Building environmental leaders through university-community partnerships
Environmental Leaders Program
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The Environmental Leaders Program creates transformative experiences for both graduate students and communities through civic engagement that addresses local environmental issues. This new UC Davis program facilitates place-based learning experiences for graduate students ("Environmental Leaders") and greater access to resources for communities. Graduate student Leaders provide technical, scientific, organizational, and educational assistance, with an emphasis on collaborative problem solving and exchange of knowledge. The Environmental Leaders Program is one strategy for how universities can: 1) engage in public scholarship, linking theory and practice, and 2) make graduate education more critical and applied.
About the Environmental Leaders Program
The Environmental Leaders Program establishes an innovative model for research universities to involve graduate students in a campus-wide service-learning framework to address community environmental issues and to promote university-community partnerships. By linking established strengths within the University of California, Davis in new ways, the program encourages students to apply their academic training to real world problems, learn from interactions with communities, and become life-long leaders in civic engagement and public scholarship.
The Environmental Leaders Program brings university students and community stakeholders together to address environmental issues. The program places graduate students into California communities to foster citizen-based learning, engagement, and decision-making about the environment. The Environmental Leaders Program facilitates place-based learning experiences for graduate students and greater access to resources for communities. Through a project structure, graduate students provide communities with technical, scientific, organizational, or educational assistance, with an emphasis on collaborative problem solving and exchange of knowledge.
Environmental projects combine solution-oriented research and engagement activities and address local conditions of the communities involved. Such projects result from collaboration between graduate student Leaders and community members, link with university faculty research and research centers, and facilitate graduate student PhD and Masters level research.
Why a Environmental Leaders Program?
The Environmental Leaders Program is a strategy for university engagement with communities and a strategy for involving graduate students in real world problems, building skills and civic engagement, linking academic theory to real world practice.
Goals are to create: 1) healthier communities with improved capacity to solve local environmental problems; 2) an extensive talent pool of graduates who possess academic and scientific expertise coupled with leadership and community engagement skills; and 3) an increased UCD commitment to support service-learning as a meaningful teaching approach, to foster solution-oriented research and engagement, to develop strong relationships with local communities, and to share university knowledge and resources with those communities.
Program Organization, Activities, and Funding
The Environmental Leaders Program was launched in Spring 2006 as an interdisciplinary program for solution-oriented research and engagement addressing environmental issues in California and emphasizing graduate student leadership, civic engagement, and partnerships with communities to solve local environmental problems.
The Environmental Leaders Program (ELP) is directed by the John Muir Institute of the Environment. Joyce Gutstein is the ELP director and Kandace Knudson, Postdoc in Public Scholarship, is the coordinator. The coordinator provides supervision and a weekly professional development seminar for participating graduate students.
Funding comes from internal and external grants and contracts to graduate students, faculty, and research centers. University research grants with outreach mandates can simultaneously support graduate students and fund thematically focused community-based environmental projects.
Where Did the Idea Come From?
The impetus for the development of a Environmental Leaders Program on the UC Davis campus arose out of a UC Davis project which provided technical and scientific assistance to watershed groups in the Sierra Nevada who were actively learning and making decisions about their watersheds. This program, entitled "Data and Analysis into Local and Regional Decision Making", began in 1998 by the then California Resources Agency Science Advisor Greg Greenwood and former PSRP director Dennis Pendleton. Assistance over the course of a few years was provided to two watershed groups by "dedicated liaisons" - University personnel who served as links between university and agency knowledge and on-the-ground watershed group decision making.
In 2002-03, Culley Thomas, PSRP evaluator, and Joyce Gutstein, current PSRP director, examined the model of dedicated liaisons working between the University and Sierra watershed groups and thought it could be applied to university graduate students who desired more applied work with communities on real world environmental problems. It was also felt that the liaison model provided a vehicle for a more collaborative university role in community-based environmental decision-making.
Environmental Projects
Developed through the Environmental Leaders Program, environmental projects link UC Davis graduate students with community members to address environmental issues and solve local environmental problems, primarily in California. The resulting collaborations develop environmental and civic engagement skills and experiences for both the students and community members. Topics range from creek restoration, place-based identity, environmental justice, natural resource protection, regional growth and development, land use changes, community design, watershed health and conservation, air quality, and human health. Techniques for engaging with community members include public education, community science, community mapping, and participatory research.