A report following the 2016 Environmental Health Summit recommended engaging citizens in creating their own knowledge and solutions, thus ensuring that their concerns are adequately addressed and promoting sustainability of community projects. Indeed, citizen science has the potential to initiate a cascade of events with a positive ripple effect that includes a more diverse future STEM and biomedical workforce. This SEPA proposal involves the establishment of WE ENGAGE – an informal, citizen science-based, environmental health experiential learning program designed in partnership with and for under resourced communities struggling with health and environmental health challenges. Its purpose is to actively engage and build the citizen science capacity of citizens living in a single cluster of three contiguous under resourced, minority Cincinnati neighborhoods where generational challenges continue to plague residents despite the presence of established academic-community partnerships. Our hypothesis is that community-informed, experiential learning opportunities outside of the classroom that are structured, multi-generational, and story-based will encourage a) the active asking, discussion about, and answering of relevant complex health and environmental questions so that individuals and communities can plan action steps to make better health choices and pursue healthier environments, and b) greater interest and confidence in pursuing formal biomedical/STEM education and STEM careers. Our program has three specific aims: 1) We will co-create tailored story- based (graphic novel style) STEM education materials with a community advisory board and offer informal STEM education and research training to our target communities; 2) we will facilitate the application of scientific inquiry skills to improve health via community-led health fairs that use an innovative electronic health passport platform to collect data and through facilitated community discussions of health fair data to generate motivating stories to share; and 3) we will facilitate the application of scientific inquiry skills to foster community pride and activism in promoting healthier/safer built environments via walking environmental assessments. As in aim 2, facilitated discussions will be held to spur future community based participatory research studies and interventions. Critical to our success is the concept of storytelling. Storytelling is a foundation of the human experience. A key purpose of storytelling is not just understanding the world, but positively transforming it. It is a common language. Bringing together STEM concepts in the form of a story increases their appeal and meaning. Later, the very process of community data collection gives individuals a voice. In a data story, hundreds to millions of voices can be distilled into a single narrative that can help community members probe important underlying associations and get to the root causes of complicated health issues relevant to their communities. Through place based, understandable, motivating data stories, the community’s collective voice is clearer—leading to relevant and viable actions that can be decided and taken together. From preventing chronic disease, to nurturing healthier environments, to encouraging STEM education — stories have unlimited potential.
Public Health Relevance Statement:
Narrative WE ENGAGE is an informal citizen science-based, experiential learning program designed in partnership with and for middle schoolers to adults living in under resourced minority communities. Using the power of data collection and storytelling, its purpose is to actively engage citizens in STEM/research education and training to encourage a more diverse future workforce and to sustainably build local capacity to ask and answer complex health and environmental questions relevant to their communities. Further, by engaging citizens and giving them a more equitable stake in the research process, they are better able to discover their own solutions.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Melinda Sue ButschkovacicSusan Ann Hershberger
Screenscope, Inc. is producing three annual "state of the environment" reports. The reports will consist of a yearly, ninety-minute, prime-time public television program and an extensive outreach initiative to engage families and the public in a variety of educational activities. The television programs will: Present an up-to-date "state of the environment" assessment of ecosystem performance and human health; Feature the year's most important environmental incidents; Highlight the year's most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs and research dealing with environmental issues; Focus on community programs that have helped improve the quality of the environment over the past year. The outreach initiative will include: A Citizen Science Project with strong emphasis on family participation; Neighborhood workshops and coalitions organized by local PBS stations in association with the American Association for Advancement of Science and the World Resources Institute; An interactive web component including real-time environmental satellite data and visualizations; Local and national media events featuring the yearly release of a "State of the Environment" report; Partnerships will be developed with environmental organizations to help promote and implement the initiative's informal education activities. The project will be under the direction of Marilyn and Hal Weiner with the television programs being produced by their company, Screenscope. Anthony Janetos, Vice President and Chief of Programs at the World Resources Institute will have oversight responsibility for the science information presented in the Annual Report. Project advisors include: Bonnie Cohen, former Under Secretary of State for Management and Board member of CARE; Chet Cooper, former Deputy Director, Emerging Technologies, Battelle/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Robert Fri, Senior Fellow Emeritus at Resources for the Future and former Director of the National Museum of Natural History; Edward Frieman, Director Emeritus at of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Vice Chancellor of the University of California; Nay Htun, Dean of the University of Peace and former Assistant Secretary-General, United Nations Development Programme; Thomas Lovejoy, Science Advisor to the World Bank and the UN Foundation; Jessica Tuchman Mathews, President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Per Pinstrup-Andersen, Director-General, International Food Policy Research Institute; Maurice Strong, Chairman, Earth council and former Secretary-General of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. There also will be science advisors for each of the individual episodes.
This project brings real scientific research into the public domain by establishing a research laboratory in a museum setting where visitors not only enroll in the study, they help shape it through their work as citizen scientists. Findings from the study will increase the public understanding of how genetic research translates into meaningful personal information that can be used to better understand personal health risks and opportunities. In a community-based participatory research laboratory, school-aged children and their families will participate in an authentic research project on the genetics of taste. In a series of simple but highly specific taste tests, participants will learn which gene variations they possess and how these variations influence how they taste foods. Taste function has been increasingly linked to human health, in that variability in taste sensation correlates with, and may in part be causal for, major health problems, including cardiovascular disease and obesity. Interactive exhibit components will inform participants about the scientific process, the principles of genetics, the human genome project and genetic variation. Teaching the public about their genetic profile and its influence on taste may have a positive impact on major health threats such as cardiovascular disease and obesity. The data collected from museum visitors who choose to enroll in the study will be sent to the museum's academic partners for further analysis and inclusion in their ongoing research analysis and publications. This laboratory experience not only engages and educates the public, but also advances the research enterprise and offers a vivid model for how to translate research into the public domain.
Understanding a community's concerns and informational needs is crucial to conducting and improving environmental health research and literacy initiatives. We hypothesized that analysis of community inquiries over time at a legacy mining site would be an effective method for assessing environmental health literacy efforts and determining whether community concerns were thoroughly addressed. Through a qualitative analysis, we determined community concerns at the time of being listed as a Superfund site. We analyzed how community concerns changed from this starting point over the subsequent
A research project that is only expert-driven may ignore the role of local knowledge in research, often gives low priority to the development of a comprehensive communication strategy to engage the community, and may not deliver the results of the study to the community in an effective way. Objective: To demonstrate how a research program can respond to a community research need, establish a community-academic partnership, and build a co-created citizen science program. Methods: A place-based, community-driven project was designed where academics and community members maintained a reciprocal
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Univeristy of Wisconsin- StoutMonica Ramirez-AndreottaMark BrusseauJanick ArtiolaRaina MaierA Jay Gandolfi