While this power is usually held by researchers, many in participatory action research contest that those who experience the community are the most qualified to design and carry out the work (Homan, 2008). The university must involve community partners in the articulation of research objectives, intellectual properties, and desired outcomes, lest it be considered a form of charity (Stoecker, 2016). Additionally, the university should commit to train and involve community partners in data collection, interpretation, and presentation. In order for community members to codesign research projects, researchers and research projects must be pliable, or malleable to serve the community’s identified needs. Ridged projects designed top-down by researchers often do not fully capture localized issues or match organizational goals. In particular, when research is not malleable it often is not relevant to the community and it will not be trusted by the community. Because the institute sought to develop projects from the bottom-up, the institute researchers began attending community meetings. At one meeting, researchers explained their professional backgrounds on hazards, particularly as it relates to flooding and sea level rise. Community members were concerned about these issues, particularly as it related to inadequate infrastructure, but others were concerned about hazardous industrial facilities adjacent to the neighborhood and their impact on health.The institute and partners began codesigning projects to address these community-identified concerns. Because of these conversations, researchers shifted their focus and projects emerged around water sampling and conducting health surveys. In effect, projects should bend in order to meet community members where they are at. A malleable approach extends to service-learning projects. Faculty should design courses around community needs, not design community projects for courses. For instance, a planning capstone course that typically developed comprehensive or master plans shifted the course design in order

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to work with the Sunnyside neighborhood. Charity Productions had long believed that certain parts of Houston were underserved and neglected. Charity Productions asked the course to map different characteristics of social vulnerability across the Houston area to see if this pattern continued to hold true. In fact, that hunch, or more accurately, their local lived experience held true. Researchers can gain trust by validating and amplifying a community’s voice. Charity Productions uses these maps to communicate to the city the need for additional services. Other community-identified projects included, collecting data on the lack of sidewalks and infrastructure, mapping vacant parcels with crime data, and developing concepts to remediate an abandoned landfill reimagined as a community park. Instead of one-way talk, cocreating work means communicating in a common language and developing a dialogue (Innes & Booher, 2004). Communication differences among academics and community members can be significant. But malleability in community-based research extends to language. Researchers must be a kind of “translator”, able to disseminate highly technical information in a way that captures the most community members. Additionally, researchers should strive to listen to key language and interpret community concerns in order to inform research questions. Corburn describes how many minority communities must code switch and “carry the double burden of ‘translating’ their knowledge” about the community for professionals and researchers (2005, p. 65). The institute hired community engagement staff that could work with faculty members and assist with research translation and the dissemination of information and results. Additionally, Conrad and Daoust (2008) among others identify a lack of volunteer interest as a concern with community participation and citizen science projects (Legg & Nagy, 2006; Scull & Cuthill, 2010), but when “citizens” are driving the need for the “science,” residents want to participate. Participation is a natural consequence of cocreated initiatives, and a far better alternative to patriarchal strategies such as positive reinforcement and educational awareness about the value of a project (Legg & Nagy, 2006), both of which Arnstein’s ladder of citizen control would categorize as a level of nonparticipation. Oftentimes, participation occurs when there is an “emotional urge”. For example, our community partners in Houston were frustrated, depleted, and scared about the harm to their community by industrial facilities and decades of neglect and exploitation. Because the institute researchers molded projects around locally driven concerns, participation within community-based projects, service-learning projects, and citizen science projects were high (Sansom, 2016; Sansom et al., 2016, 2017).

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Second, who holds the knowledge? In keeping with Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, researchers must ask, who holds knowledge? Stoecker emphasizes that knowledge is not power (2016), but instead the “fuel” that moves the “truck” of power forward. Underserved communities hold different types of knowledge and often have limited power. Universities can listen to, understand, and learn from community knowledge in order to give communities power and foster community change. Therefore research teams of faculty, staff, and students must be respectful of local culture, customs, and knowledge. Instead of topdown education of community members (Innes & Booher, 2004), collaborative researchers will respect indigenous knowledge. While data gathered using scientific methods from formal sources is important to researchers (and communities), researchers should be willing to consider the contextual, anecdotal, or experiential knowledge of community partners. Citizens’ lived experiences, which can be expressed as a “set of narratives, tools, and practices located in a particular place, culture, or community” often tell a different story than what national and state datasets reveal (Corburn, 2005, p. 63). Residents offer a unique perspective on current community conditions and without them; the process is a “barren externalism”. For instance, community members are often first to detect environmental and ecosystem changes (Fabricius et al., 2007). The combination of rigorous scientific data and localized data can improve the quality of research and community-driven decisions (Innes & Booher, 2004) and amplify local expertise (Stoecker, 2016). Universities can validate community partner concerns and efforts when universities back and support their mission, because universities are buttressed by research and scientific data. To that end, sharing data between researchers and community members is critical, as well as joint fact finding. Both parties should question and validate existing data and discover new sources of data, all of which builds trust (Innes & Booher, 2004). About a year after Hurricane Harvey, one community had concerns about the accuracy of data because so much was affected—residents were displaced, jobs were not back, and schools had lower enrollment. Because typical datasets were not available, we relied heavily on residents to validate data. Additionally, data collected within communities should be co-owned and managed with community partners. Sharing may include providing community presentations and digital access to raw or manipulated data. Additionally, as soon as data collection is complete, preliminary findings should be returned to community partners via

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a research brief, community presentation, or access through online means. This type of dissemination should not preclude the publications of a peerreviewed manuscript at a later time.The institute has developed a set of data sharing guidelines on its website. The main point is that we are all learners together and we all become more knowledgeable through this process (Innes & Booher, 2004). Throughout the research process, young faculty and students quickly learned the value of indigenous knowledge. For instance, community members identified areas that often flooded, yet were not specified on maps. Partners described how runoff from a nearby abandoned landfill drained across a local street and into churches and homes. This allowed the team and citizen scientists to pinpoint areas to collect water samples and to assess drainage infrastructure. Respecting alternative knowledge comes from respect and appreciation for local culture. This kind of cultural competency is not always present in community-based research and service-learning. To ensure faculty and students are ready for an immersive community engaged experience, the institute has developed a few guiding principles considering concerned or potentially impacted groups, which may include different ethnic or minority groups and/or members of tribal nations. First, communication and community involvement should be sensitive to each group’s culture and languages. This may entail using multiple methods to communicate, such as sending out bilingual researchers and those with similar backgrounds to survey door-to-door. Second, faculty are instructed that community participation should not exclude any individual or group based on social or economic factors. Additionally, projects should not harm the equality of the community or environment. Treatment and communication with groups, including all university affiliates, should not discriminate or belittle the importance of the community. Finally, recommendations should consider all viewpoints affecting the community. Additionally, cultural competency training is made available through the TAMU Department of Multicultural Services. As an example, when an undergraduate landscape architecture studio course was tasked with generating design ideas to rethink floodprone streets, we were sensitive to cultural differences that may have existed between community members, faculty, and students and how preconceived notions might lead to fear, tension, misunderstanding or other counterproductive obstacles on both sides. Therefore prior to meeting community members or visiting the community, staff organized a cultural competency training in the classroom and

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invited community partners to interact with the institute in informal ways to build rapport. The training was an already available course on campus modified for the class.The faculty member now includes this training at the beginning of every class that works with communities. Within citizen science projects, we have learned that this is important not only for students, but also for faculty that may be less familiar engaging with community members.

Third, who benefits? When partnering with communities, workload must be reciprocal (Stoeckar, 2016). Research projects often place additional burdens of time and logistical planning on community members. Effective working groups understand that “processes that burn out members or that erode trust among members reduce their capability to work together on subsequent group tasks”. A reciprocal relationship means faculty members offer their time by attending additional community meetings beyond the scope of the project. For instance, FHS asked the research team to be present at several local events, such as a booth at a Saturday high school fair and at an Earth Day event in a local park. JFA identified a desire to start composting at the school and expressed interest in recording local history through an oral history project. The research team connected to other university experts and acted as a conduit to their organizational goals in the community. Charity Productions asked researchers to speak on a local radio station, attend large quarterly community breakfasts, and attend a community disaster preparedness field exercise. T.e.j.a.s. asked the research team to attend and present at several national environmental justice conferences. Additionally, after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the institute offered to cook food at a clothing drive in support of t.e.j.a.s. and the community we were working in. While these “asks” are not research and not explicitly a part of a funded project, all were critical to maintaining a relationship of reciprocity. By showing up and by participating in local events even though it did not directly align with research, the institute built and maintained trust. Such reciprocity also means sharing resources. Sharing resources can be in the form of writing grants, providing stipends to community partners for additional time and effort, and giving recognition as having made meaningful contributions to scholarly work. Researchers can gain credibility when they jointly write grants and coauthor publications with community partners. By identifying the partner organization as a contributor

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you increase their credibility and yours. Even if community partners do not coauthor work, it is always best to allow partners to review papers intended for submission to peer-reviewed journals, as well as popular press pieces, presentations, or other forms of communication intended for public view. Additionally, the institute makes a habit of providing files and data back to the community so they can take the information and use it ways that best suit them.This abides by the principle that we are about doing no harm and focused on growing capacity, not dependency. Additionally, another way to amplify a communities voice is for universities to introduce community partners to their own networks (Stoecker, 2016). While working with t.e.j.a.s., community engagement staff introduced them to on-campus network, such as the School of Public Health to discuss health impacts on the fenceline communities, the College of Engineering to discuss inadequate infrastructure, and others. Beyond campus, the institute connected t.e.j.a.s. to the Academy of Sciences, the Educational Partnership for Innovation in Communities Network, and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. When their stories are amplified, we as universities are collectively adding their “fuel” to the universities “truck”, moving forward the complex task of understanding and tackling wicked problems, encouraging change and action, and fostering more resilient communities. Most importantly, universities should practice stepping aside and letting community members take the spotlight. As a general rule, universities should only seek or assume the spotlight only when it benefits the community. Universities, faculty, and students must remember that “it is not about you.”Whenever possible, make the work about the community. Small considerations, such as placing the community logo or organization logo on work, instead of the university’s logo can be a powerful way of stepping aside. When universities apply for awards, it should only be on behalf of the community. This has been a slow lesson to learn, as many faculty and students are also looking for resume-building opportunities. Such small gestures are indicators of respect and reciprocity, and go a long way to building trust.

Finally, who stays? Community based research projects must be extendable and renewable. Communities are often tired of being studied by researchers that come and go (Scull & Cuthill, 2010). Innes and Booher (2004) recommended

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participatory governance with continuous public engagement instead of one-shot activities, which should be applied to university–community partnerships as well. Such extendable ways of working will offset many of the limitations identified in the literature, such as community research fatigue, higher participation, and valid data collection among citizen scientists (Scull & Cuthill, 2010). Scull and Cuthill (2010) identified that short research grants make it difficult to build trust and understanding. We do not seek one grant opportunity to work with community partners. In Sunnyside, the institute has been able to work on X grants and 14 service-learning projects over 4 years. In Manchester, the institute has been able to work on X grants and 12 service-learning projects over 5 years. Sometimes you may run out of resources before you reach your goals. In these cases, we agree with the community partner to temporarily set aside the work and come back to it later. To further extend the work of the institute, a collaborative effort with Texas Sea Grant Program and other entities was established after Hurricane Harvey to provide technical assistance in planning, outreach, and education to resource managers, land use planners, and emergency managers that deal with hazard mitigation and land use planning along the Texas coast. These planners in the field aim for communities to adopt high-quality plans to achieve locally defined visions of sustainable development, to increase resilience to natural and technological hazards, to monitor, enhance, and restore habitats and ecosystems, and leverage local and scientific knowledge in planning and other decision-making processes.There are several planners along the coast that support ongoing engagement and contact with institute partners. By investing in relationship building and greater face-to-face contact with institute staff we ensure adequate time needed to build trust. More often that not, our community partners seek action, not just information.The literature also describes the need to shift from “analytic and prescriptive advice” (Corburn, 2005, p. 69) to action (Ross & Stoecker, 2016; Stoecker, 2016; Stoecker, 2009). When we start from a participatory planning approach, getting to the action is much easier. For instance, community planning documents help identify specific actions communities can take in the short and long term and what collaborating partners are necessary to accomplish such tasks. The plans are critical for partners to pursue funding, because it documents the community-wide participatory approach to get at specific actions. Even when institute projects do not include planning processes or focus more on research, it is important to work with community partners to identify next steps they can take to move their cause forward.

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In all, we must be ready and willing to continue the work to achieve the expected goals and objectives identified. That means that we may need to work during summer breaks and spring breaks, because community problems do not take a break. If a project gets derailed or there are unforeseen factors that shift schedules and timelines, we must be ready when our partners need us. Even once we have achieved our goals and objectives as originally conceived, we need to be ready to take the next step if one is revealed to us in the process. If there is a logical next step to continue engagement and action, we should take it. We know that successful change is a verb, not a noun, and it cannot be delivered overnight, so we must be prepared to stay.

Conclusion Authentic engaged research and service-learning requires intentional ethical practices. As universities expand in their engagement with communities, we hope faculty, staff, and students apply ethical community engagement that buttresses a community’s own capacity for restoration and transformation toward resilience.

References Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4):216–224. Conrad, C. T., & Daoust, T. (2008). Community-based monitoring frameworks: Increasing the effectiveness of Environmental Stewardship. Environmental Management, 41, 358–366. Conrad, C., & Hilchey, K. (2011). A review of citizen science and community-based environmental monitoring: issues and opportunities. Environmental Monitoring and Assessment, 176, 273–291. Corburn, J. (2005). Street science: Community knowledge and environmental health justice. Cambridge: MIT Press. Fabricius, C., Folke, C., Cundhill, G., & Schulz, L. (2007). Powerless spectators, coping actors, and adaptive co-managers: a synthesis of the role of communities in ecosystem management. Ecology and Society, 12(1), 29. Homan, M. (2008). Promoting community change: Making it happen in the real world. Brooks: Cole Belmont, CA. Innes, J., & Booher, D. (2004). Reframing public participation strategies for the 21st century. Planning Theory & Practice, 5(4), 419–436. Legg, Colin, & Nagy, Laszlo (2006). Why most conservation monitoring is, but need not be, a waste of time. Journal of Environmental Management, 78(2), 194–199. Reardon, K. (1998). Enhancing the capacity of community-based organizations in East St. Louis. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 17, 323–333. Ross, J. A., & Stoecker, R. (2016). The emotional context of higher education community engagement. Journal of Community Engagement & Scholarship, 9(2), 7–18. Sansom, G. T. (2016). Assessment of Community Health and Environmental Risk Perceptions in the Neighborhood of Manchester, Houston,TX. Doctoral dissertation,Texas A&M University.

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Sansom, G., Berke, P., McDonald,T., Shipp, E., & Horney, J. (2016). Confirming the environmental concerns of community members utilizing participatory-based research in the Houston Neighborhood of Manchester. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 13(9), 839. Sansom, G., Parras, J., Parras, A., Nieto, Y., Arellano, Y., Berke, P., et al. (2017). The impacts of exposure to environmental risk on physical and mental health in a small geographic community in Houston, TX. Journal of Community Health, 42(4), 813–818. Scull, S., & Cuthill, M. (2010). Engaged outreach: using community engagement to facilitate access to higher education for people from low socio-economic backgrounds. Higher Education & Development, 29(1), 59–74. Sirianni, C. (2009). Neighborhood empowerment and planning: Seattle, Washington. Investing in democracy: Engaging citizens in collaborative governance. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Stoecker, R. (2009). Are we talking the walk of community-based research? Action Research, 7(4), 385–404. Stoecker, R. (2016). Liberating service learning and the rest of higher education community engagement. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

CHAPTER 11

Program evaluation Michelle Annette Meyer

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Introduction Why evaluate? Evaluating program activities of the IfSC Measuring inputs Evaluating the process Identifying and measuring outcomes and impacts of the IfSC programs Conclusion: challenges for the future of the IfSC References

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Introduction Successful community-engaged research aimed at local hazard resilience requires regular feedback and adjustment by community participants, students, staff, and faculty. Each chapter in this book noted ways in which we worked to truly engage participants in these processes and improve the program. Specific evaluation research, though, is often called for to prove program effectiveness. But traditional evaluation formats are challenged by the design, operation, and even the ethics of engaged research. This chapter discusses evaluation and its role in engaged research programs similar to the IfSC. We use the mission of the IfSC and stakeholder feedback to identify beneficiaries and methods to assess program implementation, outcomes, and impacts.

Why evaluate? Evaluation itself is a research enterprise. The use of empirical data and scientific methods is what distinguishes program evaluation from annual performance reporting undertaken by most organizations and institutions. The United States General Accounting Office (GAO), which is charged with providing evaluative reports to the United States Congress on various federal policies and programs, places scientific rigor central to program evaluation by defining it as, “a systematic study using research methods to collect and analyze data to assess how well a program is working and why” (GAO, 2012, p. 3). Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00011-X

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Evaluation of any program provides several benefits (Wholey, Hatry, & Newcomer, 2010). First and foremost, programs should be able to demonstrate that they meet their expected goals. Program evaluation asks this seemingly simple question of whether a program is effective in meeting its stated objectives. Program evaluation is described as “essentially a serviceoriented, practical mode of inquiry that primarily has an evaluative intent” (Cordray & Lipsey, 1987, p. 17, cited from Dekker & Leeuw, 1989, p. 115). Next, the call for more systematic evaluation in recent decades often initiates from funders. Funders such as private organizations, public organizations, research foundations, or taxpayers want to see value for their contribution to a program. Almost all funding mechanisms require some form of evaluation, and funders are beginning to request more independent evaluations by external staff, rather than internal evaluations by program staff. Continued funding requires reporting successes due to program activities in easily understandable formats (GAO, 2012). Finally and most importantly, evaluations help leadership identify areas for improvement of the program. Leadership and managers should use evaluation as a method of developing, implementing, and changing program activities and operations. Program evaluation should be focused on this goal, moreso than using evaluation as merely a justification for funding, according to Newcomer, Hatry, and Wholey (2010, p. 6).They state, “When a program evaluation is used only for external accountability purposes and does not help managers improve their programs, the results are often not worth the cost of the evaluation.” Evaluation is important, yes, but is it feasible within engaged research programs? The context of community-engaged research like that within the IfSC has proven particularly challenging to evaluate using standard approaches. The IfSC can be described as a “complex intervention” (Craig et al., 2008). Complex interventions contain several interacting parts that may have independent but also interdependent effects on participants. These parts also often contain a large number of behaviors by those participating in the program, have several groups or targeted populations of the intervention, have many outcomes, and may be flexibly implemented and tailored to a particular population at a given time. The IfSC, as with many engaged research projects, generates multiplicative benefits for numerous individual and institutional stakeholders—each of which can be measured for a specific evaluation. Community-engaged research may have a primary goal of addressing community and resident resilience needs, as in our case. Measuring resilience outcomes for the community and residents provide one avenue for evaluation. But the benefits of program activities extend

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much beyond that stated mission. Program activities, for example, support the careers of faculty and staff as well as provide educational opportunities for students. These activities also promote and market the value of broader institutions involved, such as the university and local partner organizations. Each of the beneficiaries receives several benefits through different types of engagement in program activities. Evaluating these complex interventions require larger sample sizes, a range of outcome measures, detailed understanding of implementation processes, and good theoretical understanding of the programs causal processes (Craig et al., 2008). Evaluation of these programs also aims to address not just whether a program is effective, “but also about when, why, how and in what circumstances” (Datta & Pettigrew, 2013, p. 1). This chapter is dedicated to discussing ideas for and challenges to evaluation of the IfSC and other similar programs. We hope that this discussion highlights the many benefits that can be assessed and used to showcase success. We also underscore that designing a good evaluation requires as much attention, discussion, effort, and community engagement as the other actual program research and learning activities.

Evaluating program activities of the IfSC We began determining evaluation goals using IfSC mission statements and stakeholder feedback. The IfSC has three foci to begin designing an evaluation plan. These are: 1. Transformational research, including collaborative interdisciplinary networks and research-practitioner teams. 2. Community engagement, including the use of citizen science and participatory methods and cultivation of collaborative partnerships. 3. High-impact service learning, including place-based courses and interdisciplinary degrees and certificates. Annual performance reporting of the IfSC contains potential evaluation metrics based on these program goals and objectives. The reports contain quantitative data—grant funding received, student participation, number of local and university partner organizations, number of publications and presentations—and qualitative information—stories and photos of activities, participant feedback, and faculty successes. Using this information as a framework, we also spoke with members of the IfSC to uncover additional metrics they used to identify program success. This information provided the groundwork for a logic model displayed in Fig. 11.1, which is a first step in evaluability assessments. Evaluability

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Figure 11.1  Community-engaged research sample program logic model and timeframe for different evaluations.

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assessments are one type of evaluation used to identify (1) if and when a program is ready to be evaluated, (2) what are the needs or desires of those seeking the evaluation, and (3) the likely use of the evaluation findings (Wholey et al., 2010). These assessments are useful to begin articulating program benefits especially if these benefits are complex, interconnected, and amorphous, like our case. Program logic models are charts that identify the parts of the program and its results along with the strategy of how to get to those results (GAO, 2012, p. 10). The Centers for Disaster Control and Prevention (CDC, n.d.) describe logic models as: [G]raphic depictions (road map) that presents the shared relationships among the resources, activities, outputs, outcomes, and impact for your program. It depicts the relationship between your program’s activities and its intended effects.

These models include program inputs (i.e., what is required for the program to begin and operate); processes or program activities; outputs or immediate outcomes of the program; and short- and long-term impacts of the program including social, environmental, economic, or societal benefits beyond the immediate program stakeholders. External factors and assumptions affecting the program can also be included in order to ensure they are assessed during the evaluation. Logic models help evaluators and program leadership collaboratively to identify the multitude of methods to evaluate success or identify program weaknesses. Identifying the conceptions, assumptions, and goals and development of this logic model can occur through discussion with program leadership, legal and organizational history, program materials, previous research on the program or similar programs, the media, and beneficiaries of the program. A well-defined project model guides an evaluability assessment, which then often results in program modification and clarification. With an evaluability assessment, the evaluator can begin defining specific evaluation questions that assess the processes, outcomes, and impacts of the program for specified stakeholders. This process of developing a preliminary program logic model helped us identify categories of stakeholders across the IfSC mission foci. Then we began identifying the specific benefits for each these stakeholders. First, the transformational research focus of the IfSC points to faculty as an important beneficiary and their time is an input into the success of the IfSC. This research foci also points to the importance of basic and applied knowledge generation by program participants as an outcome. Next, the high-impact service learning focus points to graduate and undergraduate students as beneficiaries

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and their time as an input. Third, the community engagement focus highlights the importance of benefits for local partner organizations, community members, and high school students as well as their time as an input. Though not specifically identified by the mission statement, a fourth beneficiary of the IfSC is the university system that houses the program, in this case the Texas A&M University System. The university is also an external factor that provides direct and indirect funding to support program activities. Fifth and finally, other university staff and personnel input time into the program and receive benefits from participation for their career advancement. Practical advice on getting around the challenges of evaluating a complex program is limited (Datta & Pettigrew, 2013). We began this process with drafting the logic model. What defines success for each of these categories of beneficiaries varies. Later, we describe some potential measures for each category in light of inputs, processes, outcomes, and impacts of the program. We describe how this model provides a groundwork for future evaluations of the IfSC and similar programs, including process evaluations, outcome evaluations, and impact evaluations.

Measuring inputs Measuring inputs helps leadership conduct evaluability assessments and can be used to determine causal processes that affect outcomes and impacts. Inputs for the IfSC include time from all the stakeholders. Faculty, graduate students, and university staff use their time to attend meetings, travel to the field, communicate with local partners, and share information. This time is beyond the time used in their traditional roles as researchers or university personnel. Local partners, community members, and high school students also contribute time to attend meetings, travel to field sites around their neighborhoods, communicate with research staff, and coordinate activities. Specifically quantifying this time requires estimates of what time contributed specific to the IfSC beyond their normal roles, or in comparison to how they would spend time if the program did not exist. In other words, how much time are they spending on IfSC-specific activities? Contributing to annual reports, attending retreats, conducting community partner and citizen science trainings are all time inputs that are beyond typical university research projects. The financial costs of this time—from salary to healthcare and retirement benefits—have to be quantified to get an adequate measure of personnel inputs for the program. Financial input is another consideration, and somewhat easier to calculate. In 2017–18, the IfSC reported $10.5 million in external funding

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support for research and practice activities.The university provided approximately $400,000 in internal funding support. In-kind financial contributions should be included as well, such as office space for program staff, use of community facilities, use of research equipment, etc.

Evaluating the process The logic model also points to numerous activities that can be evaluated within a process evaluation. Process evaluations involve assessment of “how well authorized activities are carried out and reach intended recipients” (GAO, 2012, p. 15). Process evaluation “verifies what the program is and whether or not it is delivered as intended to the targeted recipients” (Scheirer, 1994, in Rossi, Lipsey, & Freeman, 2004). These evaluations address the quality and efficiency of the program operations. They ask questions such as: “Is the program reaching the appropriate target population?” or “How are strategic goals and program objectives practiced?” These types of evaluations are common during program development and implementation phases in order to address any weaknesses and adapt program activities before the program is fully established. But processes can be evaluated at any time during the program life, and often offer useful insight in conjunction with outcome or impact evaluations. Evaluating the process of a complex program is especially important to understand later effects. The IfSC processes aim to break down barriers between research, planning processes, and residents. Processes identified in the IfSC that we would evaluate in the future draw from the central feature of engaged-research and communicative planning processes, and the antithesis of most hazard planning: adequate and inclusive participation. Engaged research involves resident and local partner involvement throughout the research process (Baum, MacDougall, & Smith, 2006). Residents and community partners should have the opportunity to participate in the creation of knowledge that would provide the basis from which decision-making around policy development, tax allocations, information sharing, program operation, etc., occurs. This type of research represents the potential for redistribution of power dynamics in traditional top-down science similarly to the redistribution of power that allows citizens to have a voice in future government decision-making which Arnstein (1969, p. 216) argued. Process evaluations, as described by Green and coworkers, are interested in “professional practice, and the standard of acceptability is appropriate practice” (Green et al., 1980, in Steckler & Linnan, 2002, p. 4). The rise of participatory research gives us guidelines. Processes can be assessed against

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existing external standards or values such as inclusiveness, participation, transparency, professional standards, legal requirements, expert opinions, and diversity, among others. Community participation, for example, is a component of urban planning and public health interventions and a useful assessing goal for engaged research. Processes of community participation within given programs asks who, how, when, why, how many, and how much community members participate in the program (Butterfoss, 2006). Consensusbased planning processes have been evaluated for participation and include theoretical components similar to some processes within the IfSC.These are informal dialogue, interdisciplinary approach, coeducation, jointly searching and reviewing options, conflict resolution, and full representation of stakeholders (Schively, 2007). Schively (2007, p. 84), who attempted an evaluation of such a planning process, notes the particular difficulty of identifying external standards for comparison, “in many cases comparable efforts do not exist or the difference among them are too great to be effectively account for.” Process evaluation of community participation is also particularly important for the focus of the IfSC—resilience and sustainability. Emergency managers, commonly drawn from military training, lead most hazard planning activities in communities. This military background fosters top-down, command and control of emergency situations and planning processes, which contrasts to urban planning programs that call for public participation (Neal & Phillips, 1995). This military tradition, the technical nature of many risk assessments and response activities, and the fear that the public will panic upon knowing all the hazardous risks in an area limits the emphasis on public involvement and citizen control of hazard planning (Mileti, 1999; Pearce, 2003). Traditional risk assessment often results in experts measuring risks, deciding the appropriate response, and then informing the public of that decision (Holifield, 2012; Renn, Webler, & Johnson, 1991; Sadd, Pastor, Morello-Frosch, Scoggins, & Jesdale, 2011). Measuring activity implementation and participation, for example, can be measured by review of meeting, discussion, and public forum documents that include attendance measures. The IfSC annual report for 2017– 18 identified several processes that promoted participation including field visits, data collection days, twice monthly seminar series, and public and academic presentations. Participants included organizations, residents, faculty, staff, and students. A total of 23 organizations participated in various activities at one point or another during that year. These included 10 colleges within the Texas A&M University System, 8 institutions or centers

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with the University System, and 5 community partner organizations. Twice monthly meetings were a staple of the IfSC process, and in 2017–18 this speaker series hosted 12 speakers of which nine were faculty members, two were graduate students, and one was a community partner. Attendance reached upwards of 60 audience members at these talks. Several other activities included cooking for residents during Hurricane Harvey cleanup, attending five community breakfasts where over 400 community residents discuss community issues, developing coursework and student projects together with Jones Futures Academy teachers, and training 300 high school students in oral history data collection. Across all activities, 248 university students participated, including 32 doctoral students, 61 graduate students, and 21 undergraduate students that participated were hosted by the IfSC. Counting attendance at activities is a first step in process evaluation. Future evaluations will need additional data to capture actual participation. Fully grasping exactly how many people participated and what types of people participated can often only be captured by observing and then recording specific metrics about each of the activities. How did residents and scientists cocreate research questions? How often did interactions between scientists and residents and students take place—and how did this compare to traditional science methods? These are key evaluation questions for process evaluations related to engaged research. The process of the IfSC involves creation and maintenance of interdisciplinary and practitioner-researcher networks. Metrics can include number of new interdisciplinary connections individual faculty members gain due to program participation, number of new research teams writing grants or publications together, time spent interacting with community members, amount of data collected in participatory ways, number of academic meetings and community meetings attended, among many others. Observation research can be conducted at IfSC meetings to describe how interdisciplinary networks are built or at community meetings to describe the specific ways faculty interact with practitioners. These processes would need to be compared to the experience of non-IfSC faculty of similar rank to ensure that program participation is affecting these processes. Future evaluations should include attendance records for each event to evaluate changes over time and identify the types of events that draw the most engagement. Events will need a measure of participation, such as asking questions during talks, or completing data collection instruments while in the field. Interaction between college students and residents during a data collection event could be observed and recorded. The frequency

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of discussion between community members and scientists about research could be quantified. Additionally, the processes of the IfSC could be evaluated through interview or survey methods with participants. These questions, drawn together from our experience and the literature (Deyle & Schively-Slotterback, 2009; Mandarano & Paulsen, 2011; Schively, 2007), might measure participants’ opinion on such things as: • representativeness of participation in partnership; • comfortable atmosphere in which to interact; • generation of new problem definitions and potential solutions; • improved alignment of participants’ expectations and actions with collective understandings and goals; • consensus-based decision-making; • satisfaction with information provided and how; • greater commitment to participation; • elevated sense of efficacy in ability to affect decision-making; • trust in science and research; • access to scholars and scientific studies; • opportunities to learn the basis of such studies; • opportunities to engage experts in questions and answers, among others. Evaluating the process of engaged research process addresses one aspect of these unique programs, but we also want to evaluate outcomes and impacts across beneficiaries.

Identifying and measuring outcomes and impacts of the IfSC programs Outcomes and impacts are the two types of evaluation that receive the most attention and are most desired by funders and program leadership.The most common type of program evaluation is outcome evaluation. Outcome evaluations attempt to measure the direct benefits or improvement in the target audience or target issue due to participation in or existence of a program (GAO, 2012). Outcomes are “the state of the target population or the social conditions that a program is expected to have changed” (Rossi et al., 2004, p. 204). The stated outcomes are easy to define for many programs and lead to clearly identifiable metrics for assessment. A new teaching technique, for example, is evaluated based on changes in student test scores. Outcome evaluations are more challenging for programs that have multiple beneficiaries, have amorphous or multiple goals, have undefined timelines for expected outcomes, and are more susceptible to external factors. Outcomes

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can be evaluated, also, at multiple and different levels such as individual, group or organization, community, or overall content. Each of these challenges complicates evaluation for community-engaged research such as the IfSC. Defining and appropriately measuring outcomes is crucial—success of a program can be hidden or ignored without adequate measures (Datta & Pettigrew, 2013). We identified outcomes across the three mission foci and the various beneficiaries including faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, community partners and residents, and the university itself. We are still developing metrics to fully evaluate each of this. The research focus of the IfSC aims to produce transformational research. Success of research initiatives can be assessed via traditional outcomes such as published papers, books and book chapters, white papers and reports, and academic presentations. Each of these will directly benefit the authors, including faculty, staff, and college students. The infrastructure resilience lead, Nasir Gharaibeh, along with IfSC faculty and graduate students, led the development of a resident-assessment process for stormwater capacity. This project, funded by the National Science Foundation, resulted in five published journal articles. To attempt to isolate the effect of the IfSC on publications, the number of publications per faculty member per year can be compared to a control group of faculty not involved in the IfSC.This would allow evaluators to determine causal relationships and measure change over time to determine the trajectory of the program. Journal quality should also be assessed in this process as it is in general tenure and promotion procedures for faculty members. But the journal quality criteria may need to be adapted from disciplinary-specific measures. Many journals at this time are only beginning to accept citizen science publications or interdisciplinary publications. These journals that focus on the topic of interest—hazards, resilience, environmental justice, infrastructure planning—provide a starting place for identifying quality of publications produced by IfSC members. Transformative research also is interdependent with the community engagement focus of the IfSC. Participatory research and engaged research calls for coauthored publications with community partners.Thus, evaluating who is publishing is as important as where and how many publications occur. Outcomes for the community engagement focus include counts of testimony at public meetings, data collected and accessible by the community, and methods or toolkits for use by the community after the research projects finish. Drawing from planning and landscape architecture faculty also results in neighborhood plans and landscape designs as physical outcomes. Galen

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Newman, for example, worked with students and community residents to produce landscape designs that would reimagine vacant parcels and address flooding needs (Newman et al. 2020). Service learning outcomes may be the easiest to assess compared to community engagement and transformational research. These outcomes can include the amount of students’ papers, theses and dissertations completed because of the IfSC. Learning outcomes can also be assessed in each class that participates in related service learning activities using traditional classroom evaluation metrics. Each of our classes included these metrics. Impact evaluations are similar to outcome evaluations except they are broader and measure net effects of the program in light of external factors or on populations beyond program participants.The GAO (2012) described “net impact evaluations” as comparisons of the effect of a program to an estimate of what would have happened without the program. Impact evaluations are essentially causal research—they look to determine whether a program caused some intended and unintended effect (Rossi et al., 2004). Impact evaluations require the most sophisticated analyses techniques since all factors affecting program effects must be accounted for during the evaluation. Impact evaluations also face the greatest challenges in gathering appropriate data. Impact evaluations may address short- or long-term impacts. Many program impacts are not fully realized until much after program participation or program implementation-meaning impacts may need to be measured months or even years after a program begins. Yet, isolating the causal link between the program and the long-term impacts becomes increasingly difficult as time passes. We identified numerous short- and long-term impacts that would show the effect of the IfSC across beneficiaries. The most central long-term impact would be increased resiliency of the neighborhood to natural and technological hazards.This impact may be measured through changes in damage impacts to residents following disasters, reduced exposure-related illnesses, increased property values, reduced flooding, implementation of hazard mitigation activities, increased local funding of hazard mitigation and resiliency efforts, and growth in participation and prestige of local partner organizations. These long-term impacts will not only take years to matriculate, but also will be very difficult to isolate to the program effects. Shorter-term impacts for local communities, residents, and program participants include increased media and policy-maker discussion of the resilience challenges their neighborhoods face. Trust in researchers among residents and local

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partner organizations may grow and could be measured using survey or interview measures. High school students, as one of our primary community partners, may show increased desire for college education, interest in science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) courses along with interest in less well-known majors such as urban planning, sociology, or landscape architecture. Quasiexperimental design could measure the college aspirations and eventual enrollment of high school students who are program participants compared to others who are not. The long-term impact for faculty, university staff, and graduate and undergraduate students is, first, success in their respective fields. Metrics for these long-term effects include tenure and promotion successes, graduate school admission for undergraduates who participated, and first job placement for graduate students who participated. Isolating these impacts will require addressing selection bias in faculty and student participants. It is likely that the most successful faculty are interested in community-engaged research and have the support of their departments and colleges to take on this often risky endeavor. We hope that as more engaged research programs develop the benefits will be better integrated into tenure and promotion decisions. Increased participation in interdisciplinary projects and participatory projects across the university is also a long-term impact of these programs. We would expect faculty knowledge and experience with interdisciplinary research to increase along with their knowledge and experience with community-engagement and participatory methods. Input of individual faculty time can be measured by the amount of work hours dedicated to IfSC activities, and broken down by activity types if desired. At the organization level, evaluation can include comparison of faculty participation based on discipline, college, level (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, Administration). These metrics would highlight areas of successes (e.g., participation of junior faculty in the program) and weaknesses (e.g., equity in time spent on IfSC activities based on discipline, equity in publication rewards across disciplines). Other impacts include retention and matriculation of undergraduate and graduate students, especially students from groups often underrepresented in science, including racial minorities, are also long-term impacts that can be assessed. Short-term impacts could include metrics of research networks of faculty and graduate student participants, increased interdisciplinary educational outcomes for students and faculty, and increased grant funding and overall research productivity.

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Long-term impacts for the university include increased student enrollment into the university from underrepresented groups and neighborhoods in which the programs occur as well as increased positive feelings from the public at large to the university. Short-term impacts could be measured through media exposure of the university and grant funding the university receives. We, at our five year point, have yet to assess long-term impacts of the IfSC.This discussion points to the scientific challenge of assessing these impacts. Evaluating any one benefit for any of these beneficiaries is an entire research project itself.

Conclusion: challenges for the future of the IfSC Evaluation is a form of applied social science research requiring the same rigor and transparency as any other research enterprise. Evaluation answers specific questions about a specific program within a specified context, and—in contrast to basic social science research—evaluation questions must respond specifically to the needs and desires of the evaluation sponsor and stakeholders. Undertaking evaluation of the various programs of the IfSC and other community-engaged research is a remaining challenge. Four large issues loom: measuring and isolating long-term impacts due to the program, measuring effects with changing participation, working with youth and children, and encouraging participation in evaluation by participants. Some of the long-term goals of the program, as noted earlier, may never be fully actualized due to external factors. Increasing climate impacts, development, economic inequality, and industrial expansion affect the longterm impacts of the program on community resiliency. Isolating a change in effects for these neighborhoods is a scientific challenge, especially for environmental justice scholarship. How to isolate the effect of the program on limiting or reducing these impacts is a next step in evaluation. Other impacts are equally challenging to isolate to the program—faculty success and student success may relate to selection bias into the program or sample sizes may be too small to determine effect; community understanding and trust in science may be hindered by external factors that are affecting science overall or residents may move in and out of the community making measuring long-term change of people “exposed” to the program difficult. Finding metrics that isolate these changes in light of external, contextual factors is needed.

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Identifying who is a participant and for what aspects of the IfSC, like many ongoing public participation programs, is difficult. We attempted a pre-participation and post-participation survey to assess change in knowledge and awareness of resiliency before and after participation in the program for high school students conducting citizen science projects. The results were not useable due to limited sample size. Sample size was limited because many different researchers and staff interacted with participants affecting the consistency in gathering these surveys. Furthermore, participants joined and dropped out frequently, sometimes engaging in only one day and others engaging in multiple days. Some participants joined midway through the citizen science projects, and others left early. Each of these variations in participating affected the ability to adequately document change in survey metrics. When does participation begin? When does it end? For other participants who are highly engaged, the question is when do we evaluate change? We have maintained relationships with some students, faculty, staff, residents, and local partners for several years. We are still working through determining when to evaluate particular outcomes and how to ensure adequate participation in the evaluation, let alone the participatory projects. Working with youth and children also presented ethical and practical challenges. All evaluation procedures had to undergo review by the university’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). Because youth are a protected class, participation in evaluation, but not the programs themselves which were incorporated into classroom activities, required assent from the students and signed consent from the parents. Students, parents, and teachers with whom we spoke did not understand the difference between participating in the research activities and the evaluation of those activities. Gathering signed consent from parents was particularly challenging and slowed the ability to gather pre-participation measures. Finally, this chapter and discussion points to a fundamental difference in the ontology evaluation and community-engaged research. Resident and community partners are coleading the research projects. If the projects are not to their liking, they would not participate. They, then, often do not see the importance of evaluating the programs. They think they are successful, or they would not engage. This quandary affects us as researchers too.The communities in which we work are often over-researched without scientists giving back to them in a meaningful way that improves their lives. Undertaking traditional evaluation, through separate and invasive procedures such as surveys and experiments, to provide evidence of success just for funders or external officials goes against

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the ethic of community-engaged research. The evaluation itself must have community participation, since it is a research enterprise.With looming other priorities though, this research endeavor consistently gets delayed. Finding noninvasive ways, using feminist and qualitative methods (Jacobs, 2018) with emphasis on evaluating program processes, provides the most fruitful way forward to evaluating success. This continued trust-building with the community then may one day lead to co-development of the next phase of research—finding appropriate evaluation measures and methods.

References Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. Baum, F., MacDougall, C., & Smith, D. (2006). Participatory action research. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 60(10), 854–857. doi: 10.1136/jech.2004.028662. Butterfoss, F. D. (2006). Process evaluation for community participation. Annual Review of Public Health, 27(1), 323–340. doi: 10.1146/annurev.publhealth.27.021405.102207. Centers for Disaster Control and Prevention (CDC). (n.d.). Evaluation guide: developing and using a logic model. Centers for Disease Control Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention. Washington, DC: Department of Health and Human Services, CDC. Available from: https://www.cdc.gov/dhdsp/docs/logic_model.pdf. Craig, P., Dieppe, P., Macintyre, S., Michie, S., Nazareth, I., Petticrew, M., et al. (2008). Developing and evaluating complex interventions: the new Medical Research Council guidance. BMJ, 337, a1655. Deyle, R., & Schively Slotterback, C. (2009). Group learning in participatory planning processes: an exploratory quasiexperimental analysis of local mitigation planning in Florida. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 29(1), 23–38. doi: 10.1177/0739456X09333116. Datta, J., & Petticrew, M. (2013). Challenges to evaluating complex interventions: a content analysis of published papers. BMC Public Health, 13(1), 568. doi: 10.1186/1471-245813-568. Dekker, P. J., & Leeuw, F. L. (1989). Program evaluation and effectiveness auditing: definitions, models and practice. Impact Assessment, 7(2–3), 113–133. doi: 10.1080/07349165.1989.9726016. GAO. (2012). Designing evaluations GAO-12-208G. Washington, DC: General Accounting Office Available from: https://www.gao.gov/assets/590/588146.pdf. Holifield, R. (2012). Environmental justice as recognition and participation in risk assessment: negotiating and translating health risk at a superfund site in Indian country. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(3), 591–613. Jacobs, F. (2018). Black feminism and radical planning: new directions for disaster planning research. Planning Theory, 18, 24–39. doi: 10.1177/1473095218763221. Mandarano, L., & Paulsen, K. (2011). Governance capacity in collaborative watershed partnerships: evidence from the Philadelphia region. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 54, 1293–1313. doi: 10.1080/09640568.2011.572694. Mileti, D. S. (1999). Disaster by design. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. Neal, D. M., & Phillips, B. D. (1995). Effective emergency management: reconsidering the bureaucratic approach. Disasters, 19, 327–337. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-7717.1995.tb00353.x. Newcomer, K. E., Hatry, H. P., & Wholey, J. S. (2010). Planning and designing useful evaluations. CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.: San Framcisco Available from: https://ebookcentral. proquest.com.

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Pearce, L. (2003). Disaster management and community planning, and public participation: how to achieve sustainable hazard mitigation. Natural Hazards, 28(2), 211–228. doi: 10.1023/a:1022917721797. Renn, O.,Webler,T., & Johnson, B. B. (1991). Public participation in hazard management: the use of citizen panels in the US. Risk, 2, 197. Rossi, P. H., Lipsey, M.W., & Freeman, H. E. (2004). Evaluation: A systematic approach (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Sadd, J. L., Pastor, M., Morello-Frosch, R., Scoggins, J., & Jesdale, B. (2011). Playing it safe: assessing cumulative impact and social vulnerability through an environmental justice screening method in the south coast air basin, California. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 8(5), 1441–1459. Schively, C. (2007).A quantitative analysis of consensus building in local environmental review. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 27(1), 82–98. doi: 10.1177/0739456X07305794. Steckler, A. B., & Linnan, L. (2002). Process evaluation for public health interventions and research (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass. Wholey, J. S., Hatry, H. P., & Newcomer, K. E. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of practical program evaluation. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc Available from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com.

CHAPTER 12

Conclusion-lessons and regrets Shannon Van Zandt

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA

Chapter outline Introduction Finding synchronicity in theory and practice Institutionalizing and sustaining engaged research: challenges and opportunities Challenges and opportunities external to academe Looking within: challenges and opportunities for academe Conclusion Reference

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Introduction At the end of the fourth year of these engaged research efforts, the discovery leads, the engagement leads, and the IfSC director, and associate director came together for strategic planning. They were joined by upper administrative staff with a desire to see the IfSC effort continue long-term. IfSC personnel followed the leadership of a visual artist and strategic planning consultant through exercises that identified both the broad challenges to and opportunities for the IfSC as well as for resilient and sustainable communities. This brainstorming session highlighted both windows of opportunity and trepidation. The groundwork was laid, but the sessions highlighted that institutionalizing these efforts called for a new academic model integrating and rethinking the notions of research, outreach, and resilience. Each person involved in the IfSC effort believes in the land grant mission of Texas A&M University (TAMU) and other similar public institutions of higher education. The US Congress passed the First Morrill Act in 1862, establishing land-grant colleges in every US state and the District of Columbia to support agriculture, mechanical, and military arts (Duemer, 2007). Several additional bills fostered the intention to point science toward societal needs through agriculture experiment stations, engineering outreach activities, cooperative extension services, and Sea Grant extensions (TAMU is one of only 17 institutions to hold Land, Sea, and Space Grant designations). The Morrill Act aimed to expand the benefits of liberal and practical higher education to more members of society; the current mission Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00012-1

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of land grant institutions involves transferring knowledge derived from scientific research into practical applications for society. Engaged research in higher education through organizations such as the IfSC also embodies this mission. Many other funders and educational scholars (as noted in Chapter 1) have similar viewpoints. Thus, engaged research is a salient support system and necessary buttress to the mission of many universities. We would like to conclude this book by not only reviewing and synchronizing the theory and practice discussed within its contents, but also with an open discourse about the challenges and opportunities ahead. Addressing these challenges and achieving and enhancing the opportunities can propel science into a new phase for universities working to translate the knowledge being produced into action within the communities they serve.

Finding synchronicity in theory and practice As the book has shown, the IfSC brings together a confluence of science, practice, and communities within a singular unit. Houston, Texas serves as a unique laboratory for increasing environmental challenges coupled with socioeconomic problems, from economic inequality to environmental justice (although the IfSC has also expanded outside of this area on multiple projects). We identified the need for engaged research to address “wicked problems,” of which climate change may be the greatest in our current historical epoch. Engaged scholars must both understand scientific theory and methods but also must put such understandings toward practical ends. We have demonstrated that solutions to such wicked problems are not easy, nor can these problems be engineered away. To build community resilience, we must first identify and address weaknesses within communities themselves-especially in those places and for those peoples which have been neglected, overlooked, and underserved--to raise them to a threshold of resilience that allows them to face the future with confidence that their environment will not compromise their ability to survive and thrive. Therefore, community resilience requires attention and action that minimizes and mitigates environmental hazards, while simultaneously generating and activating capacity, bringing the power of science to activism and advocacy. We hope that, through this text, you have seen how engaging actively with communities early in the research process with formal partnering covenants reduces the power differential in traditional scientist-public relationships. This approach also reduces the typical rational, top-down perspective of science and of planning. Engaged research weaves together

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multiple theoretical perspectives from critical theory and radical planning to Habermas’ ideal speech situation to address the inherent conflicting interests and concerns within all communities, especially those actively addressing complex socioenvironmental problems.

Institutionalizing and sustaining engaged research: challenges and opportunities The irony is not lost on us that the IfSC is at a crossroads while trying to determine how to sustain its engaged research efforts. In our land grant university, the agriculture and engineering extension programs are well established, successful, and have stable funding from the state legislature.The kind of planning extension service described within the book, however, (one that responds to the increasingly complex socioenvironmental problems facing cities of all sizes) has not received the same level of support. Thus, convincing the state legislature to provide support for addressing more urban issues that include both the built and social environment requires more time and effort. Further, having fields that conduct similar engagement and extension-based services and research can result in “turf-wars” that must be strategically and politically resolved across disciplines. There are challenges both within and external to the academe we must acknowledge. We identify several ways that academia itself needs to adept to be more open to such type work; these methods go beyond simple physical resources. If developed, this effort could transform the university to more fully embody the land-grant mission. We hope that our discussion of this crossroads for the IfSC helps other similar endeavors set themselves up for future success.

Challenges and opportunities external to academe While the following is by no means exhaustive, for the future of the IfSC, we have identified a number of challenges and opportunities emerging from the intersection of the built and socioecological environments.These include: Confluence of climate change and a rapidly growing population The State of Texas is one of the most rapidly growing states in the nation, and includes three of the ten most populous cities in the United States. It is also one of the most vulnerable states in the nation, with exposure to coastal hazards, wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, and even earthquakes. As we have observed over the past few years, the Houston and coastal Texas areas are susceptible to intense rainfall events associated with tropical storms that are occurring with increasing frequency and severity, and less predictability.

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The profile of such hazards change in response to the changing climate. The urbanization of the coast means that infrastructure is stressed and many social systems attempting to support populations have been traditionally neglected and underserved. Growing economic inequality While Houston and Texas are typically seen as more affordable places to live compared to other states and large cities, wages are also low, and affordable housing is largely absent, just as in many other parts of the United States. This growing divide can cause increased friction between social groups as well as increased competition for attention and scarce resources, particularly in the aftermath of repeated disaster events. Inequalities in recovery after multiple disasters have led to growing dissatisfaction with local and state government in many areas and a well-founded feeling of having been forgotten by many neighborhood residents. A lack of capacity in disadvantaged or under-resourced communities Within many urban areas, disadvantaged neighborhoods (typically those that are low-income or predominantly minority) lack the capacity and personal empowerment to advocate for fair treatment. Little to no participatory planning exists, and a lack of cultural competency stifles participation when it is attempted. In rural areas, local and county governments are understaffed and have weak tax bases to support development. What staff they do have are often not trained to undertake the kind of robust participation and planning activities that are necessary to plan for future climate change impacts. These undermine the community’s ability to build momentum for change and to implement existing plans. Inversely, a number of opportunities also exist that can catalyze community efforts to address climate change impacts and address the barriers identified above. Even in conservative states, recognition of climate-based threats is growing.There may not be agreement on the causes of climate change, but there is growing consensus that it is now happening and will only worsen with time, as will its effects. Interest from academics, practitioners, and funders in solutions is high, and will only grow until solutions are not only identified, but also implemented. Funding opportunities have mobilized trans-disciplinary teams to take on the complex nature of the impacts, and have generated many opportunities for high impact service learning and applied learning, meaning that current and future generations are finding ways to harness their passion and get right to work as part of their educational journey.

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Understanding of climate resilience as being linked with other social opportunities is increasing Current progress on understanding climate impacts has clearly linked them to other issues such as poverty reduction, equity issues, walkability, community development, and social capital, among others. Being able to approach these issues comprehensively should make both research and implementation efforts more efficient and cost-effective. More and more tools, many that are usable by residents, are becoming available Advances in big data, as well as advances in citizen science, are not only increasing our understanding of climate change impacts, but are also putting more knowledge in the hands of citizens. Equipping and empowering residents to advocate on their own behalf has the best chance of having an impact and ultimately overcoming political (and business) interests at a local level. Further, tools to evaluate and synthesize plans and designs for climate resilience are coming online and making it easier to address climate effects as part of everyday comprehensive planning, which ultimately have the biggest benefit by ensuring that all decisions at local levels are made with climate impacts in mind, and are taking advantage of a broader set of funding streams available to implement comprehensive plans, such as capital investment funds and block grant funds.

Looking within: challenges and opportunities for academe Within the university, several processes-from faculty and staff advancement to operational structure-challenge the engaged research model we have developed. These challenges often result from a disjoint between (1) the time commitment required for participation in and with community members to do fully engaged research and (2) university expectations of faculty, staff, and student time and resources needs. Here, we discuss three areas of possible change that support further institutionalization of the engaged research model: faculty advancement, staff advancement, and the real costs of engagement. Faculty advancement It can be a challenge to find the right mix of faculty for engaged research activities. Engaged research is not right for everyone. Faculty need to be both excited about and committed to the process of engaged research and have the time and energy to undertake such work. Entrenched promotion

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and tenure processes for faculty compound this challenge by rarely recognizing and incorporating the additional time engaged research takes, nor valuing the impact it has. Thus, a first change to promote such engaged activities is to incorporate and honor engagement-related research more substantially in promotion and tenure processes. Value-engaged research in the tenure and promotion process Within the current university setting, rewards do not typically foster engaged research involvement for either senior or junior faculty. Yet, many large external granting organizations are requiring community engagement as portions of their grant proposals. As noted, our team was led by a senior faculty member, a “Presidential Hire” considered a preeminent scholar not only in his field, but also in hazard and disaster research. His leadership brought university support and provided the needed expertise and experience to achieve such an interdisciplinary undertaking. He was hired to enliven this area of scholarship at the university and provided the resources to develop his vision. As such, his teaching load was dramatically reduced to 25% of our standard teaching load. However, most other senior faculty, within and outside of TAMU, maintain higher loads of administrative service at the department, college, or university level along with external service within their respective fields as well as large-mentoring loads. This limits the time they can dedicate to on-the-ground community involvement. Such faculty may have the capacity to build connections or the expertise to help develop and lead such efforts, but they are less able to touch the projects routinely or provide the needed regular interaction with community members. Allow time for building and maintaining community relationships Promotion from associate professor to full professor could be supported by involvement and leadership in engaged research. Beyond that, faculty typically is increasingly burdened with duties that take them away from on-the-ground community work. Community-engaged research should be considered under “service to the community” in much the same way that service to the discipline is considered. These different types of service must be balanced, which may require faculty leading engaged research to have fewer committee assignments or internal meeting requirements than other faculty members, for example. Making provisions to increase faculty time and devotion to community engagement inevitably increases trust building between academics and local

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residents. Trust building between communities and academics can be difficult, as discussed in Chapters 9 and 10. Trust is built and fostered through continual and long-term engagement that is mutually beneficial for all parties involved. While the issues related to resident distrust of academics has already been discussed, once trust is nurtured, communities are more likely to engage with programs that have a proven track record of products useful to the community. Communities do not want to subject their residents to academic study without a clear and tangible return. This has been the case with the IfSC. Value-driven approaches to engagement based on community-driven desires and needs such as building on existing community assets, allowing for iterative partnerships, integrating cultural knowledge, the production of mutually beneficial tools, colearning, local empowerment, and knowledge dissemination to communities have all been effective strategies in breaking down the differences between academics and residents, resulting in trust-building. In the long term, once these barriers have been broken down and relationships have been fostered, junior faculty can more easily plug into the developed network. Senior faculty with existing relations can more readily allow for this after trust has been developed. Recognize the “broader impacts” of engaged research Junior faculty on a tenure-track, in contrast, may have fewer administrative duties and a desire to build relationships and attempt cutting-edge research. They may risk their ability to obtain tenure (the most important step of their career) through a heavy emphasis on engagement. Obtaining tenure, in a simplified description, requires faculty to focus most of their energy on research and teaching if they are at research-intensive universities such as land grant universities. Research is evaluated based largely on two factors: (1) the number and amount of external grants received (such as those from the National Science Foundation) and (2) the amount and quality of peer-reviewed research publications through academic journal articles and books. Traditionally, neither funders nor the publication process tend to value engaged research in the tenure process. However places such as community-based foundations and, increasingly, federal agencies have become increasingly focused on solving entrenched and complex societal problems. The National Science Foundation, for example, has long included a section in its calls for proposals for “broader impacts,” beyond the “intellectual merit” that scientists are accustomed to addressing. Broader impacts include the potential for scientific research to benefit society. While more often, the broader impacts section of the grant proposal considers the ways in which

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innovation might lead to new products or to make life easier, it also can include direct engagement. This engagement is oftentimes aimed particularly at underserved communities, communities of color, as well as students, field researchers, and principal investigators from underrepresented groups. The education of funders, grant reviewers, and collaborators to view engaged research as equal, empirical, and as cutting edge as traditional top-down science is needed; this must be linked to an understanding the rationale, best practices, and importance of engagement Leading journals in various fields also publish few participatory or engagedresearch papers, thus limiting the ability of faculty who do such work to have it counted similarly to a paper completed with traditional scientific methods which is more easily accepted in higher impact journals. The authors of this book are benefited by being in applied fields of urban planning or landscape architecture, which are more open to case studies and engaged research. Still, many of our publications on such related research are in interdisciplinary or participatory journals that have engagement or sustainability as a core part of their mission. Expanding the notion of “toptiered” journals to include interdisciplinary and applied journals is one step to supporting tenure-track faculty doing engaged research. Also, publication of engaged research will likely require more time than traditional research as the research questions, methods, data collection, and data analysis are open to community input and can spontaneously change in direction. Relatedly, tenure review should find a way to acknowledge the time needed to produce one engaged research publication compared to one traditional, quantitative publication and account for this for tenure. Engaged research will produce numerous other research outputs beyond grants and publications and benefit many other learners beyond typical classroom enrolled or mentored college students; this impact should be counted more heavily toward promotion Overall, service within and outside the university is a much smaller component of tenure decisions; this, in our view, is the easiest tenure and promotion change that would support both junior and senior faculty. White papers, blog posts, public presentations, presentations to policy-makers and legislatures, advisory discussions with community groups, and time spent with local students or community members doing educational activities are all examples of outputs that could be incorporated into tenure and promotion processes. In regards to the authors of this book, our department and

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college know the difficulty of this effort. As a college of architecture and department that includes landscape architects, land development experts, and urban planners, the products produced range from research grants and journal articles to art exhibits, curated collections, online platforms, physical buildings, and networked professional connections. We recently discussed this challenge with members of local and state emergency management to find ways to foster greater collaboration between academics and practitioners. Emergency management professionals took a first step by generating individual “thank you” letters on agency letterhead as official documentation of ongoing engagement and partnership efforts. There are, as of yet, no other “outputs” except our time in meetings and discussions with them. These letters can be added to tenure and promotion review as evidence of engagement. The STEM disciplines further can borrow and adapt from the arts as a starting point to understand how tenure can be broadened to incorporate other products while ensuring rigor and excellence. Unless these changes occur, we, unfortunately, encourage junior faculty to limit their involvement in engaged research activities, especially if these activities take time away from traditional research enterprises. Staff involvement and advancement should be integrated with longterm engagement efforts The faculty-related challenges identified underscore the necessity of talented and appropriately rewarded staff, like that needed to maintain the IfSC. Chapter 9 described the importance of university staff to adapt the university model to community needs.We must admit that we are currently and have always been understaffed and our staff deserves more rewards than they currently receive.The IfSC infrastructure has been maintained through three staffing levels: associate director (who may or may not be a researcher), engagement staff, administrative staff (including day-to-day administration and marketing and publicity staff). All of these staff positions, in our case, except for the associate director are committed only part-time to the IfSC and have their regular position within a different portion of the university. The associate director is tasked with coordinating daily activities of multiple interdisciplinary initiatives, supervising staff, and coordinating research materials and efforts. They act as the primary liaison with current and emerging discovery leads within the IfSC to promote and initiate research and engagement projects. This includes meeting with faculty and researchers across campus and external partners. The associate director fosters partnerships and collaborates with researchers and community

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engagement staff in strategic planning of future external funding grants. They support engagement staff by preparing successful proposals to support community engagement work and participating in field activities and are also tasked with collecting metrics that monitor faculty and staff performance and maintaining program records and databases. This information is compiled into an annual report that covers student involvement, research projects, engagement efforts, and internal/external funding. The work of the IfSC is also translated for presentation to community groups, as well as for conferences and workshops, including campus-wide events, state and national conferences, and international venues. The engagement staff (3 part-time persons with collaboration on specific projects with four other extension agents) are the crux of developing such an enterprise. This staff answers calls, emails, and messages from communities based on the communities’ schedules. They manage the majority of the emotional labor of talking with community members who are living through such negative social and physical environments. They also manage the difficult discussions with faculty who may not always easily understand why we must listen to and participate with community members on their timeline. Engagement staff also finds ways to address community needs when service-learning projects come up short. For students to best learn, they must be allowed to try and, potentially, fail. Communities, on the other hand, do not always have such a luxury. Thus, the engagement team often finalizes student work to ensure it meets its initial, and lives up to the identified, project framework. The administrative staff manages travel, meeting coordination, and some marketing tasks. For example, an administrative assistant spends part of his/her time coordinating all travel for service-learning courses and travel for faculty and staff going into partnering communities. Because engagement travel requires flexibility and meetings are scheduled with short notice, these staff must work in ways different than the usual university travel management and be available for last minute changes and requests. The assistant handles all meeting and lunch series coordination including ordering and delivering food, scheduling meeting rooms, and managing the RSVP lists both on campus and off campus. Additional administrative staff produces social media posts and marketing materials for the IfSC. Their time is mostly funded through the university, not self-funded through the IfSC. Thus, consistent, long-term funding is needed to maintain the engagement and administrative staffing needed for engaged research activities.

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Staffing needs are consistent and long-term. The engagement team’s waitlist of communities hoping for work with the IfSC is several years long. Many of these communities, however, do not have the capacity to pay the market price of such services. More importantly, the benefits of these activities do not solely fall to the communities, but also contribute to the mission of the university to educate students, conduct research, and foster public outreach and knowledge.Thus, project-based funding is oftentimes illogical for engaged research. These funds could be tied to performance indicators developed through an appropriate evaluation model like discussed in Chapter 11, acknowledging that outputs take considerable time to accrue, funds, and fund allocation need to look beyond 1-2-year increments. Educating faculty and administration on the real costs of engagement Additionally, faculty researchers increasingly asking engagement staff to participate on research grants to assist in meeting expectations for “broader impacts.” Participation on research grants is a crucial mechanism to justify staff positions, although there are a few misconceptions. For instance, sometimes faculty, particularly in the hard sciences, misunderstands or misinterpret community engagement for qualitative research, outreach, or engagement with professionals and practitioners. While such methods can assist research projects, they do not accurately entail the work of community engagement. The engagement staff spends time educating faculty and administration on what community engagement is and what it is not, and the role engagement staff can play on research projects. Oftentimes, principal investigators do not fully understand the range of tasks and activities involved, the time it takes to conduct activities, and the associated costs of engaging with communities. Because of the high frequency of requests for their services, Texas Target Communities, the primary engagement unit of the IfSC, recently generated a pricing list for their services that indicates the real costs of their time. This list was tested with a few highly engaged faculty and met with appreciation to have straightforward numbers to put into grant applications. But, the costs were much higher than what faculty often originally thought. The breakdown of services includes brokering relationships, by connecting vetted and trained faculty with community contacts; advising faculty on the design of an engagement strategy; and conducting full community engagement, by designing the engagement strategy and designing and facilitating community meetings, workshops, and other interactions. Other costs to consider include a required partner fee, which provides a stipend to community partners and more a la carte service

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options such as facilitating community meetings. Because of the growing demand of such services in engaged and research and service-learning project, engagement staff is much busier than in the past. Justifying continued support and expanded staff has been difficult. If we are to authentically engage communities, faculty, administrators, and grantors must thoroughly understand what is required.

Conclusion The work is not done to establish a sustainable institutional framework to support engaged research within universities. This book presents an actionable blueprint for other universities to follow and create similar institutes across multiple academic units. IfSC members and the book’s authors realize that many community issues differ across geographic contexts. However, there are also shared problems both nationally and internationally, each of which must react to different sociopolitical contexts. It is our hope, that, as the contents of this book are distributed, interdisciplinary collectives of faculty being to form similar research and engagement organizations (like the IfSC) and that these institutes could eventually work together intime. The vision is to achieve a national and international collaborative where interdisciplinary institutes across multiple universities with shared research and teaching goals work together for a common good based on citizen science and participatory processes. In a time of global change and crisis, such a grand undertaking is both necessary and relevant. When creating such an enterprise, it is important to remember that, at times, the evolution and establishment of the IfSC seemed organic, and people and expertise seemed to coalesce and align. The impassioned leadership of the director, the expertise of discovery leads, the wherewithal of engagement staff, the focus of administrative staff, the innovation of students, and the inspirational drive to affect change of community partners all play a large role in the successful development and sustainability of the institute. At the same time, establishing the infrastructure for the IfSC was not easy, and, despite such success, it still faces uncertainty. We are proud of the work we have been able to accomplish as well as the sustained and long-lasting relationships with community partners we have created in the living laboratory of Houston, Texas. The IfSC identified a need for better research by working alongside communities, already immersed in peeling back the layers of wicked problems. We are well aware that the IfSC would not exist without the invaluable community partners and residents that shaped, reframed, and

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refined research questions. We also acknowledge we are not the only group doing work in this realm and we will not be the last. There are universities and programs that are authentically engaging communities and reimagining what research and service-learning can be. We hope that the experiences and stories in this book provide universities the courage to begin, sustain, or fine-tune community engaged research efforts.

Reference Duemer, L. S. (2007). The agricultural education origins of the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. American Educational History Journal, 34(1), 135–146.

APPENDIX Shannon Van Zandta, Jaimie Hicks Mastersonb, Galen D. Newmana, Michelle Annette Meyera

Texas A&M University, Department of Landscape Architecture & Urban Planning, College Station, USA Texas A&M University, Texas Target Communities Program, College Station, USA

a

b

Faculty Agreement The purpose of this Agreement is to highlight the roles and responsibilities of faculty. Community engagement • All faculties, students, Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) staff, and partners are expected to conduct themselves in a professional and compassionate manner. • Expectations should be genuine and clearly expressed. • Deadlines should be stated, stressing their importance. If issues or conflicts arise with a deadline, notice should be given to IfSC staff to assist and resolve the issue. • IfSC staff will arrange meetings, site visits, and be the liaison with the community partner. • It is important to earn trust and credibility through honest, open, compassionate, and respectful communication. • Listen respectfully to others concerns and help them understand how IfSC will respond to their concerns. • Be respectful of others ideas and address critiques in a constructive manner. • Assure community members that you are sensitive to issues of confidentiality and privacy. • Cultural sensitivity is paramount. In many communities, concerned or potentially impacted groups may include different ethnic or minority groups and/or members of tribal nations. • Consider cultural differences in and/or outside of the classroom. • Communication and involvement in the community should be sensitive to each group’s culture and languages.This may entail using multiple methods to communicate and involve all groups in the community. • Participation in projects should not reflect the exclusion of any individual or group based on social or economic factors. • Projects should not harm the equality of the community or environment. Engaged Research for Community Resilience to Climate Change http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815575-2.00013-3

Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Faculty commitments: Course teaching and management 1. Follow guidelines placed by the University and specifications laid out in the course syllabus 2. Visit the project site and community partners at least twice per semester 3. Facilitate student travel necessities—including managing travel information as specified by Texas A&M student-activities requirement 4. Work with partner on project and invite partner to visit as a guest lecturer at least once during the semester 5. Manage student interaction with city officials and IfSC staff 6. Encourage frequent meeting intervals with IfSC staff and partner to assess the project’s progress 7. All materials presented to partner (at final or as progress check) need to be reviewed by faculty and IfSC prior to sending to partner. Partner should receive adequate time (1 week or more) to review items before receiving comments back or before presenting to community members 8. Produce the final deliverable at the end of course for IfSC and partner. Interaction/communication with IfSC staff 1. Include IfSC staff in all communication with partner 2. Keep IfSC informed of progress and alert staff to any issues that occur Program participation 1. Attend faculty orientation before semester to learn about projects and expectations associated with partnering with IfSC program 2. Attend opening/closing events for project as well as manage final presentations, if required 3. Provide feedback and evaluations from faculty and staff to IfSC. IfSC commitments: 1. Arrange travel, supplies, printing, and incidentals paid by partner account 2. Assist in communicating course achievements and successes, on campus and to media 3. Assist in resolving emergent issues with faculty or with partner as needed 4. Organize opening and closing sessions with partner 5. Set up and manage IfSC program evaluation. Signed: (Faculty name)

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Covenant with communities Purpose Collaborative, community-focused research endeavors offer benefits to (1) researchers through long-term community labs that support evidencebased, project-driven, and innovative approaches for students and faculty; and (2) community partners through training on issue-based subject matters, public policy development, and sustainable comprehensive action plans. This document serves as a guide for theIfSC to ensure it upholds the highest ethical, cultural, and scholarly principles when engaging community partners. In addition, this document explicitly outlines a bundle of expectations community partners may hold the IfSC accountable to, as well as the expectations the IfSC has of its community partners.

Background The IfSC affirms the mission, purpose, and values of Texas A&M toward the development of faculty and student leaders dedicated to serving the greater good. Specifically, the IfSC is Texas A&M’s response to an Environmental Grand Challenge calling for an alliance of researchers, faculty, students, and citizen scientists, to address critical environmental challenges from disasters and climate change, to poverty, and threats to public health, safety, and quality of life, in service to the people and communities of Texas, the nation, and the world. The IfSC focuses on the protection of natural and built environments and the expansion of social and economic opportunities for all people. Scholars affiliated with the IfSC believe addressing environmental grand challenges requires attention to issues such as ecological degradation, poorly planned human settlements, and the lack of access to healthy living environments and the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on poor and marginalized populations in particular. IfSC scholars also share a fundamental belief that early engagement of community partners to identify areas of concern and the most appropriate methods of collaboration, is critical for transformative progress in reducing the impacts of hazards, climate change, poverty, and other issues related to critical or unmet needs.

Roles and esponsibilities of the Institute of Sustainable Communities To apply and advance methods of scientific research for the betterment of individuals and communities, the IfSC will offer technical and logistic support for community partners while maintaining the highest level of

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scholarship and cultural competence. By signing this document, the IfSC’s principal investigators agree to assume responsibility for the following: 1. Maintain ethical research practices: Abide by, and follow all guidelines, set forth by the Division of Research’s Institutional Review Board at Texas A&M University. 2. Participatory process: Involve community partners in the articulation of research objectives, intellectual properties and desired outcomes. Train and involve community partners in data collection, manipulation, presentation and interpretation. 3. Resource sharing: Provide the resources necessary for community partners to participate meaningfully in project activities, including stipends for time and effort and other project cost (travel, communication, meetings, conferences, etc.) 4. Share data: Data collected within communities will be coowned and managed with community partners. Sharing may include and not be limited to: providing community presentations and digital access to raw or manipulated data. The IfSC data sharing guidelines can be viewed online a  http://ifsc.tamu.edu/Research-Ethics/Data-Sharing 5. Allow for feedback or permission on published work: Allow partner to review papers intended for submission to peer-reviewed journals, as well as popular press pieces, presentations or other forms of communication intended for public view and identifying the partner organization as a contributor, prior to publication. Partner should always be recognized as coauthor or contributor when appropriate. 6. Communication: The IfSC will be accessible via phone, electronic communication, and in-person upon request (see item 7). All attempts will be made to respond to communications within 48 hours. 7. In-person participation in partner events: The IfSC requests a minimum 10 days notice prior to an event (meeting, workshop, conference, etc.) to increase the likelihood of participation.

Roles and responsibilities of the community-based organization The IfSC seeks long-term change by collaborating with community partners to illuminate the conditions, concerns and capacities of community partners, while supporting communities in actualizing their own resilience. To be the most timely, efficient, and effective however, community partners must be willing and able to communicate with and provide assistance to IfSC scholars as well. By signing this document, community partners acknowledge and commit to performing the following duties:

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1. Assign a point of contact: An individual will be assigned to act as the main liaison between the IfSC and the community partner. All required administrative tools and equipment necessary for completion of project related tasks would be provided by the Partner (i.e., computer, telephone, fax, etc). 2. Assist with connections: Partner will provide connections to individuals and networks of people in the community who might benefit or assist with efforts related to project goals. 3. Communication: The partner will be accessible via phone, electronic communication, and in-person meetings to allow for the design and completion of project activities. All attempts will be made to respond to communications within 48 hours. 4. Assist with coordinating tasks and activities: Project activities including but not limited to data collection, community meeting facilitation, formal or informal discussions, and media presentations, will be co-managed by the partner as necessary. 5. Meeting/activity logistics: Partner will arrange appropriate meeting location and ensure IfSC is aware of the date and time of the activity at least 10 days in advance. Partner will confirm the location 48 hours in advance, notify participants (email and phone calls), and ensure materials are sent out in advance of meetings. 6. Keep track of project progress: Keep a record of progress towards project goals. Arrange to take notes and distribute meeting summaries to participants within 1 week after each meeting, and update team members when they miss a meeting. Communicate progress and other key information about the project to target audiences as appropriate.

Funding When pursuing or receiving funding to support collaboration—in the form of grants or donations from public or private sources—the IfSC will favor the most efficient and equitable allocation of those resources between the IfSC and community partners, in consultation with community partners and prior to proposal submission. This may include assisting community partners in locating, applying for, and utilizing resources whereby the community partner is the sole grantee.The IfSC and community partner should consider (1) the benefit to the community, (2) who has intellectual property and authorship, and (3) who manages or implements the process. ____________________________ Community Partner ____________________________ IfSC Fellow

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Actors/stakeholders list List of stakeholders to invite to task force Department of Transportation (State and Local) US Army Corps of Engineers Construction companies Community Building Department/Permit Office Emergency Management Agency (State and Local) Public Works Public Safety Public Health Agency Geographic Information Systems Department Regional Planning Council State Coastal Department/Agency State Sea Grant State Natural Resources/Environment Department/Agency Federal Emergency Management Agency Regional Office Department of Housing and Urban Development liaison NFIP Coordinator/Floodplain Management Office Planners Developers Department of Insurance Targeted Homeowners Targeted Business owners Fire Department/EMS Police Department Parks and Recreation Department Environmental Protection Agency liaison College/University Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) Faith-based Organizations (FBOs) Forestry department Example of task force member roles in Liberty County County Treasurer County Judge Director of Planning of City A Executive Director of City A Economic Development Corporation Mayor of City B City Manager of City B Sheriff

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School District Representative Extension Agent Local Church Leadership Healthcare Case Manager Healthcare Director Local Priest President of Local Charity Owner of Ecological Retreat Center Program Specialist of Community Economic Development Publisher of Local Newspaper

Task force contract Mission—To provide feedback and guidance on the comprehensive plan, the organizing document for growth and development of the city over the next 20 years. Vision—The planning task force represents various communities within the community (whether by neighborhood, interest or stake, age, race, culture, etc.) and acts as a conduit to communicate progress of the comprehensive plan, as well as, the hopes and desires of the community. Goals 1. To establish or affirm a community-wide vision, or the mental picture of the future of the City 2. To identify community assets, strengths, and opportunities for expansion or growth 3. To determine goals and priorities for established topics. Membership: “In an effective decision-making process, a number of people are involved: Those responsible for planning, Those responsible for implementing the decisions, Those affected directly by the decision, and Those affected indirectly or who can influence whether or how the solution is implemented.” (Schwarz 2003: 23)

Roles and responsibilities Monthly meetings from (start date) - (finish date) for 1.5 hrs, starting on time and ending on time

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Use the online project management application to communicate with group Communicate progress with other community members and advocate for their interests

Ground rules (From Schwarz, 2003) 1. Test assumptions and inferences 2. Share all relevant information 3. Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean 4. Explain your reasoning and intent 5. Focus on interests, not positions 6. Combine advocacy and inquiry 7. Jointly agree on next steps and ways to test disagreements 8. Discuss undiscussable issues By signing this, you agree to the information described herein: Name ________________________________________ Signature _____________________________________ Date _________________________________________

Index Note: Page numbers followed by “f ” indicate figures, “t” indicate tables, and “b” indicate boxes.

A Abraham Lincoln Award for Diversity, Outreach, and Inclusion, 93 accountability, fighting for, 36b action. See also knowledge policy and, congruence between, 20 uncertainty and, bridging gap between, 21 action community, 150 action research, 107 active and willing partners, 139, 140f adaptation, 27. See also resilience hazard mitigation, 27 measures, 27 Addams, Jane, 6 administrative staff, 188 adult education, 107 African American, 107 African American Leadership Summit, 97 age/aging, 29 AgriLife, 38, 135 air quality, Houston, 3 American Geophysical Union (AGU), 81 American Planning Association, 129 Area Median Income (AMI), 35 Arnstein’s model of participation, 148 asset-based community development approach, 132 assets, community, 132 associate director, 187 Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), 108 Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), 109 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, 81 attendance counting, process evaluations, 169

B



“barren externalism”, 153 benefit community, 150 Berke, Phil, 90 Berke, Phillip, Dr., 38, 41–43, 46, 48

sustainability plan for environmental grand challenge, 44 big data, 183 biodiversity loss of, 42 RCCCP initiatives, 47 Blanco, Arturo, 92

C Campus Compact, 6 capacity, 57 Capiello, Dina, 92 Capital One, 97 Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement, 6 Center for Housing and Urban Development, 64 Center for Sustainable Community Design (CSDC), 42 Centers for Disaster Control and Prevention (CDC), 163 Central Care, 97 Cesar Chavez High School, 92 champions, community, 133 Charity Productions (CP), 89, 90, 96, 117, 151, 155 global impact, 97 National Incident Management System guidelines, 97 citizen control, 148 citizen power, 148 citizen science, 110, 147 City of Nolanville, story of, 102b civil engineering, problems of, 13 climate change, 4, 13, 75. See also floods/ flooding; natural disasters and flooding, 4 impacts, 13 interdisciplinary research, 75. See also interdisciplinary research rapidly growing population and, 181 RCCCP initiatives for, 47 resilience and, 27, 57. See also resilience 

 

201

202

Index

climate education, 109 climate resilience, 183 Clinton, Bill, 6 Coastal Flood Risk Reduction Program, 60 coastal risk reduction, 52t flood resilience, 60 hazard reduction, 60 projects, 60 and resilience discovery initiative, If SC, 58, 59t CO2 emissions, 27 cognitive interest, 18 collaboration(s), 42, 50, 57, 58 collaborators, 186 finding for interdisciplinary research, 82 collective impact, 127, 137, 139 College of Architecture, 90b, 94 common language, developing, 78 communication, 22, 24. See also learning distorted, 19 practical realities of, 18 transition to action, 20 undistorted, 19, 22 community, in work east end story, 91 Furr High School, 93 Jones Futures Academy, 99 overview, 89 south side story, 96 Texas Target Communities (TXTC) Program, 90b community and university engagement process, integrated impact model, 128 champions, recognize, 133 community task force and students, connecting, 139, 140f core faculty, 137 core team, 136 leadership, discovering, 133 staff roles, 134 value proposition community assets, highlighting, 132 community capacity building, 131 data-driven approaches, 129 identification, 129 success demonstration, 129, 130t time and people, investing, 132

community assets, highlighting, 132 community-based education/projects, 109, 110 local context, 109 perspectives, 110 service-learning with, 110 for wicked problems, 109 community-based organizations, 89, 90. See also specific names community-based research, 107, 108 ethics of benefits (who), 155 knowledge holder, 153 overview, 147 participation rules of thumb, 148, 150t projects designer, 151 extendable, 156 participatory governance, forms, 149, 150t principles of, 148 program evaluation in, 162 public participation in, 148 reciprocity, 155 renewable, 156 university–community partnerships, 148 community capacity, building, 131 Community Development Block Grant for disaster recovery (CDBG-DR), 35 Community Development Block Grant Program, 36b community development planners, 20 community-engaged research, 120, 147, 184. See also engaged research diverse perspectives, 120 logic model and timeframe, program evaluations, 164f CDC on, 163 community engagement focus, 165 components, 165 evaluability assessments, 163 high-impact service learning focus, 165 inputs, measurements, 166 outcome evaluation, 170 process evaluations, 167 stakeholders, 165 transformational research focus, 165

Index

outcome evaluation, 171 principles of practice for, 120 program evaluation in, 162 community engagement, 48, 50t, 57, 77, 163. See also community and university engagement process feedback loops for, 117, 118f If SC’s philosophy, 127 in Manchester/Harrisburg, 90 in Sunnyside, 90 Community Engagement Core (CEC), 66 community(ies), 3 action community, 150 benefit community, 150 components, 29 disadvantaged/under-resourced, 182 engaged research in, 30 as laboratories, 5 types, 150 community impact, 105 community infrastructure, 52t defined, 61 discovery initiatives, If SC, 61 micro-infrastructure, 61 structural, 61 community knowledge, 153. See also knowledge community members, 165 and researchers, data sharing between, 153 community organizations, 7 community participation, process evaluations of, 167, 168 “The Community Partnership Exchange Breakfast”, 97 community relationships, 184 community resilience, 29, 52t. See also resilience building, 180 discovery initiative, If SC, 64 maximizing, 32 community task force active and willing partners, 139, 140f and students, connecting to, 139–141 community-university partnerships, 3 complex interventions, 162 comprehensive plan/planning, 21, 37 consensual problems, 14

203

constructivism, 107 consultation, 148 Cooper, John, 90 Cordova, Alexis, 9 core faculty, 137 core team, 136 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, 81 critical theory, 18, 107 investigation methods, 18 priorities and interests, 19 “validity-claims”, 19 critical thinking skills, 109 cross-pollination, across discovery initiatives, 67 cultural competency training, 154

D data-driven approaches, value proposition, 129 decision-making institutions, 20 definable problems, 14 delegation, 148 Delft University, 60 Department of Homeland Security, 42, 47, 64, 66, 81 Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD), 35 Department of Multicultural Services, TAMU, 154 designer, projects, 151 disadvantaged/under-resourced communities, 182 disaster, stages, 29. See also natural disasters discovery initiatives coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative, 58, 59t community infrastructure initiative, 61 community resilience initiative, 64 cross-pollination across, 67 health and environment initiative, 65 overview, 57 and related publication counts, and interdisciplinary collaboration (2016-18), 58, 59t water security initiative, 62 Discovery Leads, 8, 76 disjointed incrementalism, 21–23

204

Index

distribution, theories of, 30, 31t diverse perspectives, student feedback, 119f drainage issues, 113

E East End community, 91, 94 ecology, resilience, concept/definitions, 27, 28t economic inequality, growing, 182 ecosystems, 29 education, 29 citizen science, 110 community-based. See community-based education/projects of funders, grant reviewers, and collaborators, 186 interdisciplinary. See interdisciplinary education Educational Partnerships for Innovation in Communities Network (EPIC-N), the, 6 egalitarian approaches, 31f, 33, 34 empirical data, 161 empiricism, 17. See also logical empiricism empowerment, of learners. See learners empowerment engaged research, 7, 8, 179. See also community-engaged research broader impacts, 185 in communities, 30 environmental change and, 25 faculty-related challenges, 187 institutionalizing and sustaining, 181 challenges and opportunities external to academe, 181 challenges and opportunities for academe, 183 need for, 13 outputs, 186 engaged research partnership, 143t, 144 Engaged Scholarship Consortium, the, 6 engagement, 50, 58, 75. See also community engagement engagement staff, 188 engineering, 115 engineering-based assessment technique, 115 environmental change, engaged research and, 25

environmental grand challenge (EGC), TAMU, 41, 43. See also Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) Berke’s sustainability plan for, 44 core strategies, 49t discovery initiatives and objectives, 52t RCCCP. See Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP) environmental injustice, 3 environmental justice communities, 147 epidemiology, 66 equal shares approaches, 31f equity, 14, 17 ethics, of community-based research benefits (who), 155 knowledge holder, 153 overview, 147 participation rules of thumb, 148, 150t projects designer, 151 evaluation. See program evaluation experiential education, for wicked problems, 106 experiential learning, 110 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 service-learning, 106. See also servicelearning explanations, discrepancies among, 20 extendable community-based research, 156 external funding cycles, interdisciplinary research, 76

F faculty advancement, 183 faculty-related challenges, 187 Fair Housing laws, 35 fairness, justice and, 34. See also justice Farris, Richard, 97 feedback, student, 119. See also graduate students; high school students diverse perspectives, 119f from pre-post surveys, 120 principles of practice, 120 feedback loops. See also student feedback for community engagement in learning outcomes, 117, 118f FEMA, 97 FHS. See Furr High School (FHS)

Index

Fiesta Grocery store, 97 floods/flooding, 3, 5 climate change and, 4 coastal flood resilience, 60 in Houston, 4 food science, 66 Forester, John, 18 Friedmann, John, 15, 20 Fugate, Craig, 97 funders, 186 funding, interdisciplinary research, 76, 77 Furr High School (FHS), 93, 134, 155 design thinking, 94 preservice professional learning, 96 Schlechty Center framework, 94 student work, 95 Toxic Tours, 94–96 vision, 94 XQ Design Principles, 94

205

gender, 29 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 117 GeoHealth, 81 Gharaibeh, Nasir, 99, 115, 171 global warming, 27 government–citizen relationships, 149 graduate students, 121 interdisciplinary research, 77 in tool testing and training sessions, 47 Grand Challenges, 38 grant reviewers, 186 grants, apply for, 80 green infrastructure designs, 117, 118f Gulf of Mexico, 3 Gulf Research Program, 81

hazard risk, 8 health and environment, 52t discovery initiatives, IfSC, 65 Hendricks, Marccus, Dr., 99 high-impact service learning, 48, 50t, 163. See also service-learning high school students, 121, 165 citizen science, 111 complex stormwater management, 115 toxic tours, 112 “high-touch” partnerships, 134 household composition, 29 housing recovery, in United States, 35 Houston (TX) air quality, 3 environmental and resilience goals, 4, 5 flooding in, 4 neighborhoods, 89, 112. See also Manchester (TX); Sunnyside (TX) east end story, 91 social vulnerability, 90 south side neighborhoods, 96 Houston/Galveston-Citizen Air Monitoring Project, 92 Houston Independent School District (HISD), 93, 99 Houston Ship Channel, 3, 53, 77, 91 leukemia risk and, 3, 91 Hull House, 6 Hurricane Harvey (2017), 3, 4, 76, 100b, 153 cleanup after, 168 impacts, 27 Hurricane Katrina, 34 Hurricane Rita, 34 hurricanes, 3

H

I

Habermas, Jurgen, 18–20, 24, 180 “hard-applied” fields, 109 “hard-pure” fields, 109 Harrisburg (TX), 89, 91 community engagement in, 90 hazard management, 106 hazard mitigation, 27 hazard reduction, 27, 60 Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC), 90b

“ideal speech situation”, 19 IE. See Institute of the Environment (IE) If SC. See Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) “ignorance is bliss” approach, 21 impact evaluations, 172 inclusive plan-making process, 137, 138f, 142 income, 29 incrementalism, disjointed, 21–23

G

206

Index

indigenous knowledge, 153, 154 Institute for Sustainable Communities (If SC), 5, 8, 9, 38, 76, 89, 94, 106, 117, 127, 134, 135, 179. See also National Science Foundation (NSF) community engagement, 48, 50t complex interventions, 162 core themes and strategies for, 50t director and founder, 42 discovery initiatives coastal risk reduction and resilience initiative, 58, 59t community infrastructure initiative, 61 community resilience initiative, 64 cross-pollination across, 67 health and environment initiative, 65 and objectives, 52t overview, 57 and related publication counts, and interdisciplinary collaboration (2016-18), 58, 59t water security initiative, 62 graduate students in interdisciplinary research, 77 high-impact service learning, 48, 50t living laboratories, 52, 53f organizational structure, 50, 51f overview, 41, 144 program evaluation. See program evaluation from RCCP to If SC, 48, 49t Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP), the, 46 resilience-based research, 58, 59t service-learning, 107 TAMU environmental grand challenge, 43, 44t transformative research, 48, 50t Institute of the Environment (IE), 42 Institutional Review Board (IRB), 175 integrated impact model, 8 community and university engagement process, 128 champions, recognize, 133 community assets, highlighting, 132 community capacity building, 131

community task force and students, connecting, 139, 140f core faculty, 137 core team, 136 data-driven approaches, 129 leadership, discovering, 133 staff roles, 134 success demonstration, 129, 130t time and people, investing, 132 value proposition identification, 129 overview, 127, 128f partnerships, differences in, 142, 143t engaged research partnership, 144 service-learning partnership, 142 interdisciplinary approaches, 106 and community perspectives, in student learning, 119f, 120 interdisciplinary dissertation, 78 interdisciplinary education, 110 signature work, 109 for wicked problems, 108 Interdisciplinary Methods for Disaster Research Workshop, 76 interdisciplinary research, 48 barriers and challenges, overcoming, 79 collaborators, finding for, 82 grants applications, 80 next generation of researchers, 80 professional development opportunities, 80 publications, 80 common language and shared conventions, developing, 78 engaging graduate students, 77 external funding cycles, 76 future perspectives, 83 If SC on, 76 overview, 75 stakeholder-engaged, 76 interdisciplinary thinking, 106, 109 interpretive inquiry(ies), 17 ideological character of, 17 proponents of, 18 interviews, evaluation process, 170

J Jackson State University, 60 JFA. See Jones Futures Academy (JFA)

Index

Jones Futures Academy (JFA), 99, 155 justice, 14, 17 egalitarian approaches, 31f, 33, 34 equal shares approaches, 31f fairness and, 34 Rawlsian approach, 31f, 34–37 theories of, 30–34, 31f utilitarian approaches, 31f, 32

K Kellogg Commission, the, 6 knowledge, 20, 106. See also action community, 153 creation of, 167 improvement, method, 22 indigenous, 153, 154 local, 3 perfect, 21 pragmatic traditions and, 24 radical planning, 23 research projects, 153

L “ladder of citizen power”, 148 LAF’s Benefits Toolkit, 117 Land Grant universities, 38 Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), 117 Latino, 107 leadership capabilities in community, discovering, 133 learners empowerment green infrastructure designs, 117, 118f overview, 105 projects for everyone’benefit, 110, 111f service-learning, 106 with community-based projects, 110 local community impact, 108 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 pedagogical approaches, 107 racial minorities, 107 social change, 108 underrepresented students, 107 stakeholders, 110, 111f stormwater infrastructure assessment and planning, 113, 114f student feedback (discussion), 119

207

diverse perspectives, 119f principles of practice, 119f, 120 surface water quality, 116 toxic tours, 112 wicked problems community-based education for, 109 experiential education for, 106 interdisciplinary education for, 108 learning, 22. See also communication experiential, 110 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 service-learning, 106. See also service-learning service-learning, 8, 106 with community-based projects, 110 high-impact, 48, 50t local community impact, 108 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 pedagogical approaches, 107 racial minorities, 107 social change, 108 underrepresented students, 107 transformational, 119 learning outcomes feedback loops for community engagement in, 117, 118f marked positive, 106 leukemia, risk of, 3, 91 liberalism, 23 Liberty County (2015), 101b, 129, 133 LID. See low-impact development (LID) living laboratories, IfSC, 52, 53f local knowledge, 3 local partner organizations, 165 logical empiricism, 14, 16 social problems, 14, 16 logic model, program evaluation, 164f CDC on, 163 community engagement focus, 165 components, 165 evaluability assessments, 163 high-impact service learning focus, 165 inputs, measurements, 166 outcome evaluation, 170 process evaluations, 167 stakeholders, 165 transformational research focus, 165

208

Index

low- and moderate-income households, 35 low-impact development (LID), 67

M Manchester (TX), 89, 91, 112 community engagement in, 90 leukemia risk, 91, 92 living laboratories in, 53f neighborhood , master plan for, 93 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 medicine, 66 memorandum of understanding (MOU), 144 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 42 miscommunications, 20 mitigation defined, 27 hazard, 27 Morrill Acts of 1860 and 1862, 6, 179 MOU. See memorandum of understanding (MOU) multi-university research teams, 80

N National Academy of Sciences, 66, 81 National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 60 National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement, the, 6 National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) Community Rating System, 61, 68 National Incident Management System, 97 National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, 64, 66, 79 National Institute of Standards and Technology, 47 National Institutes of Health, 81 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 47 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, 66 National Red Cross, 97 National Research Council, 44 National Science Foundation (NSF), 6, 42, 47, 60, 64, 66, 76, 81, 171, 185 hazards and disasters research by, 76 Interdisciplinary Methods for Disaster Research Workshop, 76 strategic plan, 76

National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education Program, 60 Native American, 107 natural disasters impacts, 42 increasing frequency and magnitude, 105 Natural Hazards Workshop, 81 natural resources, RCCCP initiatives for, 47 net impact evaluations, 172 Newman, Galen, 171 NIMBY (Not-In-My-BackYard) behavior, 29 nonparticipation, 148, 149 NSF. See National Science Foundation (NSF)

O Office of Multicultural Services, 90b Oti, Isaac, 99 outcome evaluation(s), 170 community engagement focus, 171 impact evaluations, 172 research focus, 171 service learning outcomes, 172 outcomes, defined, 170. See also learning outcomes

P Paris Agreement, the, 4 Parras, Juan, 90 participatory governance benefits, research and, 149, 150t collaborative, 149 consultative, 149 forms, 149, 150t functional, 149 transformative, 149 partnership(s), 9, 57, 148 differences in, 142, 143t engaged research partnership, 143t, 144 service-learning partnership, 142, 143t Paulison, R. David, 97 pedagogical approaches. See also specific entries service-learning, 107 peer-reviewed journals, 80

Index

people, 3 perception data, surface water quality, 116 perfect knowledge, 21 physical data, surface water quality, 116 placation, 148 place, 3 place-based approaches, 105, 106 place-based education, 109 planning, 15 problems, rational comprehensive model, 21 radical, 23 stormwater infrastructure assessment and, 113 policy and action, congruence between, 20 Policy Sciences, 14 pollution, 3 population(s) climate change and, 181 rapidly growing, 181 socially vulnerable, 30 positivism, 17 social problems, 15 social theory and, 17 “wicked” problems, 15 pragmatic planners, 24 pragmatism, 24 prediction, 20 “Presidential Hire”, 184 principles of practice, student feedback, 119f, 120 problem(s). See also “wicked” problems of civil engineering, 13 consensual, 14 definable, 14 understandable, 14 problem solving, 16 process evaluations, 167. See also program evaluation activity measurements, 168 attendance counting, 169 of community participation, 167, 168 interdisciplinary connections, 169 interview or survey methods, 170 program evaluation benefits, 162 in community-engaged research, 162 complex interventions, 162

209

defined, 161 future perspectives, 174 If SC activities, 163, 164f community engagement, 163 high-impact service learning, 163 inputs, measurements, 166 outcomes and impacts, identification and measurement, 170 process evaluations, 167 transformational research, 163 logic model, 164f CDC on, 163 community engagement focus, 165 components, 165 evaluability assessments, 163 high-impact service learning focus, 165 inputs, measurements, 166 outcome evaluation, 170 process evaluations, 167 stakeholders, 165 transformational research focus, 165 need for, 161 objectives, 162 overview, 161 progressive education, 107 project management software, 136 publications, interdisciplinary research and, 80 public health, 66 interventions, 167 RCCCP initiatives for, 47 public participation, 148 in community-based research, 148 Pugh, David, Dr., 90b

R race/ethnicity, 29 racial minorities, service-learning, 107 racism, structural, 29 radical planning, 23 rational comprehensive model, 21 disjointed incrementalism, 22 “ignorance is bliss” approach, 21 knowledge and selflessness, 23 pluralism, 22 radical planning, 23 Rawls, John, 34

210

Index

Rawlsian approach, 31f, 34–37 RCCCP. See Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP) “real world”, 15 reciprocity, 105, 155 resources sharing, 155 Reliant Energy, 97 renewable community-based research, 156 research, 75. See also community-based research engaged. See engaged research participation in, 147 participatory governance and, 149, 150t public participation, 148 transformational, 48, 50t, 163 university–community partnerships, 148 researchers/designer, projects, 151 and community members, data sharing between, 153 research projects knowledge, 153 researchers/designer, 151 resilience, 7, 52t accountability, fighting for, 36b adaptation and, 27 climate, 183 climate change and, 27, 57 community, 29 concept, 27–29 definitions, 27, 28t, 44 discovery initiative, If SC, 58, 59t ecological definitions, 27, 29 ecosystems, 29 social vulnerability, 29, 30 theories of justice, 30–34, 31t Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP), 46, 48 initiatives, 47 biodiversity and natural resources, 47 climate change, 47 public health, 47 interdisciplinary proposals, 47 objectives, 46 overview, 46 resilience-based research, If SC, 58, 59t. See also discovery initiatives

resilience planning, 8 Reyes, Brenda, 92 Rice University, 60 risk analysis, 76 Roberts, Andrea, Dr., 99 rural community planning City of Nolanville, story of, 102b Liberty County (2015), 101b

S sanitation, problems of, 13 scenario planning, 79 Schlechty Center, 94 science, 3 scientific methods, 161 selflessness, 23 self-realization, 23, 24 self-reflection, 19 service-learning, 8, 106, 109, 142, 147 with community-based education, 110 high-impact, 48, 50t, 163 local community impact, 108 marked positive learning outcomes, 106 outcomes, 172 pedagogical approaches, 107 project awards, 130t racial minorities, 107 social change, 108 underrepresented students, 107 service-learning partnership, 142, 143t service-learning projects, 105 settlement house model, 6 shared conventions, developing, 78 signature work, 109 Sims Bayou Watershed (Houston), 61 Sister City Project Haiti, 97 Smith-Lever Act of 1914, 6 social justice education, 107 social mobilization, 24 social policy, 17 social problems logical empiricism, 14, 16 positivist viewpoint, 15 rational comprehensive model, 21 as “wicked” problems, 14. See also “wicked” problems social reform, 21 social science, 13

Index

social theory, 17 interpretive inquirers, 17, 18 positivism and, 17 social vulnerability characteristics, 29 defined, 29 factors, 29, 30 Houston neighborhoods, 90 populations, 30 socio-environmental systems, dynamics, 63 “soft-applied” fields, 109 “soft-pure” fields, 109 Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission, 5 South Park (TX), 77 south side neighborhoods of, 77 “spirit of service”, 6 St. Joseph Medical Center, 97 staff roles, university, 134 stakeholder-engaged interdisciplinary research, 76 stakeholder(s) learners empowerment, 110, 111f logic model, program evaluations, 165 Starr, Ellen Gates, 6 State Sea Grant, 81, 135 Stevens, Tracy, 115 stormwater infrastructure assessment and planning, 113, 114f stormwater management, 68 structural racism, 29 student feedback, 119. See also graduate students; high school students diverse perspectives, 119f from pre-post surveys, 120 principles of practice, 120 success, demonstration, 129, 130t Sunnyside (TX), 89, 112 community engagement in, 90 living laboratories in, 53f, 54, 77 south side neighborhoods of, 53 surface water quality, 116 health survey, 116 perception data, 116 physical data, 116 sampling, 116 Survey of Earned Doctorates, 78 surveys, evaluation process, 170

211

survival, 3 sustainability, 38 Berke’s sustainability plan for EGC, TAMU, 44 synchronicity, in theory and practice, 180

T TAMU. See Texas A&M University (TAMU) Tbilisi Declaration, the, 108 technological events, 5 Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service, 91 Texas A&M University (TAMU), 41, 60, 82, 98, 129, 168. See also Institute for Sustainable Communities (IfSC) Department of Multicultural Services, 154 environmental grand challenge (EGC), 41, 43 core strategies, 49t RCCCP. See Resilience and Climate Change Cooperative Project (RCCCP) Grand Challenge approach, 41 Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center, 64 Office of the Provost and Executive Vice President, 76 as Predominately White Institution (PWI), 112 Superfund Center, 66 TXTC Program, 90b Texas AppleSeed, 36b Texas Center for Beaches and Shores, 58 Texas Department of State Health Services, 66 Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s), 90, 92, 94, 112, 133, 155 Toxic Tours, 94, 96 Texas Gulf Coast, the, 36 Texas Housers, 36b Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, 36b Texas Sea Grant, 60, 64 Texas Target Communities (TXTC) Program, 5, 37, 38, 90b, 135, 144, 189

212

Index

Texas Water- Food-Energy, 48 Texas Water Observatory, 48 theory(ies) critical. See critical theory of distribution, 30, 31t of justice, 30–34, 31f social. See social theory synchronicity in, 180 tokenism, 148 tornadoes, 5 toxicology, 66 toxic tours, 92, 94–96, 112 transformational learning diverse perspectives, 119 principles of practice for, 120 transformational research, 48, 50t, 163, 171 trust, 57 truth, uncovering, 20, 24 “turf-wars”, 181 12-item Short-Form Health Survey version 2 (SF12v2), 116

U uncertainty and action, bridging gap between, 21 bottom-up approach, 23 under-resourced/disadvantaged communities, 182 understandable problems, 14 United States, housing recovery in, 35 United States Environmental Protection Agency, 60 United States General Accounting Office (GAO), 161 university, 5. See also community and university engagement process citizen science, 111 core faculty, 137 core team, 136 staff roles, 134 toxic tours, 112 value proposition community assets, highlighting, 132 community capacity building, 131 data-driven approaches, 129 identification, 129 success demonstration, 129, 130t time and people, investing, 132

university–community partnerships, 148, 149, 156. See also community-based research ethical, 150 university engagement process. See community and university engagement process University of Houston, 60 University of North Carolina (UNC), 42 University of Texas School of Public Health, 3 University Year for ACTION, 6 urban planning, 13, 115, 167 urgency, 3 USDA Food Access Research Atlas, 91 US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, 108 utilitarian approaches, 31f, 32

V value-engaged research, 184 value proposition community assets, highlighting, 132 community capacity building, 131 data-driven approaches, 129 identification, 129 success demonstration, 129, 130t time and people, investing, 132

W water quality and availability, global decline in, 42 surface water, 116 water security, 52t defined, 62 initiative, IfSC, 62 Watson, Karan, Dr., 41 White, Charles X, 90 “wicked” problems, 8, 180 characteristics, 13 classification, 16 community-based education for, 109 critical theory, 18 and discrepancies among explanations, 20 experiential education for, 106 hypotheses as potential solutions, 17 interdisciplinary education for, 108 interpretive inquirers, 17, 18

Index

logical empiricism, 14, 16 no definitive formulation of, 17 positivist viewpoint, 15 rational comprehensive model, 21 social problems as, 14 social theory, 17 solutions, as not true-false, but good-bad, 17 as symptom of another problem, 16

as unbounded, 17 uncertainty and action, bridging gap between, 21 wildfires, 5 Wilson, Woodrow, 6 “world of our experience”, 15

Z zoning, 29

213