Building Equitable University-Community Geoscience Research Collaborations on Chicago’s South Side

The geosciences have long struggled to recruit and retain students and professionals that reflect the diverse population its research serves. While traditional approaches to recruitment and retention have made important progress in recent years, this project seeks to build on new frameworks for equitable-reciprocal partnerships between geoscience departments and community-based organization applied within the city of Chicago through open sharing of assets and knowledge spanning both research and teaching practices.

These transparent sharing practices open pathways for place-based learning and research, actively engage individuals outside the mainstream geosciences, invest in regenerative community enterprise and train students for inspiring career pathways in sustainable geoscience fields. This planning grant will specifically formalize and accelerate a partnership between the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) with the Urban Growers Collective (UGC), a Black and Women-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

The goal is to develop a scalable roadmap to address structural and cultural barriers that hinder partnership growth. The initial phase of the project will utilize approaches developed by Partnerships for Antiracist Campus Transformation (PACT) at University of Illinois Chicago to establish how best to develop equitable budgets, redress structural barriers, align strategic plans between institutions, co-create teaching and research plans and identify new workforce pathways.

The project will then pilot both teaching and research projects that empower students to solve problems on urban land stewardship, food production and waste upcycling in Chicago. For the teaching case, the department’s core soil class will work with stewards across the network of urban agriculture sites in the city to develop actionable ideas for soil renewal in disinvested and industrially zoned areas of Chicago’s southside.

For the research case, the community researchers and university investigators will quantify carbon, nutrient, and greenhouse gas benefits associated with upcycling of urban food waste using composting and UGC’s new anaerobic digester facility. This aspect of the project will shed light on workforce development avenues based on upcycling and regenerative practices.

A formal project assessment will be undertaken by consultants of the Urban Growers Collective during each phase of the project with the goal of developing an implementation project that incorporates a larger cohort of community groups, confronts institutional challenges associated with supporting these partnerships and developing a pathway for sustainable implementation of these approaches with other urban Community Based Organizations and geoscience departments.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.