Capacity-Building for Public Engagement and Outreach in Science

By Sheeva Azma

Since I had a press pass to attend the 2024 AAAS Conference, I attended every science policy session I could. Check out my recap blogs of this meeting or read all of my recaps about various AAAS seminars and meetings I’ve attended here.

Below I recap a session called “Incentivizing and Recognizing Public Engagement and Outreach.” The session discussed community engagement to drive not only policy but co-create knowledge in research, among other outcomes. Key questions covered included: What does it mean to engage others in research? What does it take to do so in a meaningful way?

What is community engagement in science?

Brie Lindsey of the California Council on Science and Technology kicked off the talk framing the issue of community engagement. Public engagement is broad and goes by different names and can take different forms. One specific type is community engagement, which is, above all, a tool. Community engagement is engagement between an academic community and other communities to achieve shared goals or outcomes, such as problem-solving, knowledge production (in other words, research) or fair allocation of public resources. This type of engagement is limited to a specific population, such as a neighborhood or region; identity; or other types of communities. Communities of practice (for example: healthcare workers, policymakers) unite researchers around types of work; communities of interests gather around specific groups (for example: running).

Seven characteristics of effective community engagement can make research partnerships with communities more community-centered, with flow of knowledge in both directions or even co-created. Posed as questions, these are:

• Who should be involved?
• What is the purpose of the engagement?
• Where will the engagement lead?
• Why is community engagement needed?
• Why are the researchers engaging the community?
• What should the engagement look like?

Community engagement in action

Michael Rios, Vice Provost, Public Scholarship and Engagement of the University of California, Davis, next spoke about his work in community engagement. His first experience in community engagement was his work, before he became an academic as a practitioner, to engage with communities in Oakland to be able to expand their parks and open spaces via a multi-year project that led to a waterfront park. He calls himself a “pracademic,” or a practitioner-turned-academic, that is interested in the community’s voice in decisionmaking processes. His current work at UC Davis supports faculty and students working in community engagement. “Part of that requires up to show up and be present” and “showing a deep respect” for cultures with which one engages. Thinking about co-creating knowledge with communities can lead to mutual benefit. “Community engagement should never be an afterthought…it should be an integral part of research design: whose knowledge? Whose benefits?” he says. Looking at a community partner as a co-Principal Investigator on the research rather than a contractor is one way to bake in this type of framework, Rios noted.

Roberto Delgado, Program Director in the National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs, became engaged in community engagement long before his time at NSF, through his research in behavioral conservation of wildlife. He spent a lot of time “overseas, in foreign lands, in a very different context” and his work necessitated working together with local Indigenous people to guide his research and outcomes. This enabled him to cross over into a developmental perspective, looking at socioeconomic development as well as his basic science investigations. His work led to the development of protected forests and reserves, and he ended up needing to explain why he chose to follow the research path that he did to Indigenous populations, and what benefits there were for them from his research goals.

As a “research-adjacent” professional working with Indigenous peoples in the Arctic, Delgado has learned that “controlling the purse” and funding these activities gives the NSF a lot of power to bake in community engagement directly into the research aims and broader impacts. The NSF defines broader impacts as: “moving their research beyond the lab to impact the public good, thereby benefitting the economy, society and discovery itself.” He has worked to develop guidelines to strengthen co-production of knowledge and leverage Indigenous knowledge systems to examine climate in the Arctic.

Challenges in community engagement

The panelists stated that challenges to this type of work include building trust, listening, communication and translating research knowledge to community audiences. There’s a two-way communication there that must be established for a fruitful community engagement relationship. 

Another challenge is getting scientists to do the “volunteer work” of engagement, including science communication to communities, is not always recognized by institutions, and so there is a lack of skills-based training to do that effectively (check out our free SciComm resources). The outreach activities should be put into the NSF proposal budget, Delgado says, to combat this challenge. His office recognizes the value of “incentivizing this type of support” to make sure that community-centric evaluation metrics exist as well for a productive partnership.

An additional challenge is the labor piece for communities. Community-partner compensation should be built into research grants to boost equity of what labor looks like and how it’s compensated across scientists and communities alike.

At the core, though, it’s about more than money, though, according to Rios: a value shift is needed. Students have different values that align with social impact, and institutions can use that as a force for good in the world.

Delgado suggests adding an evaluative process in the proposal so that goals that are being described can be monitored to see if they are being met. “Ensuring that this all ties in with broader efforts” for engaging Indigenous communities, and compensating stakeholders from those communities who are involved in the research effort, is important.

Building an academic infrastructure for community engagement

Rios says that increasing faculty recognition and rewards in this space to recognize public scholarship and engagement, not just “service.” Faculty development opportunities that recognize this work as crucial to professionals can also help, he says. UC gives out grants every year for professors to engage with communities, with the opportunity to get more grant funding for more in-depth community engagement projects. Rios is working to bake community engagement into scholarship and academic research to “build capacity for engaged research.”

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Read all of my AAAS 2024 Annual Meeting recap blogs here or level up in science communication and science policy by checking out Fancy Comma’s FREE resources.