Community Work for Climate Resilience: Forging Justice at the Nexus of a Polytechnic and Grassroots Organizations
Link to JSE December 2024 CECR Issue Table of Contents
Cardinal and Costelloe Kuehn JSE Dec 2024 CECR Issue PDF
Abstract: Engineering education increasingly recognizes the need to incorporate sustainability and community engagement, but significant challenges remain in implementation. This study explores how sustainability-focused research-in-community can be integrated into critical and creative engineering education to build climate resilience and justice. We develop the concept and practice of “community work” to refer to both work building communities (forging and maintaining relationships) and work by these communities (to improve their present conditions and build towards better futures). Community work offers hope rooted in embodied experiences with present, evolving collectivities, contrasting with decontextualized, depoliticized, techno-optimistic visions of engineering solutions. While risks of extraction are always present in neoliberal higher education contexts, our research aims to improve the quality, not just quantity, of university-community relations. Through participant-observation and ethnographic interviews with leaders of a collaboration between local community organizations and faculty at a polytechnic institute, we argue that community work can contribute to a shared sense of “home,” foster social relationships and networks, expand imaginations of sustainability beyond technical fixes, and intervene in power hierarchies in town/gown dynamics. Together these practices create conditions for greater climate resilience and justice.
Keywords: community work, engagement, pedagogy, sustainability, climate justice, resilience.
INTRODUCTION
WELCOME TO TROY
The City of Troy is home to about 50,000 people in the Capital Region of New York. The city is long and skinny, running north-south along the Hudson River, with creeks (the Poesten Kill and Wynants Kill) flowing down from the Rensselaer Plateau (to the east leading to the Berkshire Mountains) into the Hudson in the south of the city. Due to these geographic factors, a large portion of the city has a high risk for flooding during increasingly frequent and severe storms (Smith et al., 2023). Troy also has lots of concrete and little green space, especially in neighborhoods in the north and south, creating extreme heat conditions (Cheval et al., 2024). Looking up a steep hill from central downtown area, we see Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Figure 1: The proverbial “college on the hill.” View from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute campus. Source: https://www.collegeadvisor.com/colleges/rensselaer-polytechnic-institute/
The city of Troy is taking some steps toward climate resilient infrastructure, such as repairing the downtown-focused seawall along the Hudson, adopting geothermal energy in a portion of downtown, and some other modest changes. But climate risk and investment is patchy. Downtown is a funding and planning priority, drawing entrepreneurs and loft-living denizens of newly-built “luxury apartments,” but the majority of city residents live elsewhere. In these areas peripheral to downtown, community members are working to build their own capacity to create climate resilience and justice.
Local nonprofit organizations have fostered significant social networks connecting residents with gathering spaces and resources. Oakwood Community Center, for example, hosts monthly community meals and open mics, a food pantry, and youth performing arts programs. Troy’s North Central neighborhood, not on the city’s investment radar, is home to the Sanctuary for Independent Media, NATURE Lab, Collard City Growers, and the Troy Bike Rescue, which are part of a thriving neighborhood network. These places are not just important components for quality of life, but also for resilience in a changing climate, creating spaces for building community capacity around life’s necessities like food (Quinn, 2024), clothing (Mahar, 2024), and housing (Wallace, 2024). The work by diverse Trojans to build community, and to leverage this community for collectively working towards climate resilience and justice, comes together in the central concept of this article: community work.
ARRIVING AT “COMMUNITY WORK”
The geographical and socio-economic disparities and challenges in Troy underscore the critical need for robust communication and collaboration across differences, in order to build climate resilience for all of Troy, not just a small area of concentrated investment. After almost 20 years, between the two of us, attempting to incorporate community engagement into our research and teaching at Troy’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, we decided to zoom out and take stock of the impacts of our work on our community.
Instead of just doing the best we could to responsibly connect our students with local organizations under less-than-ideal conditions, we embarked on a project with our colleagues in the Department of Science and Technology Studies to analyze and improve these conditions. We slowed down and listened to our frequent collaborators and explored the question that became central to the research we share here: How can we responsibly include research-in-community as part of a critical and creative polytechnic education that builds climate resilience and justice where we live?
Building on lessons learned in what has become a multi-year research project with leaders of local community organizations, volunteer coordinators, educators, polytechnic institute students, and sustainability-oriented faculty like ourselves, we argue that despite numerous challenges community work is essential to justice-oriented climate resilience. Before elaborating on the relationship between the form of community engagement we describe in this article and the justice-oriented climate resilience we seek to contribute to, we will expand on what we mean by work building community, work by the community, and how these two components of community work relate.
Community building – the first part of our definition of community work – brings people together in at least a partially shared vision of “home,” through collaborative experiences and knowledge exchange, in a context where “community” includes many diverse experiences of the same city, a place made up of many different neighborhoods and networks. “Community work,” in contrast with “community engagement,” questions the distinction between the community and the (presumably more powerful and active) “engager.” In community work, all of the contributing stakeholders are recognized as part of the community and valued for their work, even as differences in capacity, power, and knowledge are named, questioned, and strategically mobilized. To align with principles of climate justice, the concept/practice of community work in the context of university/community dynamics necessarily disrupts entrenched power hierarchies by shifting resources and labor from the university into projects developed and led by the expertise of grassroots community groups. The point, here, is not to write yet another article pointing out inequality – which risks perpetuating the “damage-centered research” Eve Tuck (2009) has called for a moratorium on – but to leverage the different forces swirling in our community work to build another kind of community/power together.
The second part of community work focuses on the diverse kinds of work done by communities. Fortunately, our small city boasts an incredible array of action-oriented grassroots organizations working towards climate resilience and justice. As long as we build community between and among groups that are often disconnected (namely university students and community groups) we can trust that “the work” – action that tangibly builds towards just sustainabilities – will be accomplished. Collaborations between long-standing and highly effective but under-resourced community-based groups, higher-ed faculty, and students have the potential to set university towns on a path towards better climate futures, but this outcome is far from guaranteed. To animate this potential, essential elements include fostering an expanded sense of home for students, supporting community leadership of initiatives, and securing financial resources from colleges and universities. With this foundational support, community work can result in collective shifts of perception and practice, transforming student emplacement from transience to rooted community ties and a sense of home beyond their individual domiciles, and supporting the ongoing work of community organizations that, in organization-rich places like Troy, have been doing the work for decades.
SITUATING OUR APPROACH AND CONTRIBUTIONS
Mobilizing our two-part definition of community work, this article lays out our experiences attempting to create sustainable conditions for mutually meaningful collaborations, weaving in insights from community-engaged critical research, critical pedagogies, and diverse forms of solidarity between university-based actors and people working within community organizations.
The community work we are developing, in contrast with the dominant pedagogies within the polytechnic where we work, focuses primarily on social relationships and networks. As Scott Kellogg (2021) and others have pointed out, the social component of “triple bottom line” sustainability tends to be undervalued compared to economic and environmental considerations. It is especially crucial to share the lessons we have learned on the centrality of relationships with engineering students, who often view sustainability solely as a technological issue requiring innovative technical “fixes.” In our institutional context, community work invites students to expand their imaginations about sustainable futures beyond techno-optimistic visions of engineering solutions.
In neoliberal universities, however, well-intentioned community engagement can still inadvertently exploit community groups, faculty, and students. While our professional world prioritizes research (often reduced to publications) we emphasize ethical engagement in community work and see individual research as necessary but insufficient. Collaborative research, at its best, fosters reflexivity, maps power relations, and enhances understanding of diverse perspectives, improving our collective capacity to build our conditions otherwise.
Our research emerged from, and aims to contribute to, community work that avoids extractive practices and facilitates meaningful experiences for everyone involved. But rather than waiting until we have everything completely figured out, and have secured the ideal support we need to do the work, we’re building as we go, bringing students out of the classroom and into the community in imperfect ways. Our work is aligned with scholarship “against purity” (Shotwell, 2016) and attempts to evolve theories of change within compromised spaces (Liboiron & Lepawsky, 2022). The community work we’re developing aims to provide a greater degree of reliability for the various stakeholders involved in our initiatives, while taking into account a sense of urgency in our rapidly changing climate and watching out for how “urgency” can get in the way of care, attending to power, and building better relations. Our community work and research, which often felt rushed and rarely went exactly as planned, regularly benefitted from what Kyle Whyte calls an “epistemology of coordination” capable of “generating the (responsible) capacity to respond to constant change” and “conducive to responding to expected and drastic changes without validating harm or violence” (Whyte, 2020).
To develop our theories of change as we analyze and intervene in the spaces between current conditions and more hopeful futures, we engage with literature on community engaged critical research (CECR), community engaged civic learning (CECL), critical university studies, mutual aid, grassroots infrastructure, and climate resilience. This study contributes to this literature by illuminating effective ways to strengthen support lines between resource rich institutions (like polytechnic institutes, which often have different understandings from the authors about what “regional engagement” looks like) and disinvested communities (via local place-based community organizations). While existing research has extensively documented the socio-economic impacts of climate change in urban settings, less attention has been given to how polytechnic institutions can actively participate in mitigating these impacts through community-engaged education. Our study fills this critical gap by demonstrating how STEM-focused academic institutions and grassroots organizations can work together to build more sustainable and resilient communities.
Using ethnographic and action-oriented research with community nonprofits and participant observation in our campus sustainability program, university “service learning” initiative meetings, a regional community engagement conference, and a regional climate adaptation forum, along with interviews with community partners and educators, we explore the process of forging community networks, and connections between community work, climate resilience, and climate justice. We unpack different meanings of “engagement” in our work to suggest the necessity of centering power in discussions about who is changing and building community, how, and for whom.
Our central argument is that community work can create conditions for greater climate resilience and justice by nurturing social relationships and networks, expanding imaginations of sustainability, intervening in hierarchies in town/gown dynamics, building collective power, and generating a shared sense of “home.” After tracing this argument through our literature review, a summary of our research methods and results, and a discussion of the lessons learned, we end this article with an exercise of hopeful futuring. We envision a brighter future where our university supports the work of grassroots groups, contributing financial, technical, and other resources to collaborations that create and sustain networks of support and resilience.
LITERATURE REVIEW
CECR, CECL, and CRITICAL UNIVERSITY STUDIES
Community Engaged Critical Research (CECR) attends to power dynamics in the research process, and especially pushes back on hierarchical and colonizing forms of research, to attempt partnership and avoid extractive researcher/researched roles. Community Engaged Civic Learning (CECL) is shifting the focus in community engaged pedagogy from individual student experience to social change (Vincent et al., 2021). This focal shift in both research and teaching involves intentional design (Davis et al., 2024), reflection, and flexibility. Our own practice of community work follows this attention to power dynamics and social change by approaching collaborative research as mutual learning. In theory the “researched” becomes the teacher and the “researcher” takes on the role of student (Ingold, 2018).
In practice, however, we are still entrenched in the hierarchies of unjust social contexts built on histories of racism, colonialism, displacement, and disinvestment (Baldwin, 2021; Mettler, 2014; Wilder, 2013). Our teaching and research are entangled with the neoliberalizing higher education system and fraught town/gown dynamics. In the framing chapters of the wide ranging Cambridge Handbook of Service Learning and Community Engagement, Dolgon et al. (2019) draw on critical university studies to suggest that community engagement must be focused on social change, including anticolonialism, antiracism, and institutional transformation as necessary components of a more just future.
Even as we sometimes refer to financially struggling communities and groups as “under-resourced,” community work must not begin from assumptions about who has resources, what counts as resources, and who is doing and receiving the “service.” Bloomgarden describes the space connecting and separating universities from the surrounding communities as “ecosystems at the borderlands,” and urges practitioners of community engagement to value the experiential knowledge of community participants (2017). Following borderlands scholars, we suggest that these interstitial spaces, places in the gaps of institutional support (both university and government) are increasingly the rule rather than the exception. Research on “ruderal ecologies” has detailed how possibilities and opportunities flourish in the cracks (Stoetzer, 2022), and while critical of inadequate institutional support structures, we shift focus to what has thrived in the gaps, and suggest that grassroots-led community work remains necessary even in a future that ideally includes an influx of institutional resources.
MUTUAL AID, CLIMATE RESILIENCE, AND GRASSROOTS INFRASTRUCTURE
We suggest the central importance of social relationships to climate resilience and consider scholarship on mutual aid as a launching point for this vital connection. Peter Kropotkin argued in the late 19th century that cooperation was as “natural” for humans as the “survival of the fittest” social evolution theory popularized at the time by Spencer and Huxley, and used in service of colonial expansion and exploitation (Kropotkin et al., 2021). More recent empirical research explores the utility of the mutual aid model in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic (Lachowicz & Donaghey, 2022; Mould et al., 2022). It is notable that in practice and scholarship mutual aid reemerged during this acute disaster period, demonstrating the need for strong social networks to grapple with world-upending challenges. Climate change presents instances of acute and ongoing disaster, and communities with already strong social support networks are better positioned to weather climate-related challenges (Spade, 2020). The spirit of mutual aid also informs scholarship by seasoned organizers, like Jane McAlevey, who write about how meeting immediate needs can forge the trust and relationships needed for effective policy advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing (McAlevey, 2021).
In contrast with the focus in the mutual aid literature on social relations, much of the growing interest in climate adaptation focuses on physical infrastructure: bridges, sea walls, subway fluxgate systems, and even “natural” solutions like planting mangrove trees and building absorbent coastal parks and green spaces (Goh, 2021; Kaufman & McKibben, 2021). There is a focus in the climate resilience literature on coastal cities, and less attention to small cities and communities (like Troy) along rivers and inland waterways that are also prone to increasing climate-related flooding (Eubanks, 2016).

Figure 2: The newly rehabilitated seawall along the Hudson River, protecting the downtown business sector while sacrificing south and north Troy neighborhoods. Source: https://www.enr.com/articles/53016–year-old-seawall-gets-more-resilient-in-troy-ny
Bridging the literature on social relationships and material resilience, Kian Goh finds that communities that already have strong established social networks and leadership are the most effective at the participatory design of infrastructure for climate resilience (2021). Conversely, political scientist Daniel P. Aldrich uses the concept of “social infrastructure” to describe physical infrastructure that fosters community, “the spaces and places that help build and maintain social ties and trust, allowing societies to coordinate behavior” (2023, 30). Aldrich and colleagues convincingly show, in a wide variety of contexts around the world, how sites of community formation and mobilization are crucial for resilience, disaster preparation, and recovery (D. P. Aldrich, 2012; D. P. Aldrich & Meyer, 2015).
Our concept of community work pans out from social spaces to examine, and participate in, the bottom-up relationship building that’s crucial to mutual aid-based climate resilience. In a companion piece to this article, we develop the concept of “grassroots infrastructure,” an interlocking set of conditions that undergird the work described below. Grassroots infrastructure for community work draws together five key components: 1) organization of a collection of diverse groups into an aligned ecology of stakeholders; 2) regular orientations developed by and for these diverse stakeholders; 3) embedding community work into more institutionalized structures; 4) information-sharing infrastructure; and 5) channels for engagement with wider networks. If community work is the verb, grassroots infrastructure is the noun that is both created through, and supports, community work (Costelloe-Kuehn et al. forthcoming).
METHODS
We began this project with an action-oriented goal: to create infrastructure for mutually meaningful community engagement between RPI and local community organizations. We prioritized practical impacts over research publications, focusing on social change and attempting to avoid some of the common pitfalls of community-based research such as extracting time and energy from community groups without following through on promised results (Stoecker, 2012). The research eventually grew from that goal and we developed a methodology incorporating ethnographic participant observation, interviews, and hosting a series of focus-groups that doubled as organizing meetings.
In the summer of 2022 we, along with our collaborators in the Oakwood Community Center (our anchor community partner) and the Parker School (a local private elementary-middle school interested in greater community engagement), received a $40,000 grant from the Rubin Family Fund, a local family foundation, and so for the first time were able to pay community organizers for their time and insights. This felt essential, lest we reproduce the extractive approach this research set out to disrupt. We gathered a group of nine local nonprofit leaders we had collaborated with previously to talk about what worked, and what didn’t, when our students worked with their organizations. At this first focus group, we sat in a circle for two hours and discussed the challenges and benefits of our prior attempts at “service learning,” a term we were always uncomfortable with, but did not yet have a clear alternative to.
“Community engagement” also didn’t feel quite right; we were part of the community, not engaging with it. One of us has lived in and around Troy and regularly worked with community-based organizations since 2006, and the other moved here in 2019 and has since volunteered with Oakwood Community Center in mutual aid initiatives and worked with local organizers on water-focused environmental justice. Further complicating the community/university binary, several of the local community organizations we work with (including the Sanctuary for Independent Media and the Troy Bike Rescue) were founded by RPI faculty and students. We also benefited from the work that other faculty at RPI, especially in the Department of Arts, and other local colleges, including Sage College, have been doing for decades. Our initial meeting with community leaders in Troy came together easily because we could build on this rich legacy of relationship building.
Findings from our initial focus group, and over a year spent planning with leaders from these organizations, led to our first large event in fall 2023: a half-day orientation fair. This “Volunteer Troy” fair was a response to local organizations’ request that 1) students have some orientation to working with local groups before getting involved, and 2) students find volunteer opportunities aligned with their interests so the work would be more meaningful to them and create deeper investment.
The shared experience of planning and hosting this event led to sustained collaboration between the organizers and laid the groundwork for individual and group semi-structured interviews (two individual and one group of two) in summer 2024 where we asked about their ideal vision for RPI student involvement in their organizations and learned more about the history of educators doing community engaged work in our area. In addition to these in-depth research interviews, we have sustained ongoing conversations with these community leaders in a wide variety of community spaces and organizational settings in Troy. We also conducted participant observation at two service learning initiative meetings at our institution (spring 2024), the most recent Engage for Change conference hosted by the Community Campus Collaborative in Troy (summer 2024), and the Climate Adaptation Forum: Building Social Capital for Climate Resilient Communities in Boston, MA (summer 2024). Most recently, we gathered valuable insights and cross-national comparative perspective from a workshop we hosted, on conducting responsible collaborative research and teaching with community-based organizations, at The Concordia Ethnography Lab in Montreal, Canada (fall 2024).
Our ethnographic approach, combining formal and informal methods and connections, interviews, focus groups, and participant observation, allowed us to gain nuanced insights into the specific dynamics of community work drawing together grassroots organizations in a small U.S. city and a private polytechnic institute. This methodology’s strength lies in its ability to capture details of various stakeholders’ experiences and perspectives in this particular place. We acknowledge that our focus on a single institution and its surrounding community may limit the generalizability of our findings, but we hope that the concept of community work that emerged from these specificities will be adapted for a variety of contexts, taking on new contours, and contributing to climate resilience and justice in different ways in different initiatives.
RESULTS
BUILDING THE COMMUNITY
This section lays out some of what we have learned about the first part of the community work definition: actively building the relationships that create the community. Building on Aldrich (2012) and Goh (2021) we suggest that forging and maintaining these connections creates strong community networks that can spring into action to provide necessary support in a changing and volatile climate.
As we fumbled along as individual faculty trying to create “good” community engagement opportunities in our classes, we greatly benefitted from coming together with educators sharing similar goals in the regional Community Campus Collaborative (CCC). The CCC describes itself as focused on “community change through reciprocal learning,” which resonates with the CECR approach of mutually learning across power differentials and aligns with our desire to create opportunities for mutual aid and solidarity. In the early days of this project, we presented our hopes and struggles at the CCC’s Engage for Change conference where we joined a broader network and conversation with local educators and nonprofit organizers. Ali Schaeffing, the Director of Service Learning and Community Engagement and an Assistant Professor of Geography at Russell Sage College in Troy, described the goals of the CCC in an individual interview as we heard about her story and reflected together on our work. She explained that the CCC founders
tried to develop a cohort of us at all the colleges and universities in the area, someone in a role like ours to represent the institution and get together with once a month for shared programing and collaboration and, you know, ideally all community organization-led. Like how can we align ourselves with the institutions to make it easier for community partners to engage with us in mutually beneficial ways? (Ali Schaeffing, ethnographic interview, July 2, 2024)
The most recent Engage for Change conference again generated invaluable connections, conversations, and questions, as dozens of leaders of community organizations and educators came together to talk about their experiences with community work. The conference wouldn’t have been possible without institutional support, and Ali’s story of establishing necessary institutional resources began with a lot of uncompensated labor. She “carved out” a position for work she believed in, reflecting, “my job was only supposed to be 20 hours a week… and I found I was quickly able to fill up a lot more time than that.” After several years she “was able to demonstrate to Russell Sage [College] how valuable this work was” and sought to expand the position and program “to do this work well, and sustainably, and meaningfully.”
Today, after years of bootstrapping and putting in above-and-beyond community work hours, Ali receives course releases to support her facilitation of college/community relationships and collaborations, amplifying her ability to support community work within and beyond her own place of employment. These course releases are an example of tangible contributions colleges and universities can make as part of the infrastructure needed to enable meaningful higher-ed/community collaboration. Direct funding for these initiatives is important, but enabling those with the passion and skills to dedicate the required time to build and sustain these programs is equally crucial. While we were initially concerned with the risk of community-engaged teaching being extractive of community organizations, Ali’s story helped attune us to the importance of supporting faculty labor in these contexts as well, and only after involving more students in our research did we start to take seriously the need for student’s contributions to community building to likewise be sufficiently supported.
We have come to understand the value of making community work optional, and have been striving to create opportunities for students to select community work that aligns with their interests and skills. While this approach is in tension with our goal of getting more students involved off campus, we chose to incorporate a more “opt-in” approach in our classes after hearing stories of the harm that students can cause when they are reluctantly engaging in “service” only because they need to meet some externally imposed requirement. We are also wary of forcing students to engage with the broader community when so many of them are already on the verge of burnout, are grappling with significant social anxieties especially in light of Covid rippling effects, and can be overwhelmed with being accountable to community collaborators. Building on scholarship and practice in the intersecting realms of harm reduction, pleasure, and life-affirming work (Campbell, 2023), and aligning with lessons learned from community leaders and students in focus group discussion and interviews, we have come to take a more “consent-based” approach to our enrolment of students in the work of community building.
Offering compelling opportunities to get off campus and start to build relationships with the broader community has been a powerful way to help our STEM-oriented students’ find new sources of meaning and identity. We have seen how these experiences have helped students reframe sustainability problems from technical issues in need of quick techno-fixes to complex sociotechnical challenges. By the time they are seniors, many engineering students’ initial enthusiasm for changing the world has been dampened by an approach to engineering education that Jim Malazita characterizes as a “context of decontextualization” (2017), replaced by a focus on demanding course work, an individualistic focus on landing a high paying job, and making it to the graduation finish line. Over the years, we have seen how community work can at least partly counter an “ideology of depoliticization” dominant in engineering education contexts (Cech & Sherick, 2015).
By following our community partners’ guidance and learning from their expertise, we have seen students broaden their experiences and cultivate deeper roots in Troy. First year students reflected that getting to know the community beyond RPI, and physically traveling by foot or bus to do community work, evoked feelings of home. They saw glimpses of the homes they had recently left in the friendly stories of older community residents, in the landscape, and in participating in community events (from food pantries and community dinners to trail maintenance and bike repair) they had previously experienced with their families. This is a major accomplishment in the context of a polytechnic where some students get to graduation day with little to no meaningful experiences in Troy beyond their time at RPI.
I (Jen) regularly do an experimental mapping exercise in my environmental justice course in which students begin by mapping their experience of Troy, documenting places they know and frequent. It is an upper level course often filled with seniors, and I am continuously shocked at how many students rarely leave campus. Those who do often limit their interactions to a handful of student-frequented coffee shops and bars in the small and rapidly gentrifying downtown area just down the hill from the RPI campus. In sharp contrast, in a class of seniors who participated regularly in community work, several have found jobs and stayed in Troy or returned to put down roots here. This isn’t to say the goal of community engaged pedagogy is to get college students to stay in college towns, but enrolling students in community building can help them see Troy as a home while they’re here, rather than just a temporary residence they pass through on the way to “real life.”
Multidimensional connections between this theme of “home,” a sense of place, and sustainability were central to interviews with leaders of two of our community partners, Troy Bike Rescue (TBR) and Rensselaer Youth Outdoors (RYO). Both Isaac (TBR) and Michala (RYO) are from the Capital Region area and returned after moving away for college. Though neither grew up in Troy’s city limits, they have become a part of the Troy community through their community work. While they both recognize a distinction between being raised in the city of Troy and the suburbs, we see them as models for growing home roots via community building.
In our interview with Michala and Isaac, “roots” extended beyond the individual, and they talked about sustainability in terms of both climate resilience and organizational longevity and purpose. Rooting the sustainability of their organizations, and the communities they support, in local youth leadership, these leaders share a vision “where the community is taking meaningful leadership” (Isaac Silberman-Gorn, ethnographic interview, July 2, 2024). “There’s a concrete path” Isaac imagines for local youth in the North Central neighborhood. “This is how you go from walking in the doors [of the TBR headquarters] to taking ownership and representing people, and doing things in a way that’s ideologically sound, honors your needs, and is anti-racist.” Michala expands on this vision of local youth taking over organizational leadership:
I would love to see our youth take over as the leads of our forest conservation program… One of our forest conservation alumni is our youngest board member now. Another member went on to become a youth scientist with The Sanctuary for Independent Media. And that’s what I hope for, is those pathways. (Michala Hendrick, ethnographic interview, July 2, 2024)
RYO, as the name suggests, is a youth-focused organization that partners with Rensselaer Plateau Alliance (RPA), a non-profit land conservation organization. RYO is RPA’s primary way of engaging with youth locally, and as Michala has taught us, this “engagement” goes both ways; youth are not just recipients of outreach, they are taking on real leadership around local conservation efforts and building a community where fellow youth feel at home in the outdoors.
Connecting to our framing argument about the value of community work for climate resilience and justice, here we want to focus on the expanded conceptions of home that so many of our students and collaborators highlighted. Scholars in the field of education for sustainability (EfS) have argued that sustainability-focused educational experiences have great potential to enhance a sense of belonging and community among students (Lewis et al., 2019). Similarly, Michala explains the value of long-term programming and engagement beyond just “conserving” land, activating a relationship with the land that supports relationships among people as well. Michala poses an essential question: “now that we have the conserved land, how do we get people to the land?” In response to surprise from other conservationists about why many local kids “don’t feel welcome or represented in the outdoors,” she responds:
Well we haven’t built a relationship with them yet. We haven’t been in their classrooms, we haven’t taken them out and taken them for a hike… I say all that because RPA is an organization that conserves land and engages the community, but we are still in the process of expanding engagement in terms of the communities we serve. I really want to get into more impactful long-term programming for young people and foster deep place attachment.
The connection between youth engagement and climate resilience is clear in Michala’s narrative. As she explains:
When you get kids out in the woods and you’re working for a week… and then at the end of the week you show them a map of the land RPA is conserved and there’s an 11 mile wildlife corridor that we’ve now successfully conserved. These are the vestiges of wild spaces that will make us more resilient to climate change and will help us. And by being able to first show kids that, they are so much more willing and able to understand ecosystem services and how those relate to their everyday life by getting them on the land.
Expanding the places residents feel at home into spaces that may have seemed previously exclusionary extends and deepens roots and social networks for both local youth and RPI students. Michala sees a big opportunity in this space for RPI students to participate as volunteer educators and field guides in youth programming, helping others feel the kind of place-based sense of home that these emerging leaders have come to experience. The expanded sense of home and feeling of being part of an ecosystem we have seen result from community work is one of the crucial ways that this work supports climate resilience in the long run.
As we’ve seen with our college students, and Michala has found with local youth, understanding our local ecosystem as home is a vital component for climate resilience, and these home roots grow deeper from investing time and energy in meaningful work, and building lasting relationships. This is an especially important effect of community work for STEM-focused students that often experience higher-ed as decontextualized and depoliticized. The importance of developing a sense of home and place attachment that emerged in our study resonates with Lewis et al.’s (2019) work on sustainability-focused educational experiences enhancing students’ sense of belonging. However, our research goes further by examining how this sense of home can be extended beyond the campus to the broader community.
DOING THE COMMUNITY WORK
Now we shift to describing the different kinds of work that can be done once the community building is underway. The connection between the work of the organizations we partner with and climate resilience takes shape in a number of ways: reducing carbon emissions by getting more people commuting on bikes, cutting waste by repairing and redistributing broken bicycles, conserving land including essential carbon-capturing ecosystems that provide myriad benefits to the people living in and around them, providing a daily local radio show to inform the community of resources available to weather various climate stresses, etc. Similarly, there are diverse kinds of engagement that meaningfully feed into these organizations’ capacity to continue to execute their missions.
Rather than developing “best practices,” or a hierarchy of modes of work, we have learned that community work requires a wide variety of relationships, forms of labor, and supporting resources that can change over time. In our focus groups and interviews, we have heard from multiple organizations that there are times when having dozens of students show up for a one-off volunteer day is perfectly aligned with various needs (i.e. helping an organization move its office from one location to another). In contrast, in the “speed dating” portion of the orientation we hosted with community-based groups and RPI students in fall 2023, TBR representatives told members of a large service-oriented fraternity that the fraternity’s frequent approach of offering to bring a large group of students for one-off “service days” was not a great fit with TBR’s need for in-depth and ongoing engagement. While in the short term, some of the members of the fraternity may have taken some offense at what felt like critique of their model, it created an opening for follow-up conversations that helped both the grassroots organizations and the students have a better sense of which group combinations had a more natural fit, and which would require a bit more adaptation. Leaders within TBR repeatedly stressed to us the necessity of would-be volunteers having a deep sense of commitment to the organization, building strong relationships with the youth that come to the shop to work on their bikes, and having alignment with the antiracist and trauma-informed values and practices of the organization.
In an attempt to align RPI resources with the need for anti-racist and trauma-informed skills that we were hearing from TBR and other organizations we regularly partner with, we used funds from a grant from RPI’s Teaching and Learning Collaboratory to hire Rested Root for a workshop. Rested Root is a “worker-owned cooperative of Black and Queer educators, facilitators, and organizers” with “nearly two decades of combined experience offering liberatory teaching and consulting focused on the relationship between personal and collective transformation through embodied practice, historical and political analysis, mutual vulnerability and accountability, and rest” (Rested Root, 2024). They are, in short, the perfect collaborator to build our capacity to meet the stated needs of our community partners around anti-racist, trauma-informed, and organizing skills, in a way that also supports students on the edge of burnout, as described above. Their workshop brought together student leaders of the clubs and organizations at RPI that most frequently work with community-based groups and helped these students reflect on their own identities, privileges, resources, and skills. The workshop also provided a space for dialogue between deeply-engaged community organizers (the facilitators from Rested Root), students, and faculty on the mixed impacts that RPI has historically had on the broader community.
For organizations like TBR, where “doing the work” requires communication and collaboration across multiple differences, the workshop was an important step towards mobilizing RPI resources to prepare students to engage in challenging but rewarding environments. While we were thrilled with the process and outcomes of this workshop, and see Rested Root as the perfect organization to continue and deepen this work, we have struggled to secure sustained RPI resources to support these kinds of workshops in an ongoing way. We will continue to advocate for resources to support Rested Root’s offerings, in part because we have seen how they can help foster a stronger and more inclusive community inside RPI in a way that builds capacity for RPI community members to develop better relations with the community beyond our campus.
The need TBR has for a small group of highly dedicated volunteers, that are attuned to the contexts they’re working in, is a core need that RPI could support, but even small-but-dedicated organizations like TBR also require a broader network of more loosely connected supporters that enable the “TBR Core” to sustain their on-the-ground daily work. When the TBR shop in North Central Troy needed emergency repairs to address the structural integrity of the front brick facade of their building, in the span of about a week 94 individual donors gave a total of $4,950, going beyond the funds needed for the repairs. Besides these occasional emergency needs, this broader network of TBR supporters has come together for the past 13 years for an annual Bikefest which raises thousands of dollars with a raffle and cake auction enabled by donations from over 20 local businesses.
These forms of financial and material support from the Troy community provide critical support for TBR’s programs. Events like Bikefest are also part of what makes for a sense of community that at least some residents of Troy feel strongly. But TBR’s resources, overall, are highly limited. In his answer to our ideal future vision question, Isaac responded with a question: “what if the institution was able to throw some meaningful money at local nonprofits, to the benefit of the community and students both?” He emphasized that TBR intends to support youth in North Central Troy first and foremost, but that supporting these youth and RPI students is not mutually exclusive. Similarly, RPI’s first responsibility is to its students, but supporting groups like TBR could have major benefits for the Troy community, including but not limited to RPI students.
Both stronger and looser ties to organizations, indirect support (like using a grant from RPI to train students before they are on boarded by local partners) and direct support (like providing funds that local organizations could use to hire more staff and amplify their impact), are all necessary – in different ways and at different times – for meeting the acute needs of local organizations and achieving the bigger picture goal of sustainable community work: building capacity and longevity by keeping collaborations, projects, and relationships going strong without burning out.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: WHY COMMUNITY WORK MATTERS
This study advances a novel framework – community work – for grappling with the question of how to build climate resilience and justice by integrating community-engaged sustainability education and research into critical and creative engineering education. We draw on and bring together scholarship on community engaged research and pedagogy (Vincent et al., 2021; Dolgon et al., 2019), climate justice (Goh, 2021), and mutual aid and social infrastructure (Spade, 2020; D. P. Aldrich, 2012; D. P. Aldrich & Meyer, 2015). Our community work weaves polytechnic educational initiatives with the work of grassroots community organizations to build community and leverage this community for diverse modes of social and material change. Our research acknowledges the fraught “town-gown” dynamics often present in university towns, as discussed in critical university studies (Baldwin 2021). We suggest, however, that carefully structured community work can enhance practical capacity for resilience efforts and provide educational opportunities for all participating stakeholders by grounding learning in concrete community challenges and opportunities.
Community resilience projects led by local nonprofits benefit college students with experience, knowledge, and connection. Community organizations benefit from the labor, energy, and knowledge of college students. In the context of polytechnic university towns, students often have specific and useful technical skills, but imagine climate resilience as exclusively focused on technical solutions and innovation, like wave-absorbing sea walls or renewable energy technologies. Community work grounds them in the complex contexts and social relationships we suggest are essential to climate resilience and justice.
As RPI leads an effort to rename the Hudson Valley “Quantum Valley,” referencing the first IBM quantum computer on a university campus, we hope that the rich history of grassroots organizations making Troy feel like home for so many isn’t displaced. A recent New York Post headline asked: “Time to buy in ‘Quantum Valley?’ Upstate New York home prices are set to skyrocket as Big Tech moves in” (Realtor.com, 2024). As intersecting challenges around affordable housing, gentrification, and climate chaos intensify in the coming years, we will work to integrate our community work framework into RPI’s “regional engagement” strategy in a way that builds on the solidarity with local organizations that we have been cultivating for many years.
“Regional engagement” is one of the themes of the “Rensselaer Forward Plan,” which will guide the institution for the decade following its bicentennial in 2024. But while this plan focuses largely on university leadership in economic development – “because, by definition, we are focused on the technologies and industries of the future” – our community work aims for RPI to play more of a support role, following the lead of community-based groups, and centering ecological and social concerns at least as much as “strategies to grow regional economies” (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2024).
The value of community work runs in multiple directions, and we devote a lot of time in this article to unpacking the necessity of fostering relationships, but material support cannot be overlooked. Community organizations have essential local knowledge; they know what needs to be done and how to rally people together to get it done. But they are stretched thin; again and again our local collaborators stressed the necessity of financial support. In the context of community/university partnerships for climate resilience and justice, leaders of grassroots organizations must set the course, and educational institutions must support with resources. Our emphasis on grassroots leadership of community work echoes Goh’s (2021) findings on the effectiveness of participatory design practices in communities with established social networks and leadership. Our study builds on this by exploring how educational institutions can support these grassroots efforts without coopting them or positioning already powerful institutions as “regional leaders.”
In order to be sustainable for everyone involved, community work in under-resourced and systematically disinvested communities requires financial support from relatively resource-rich universities. While in this conclusion we are stressing the importance of this simple monetary investment in local community organizations, we want to be clear that community work should not be directed by the institution, but rather from those community leaders who have expertise in what is needed to support local residents and how to make it happen. Positioning community organization leaders as decision makers is an important component in ensuring procedural justice in climate resilience, but without financial backing of wealthy institutions, “resilience” falls into the all too common pattern of placing extreme unnecessary strain on local residents and demonstrating their ability to pull together and survive acute and ongoing disasters.
Inspired by transformative learning scholar Laila Strazds work on pedagogies of hope and “radical hope” that is “contextually dependent and is made meaningful when in action” (Strazds, 2019) we will end with a hopeful futuring exercise: If we are able to successfully sustain and grow our attempts at community work, what could the small city we call home become? We envision a future where students grow healthy attachments to Troy, not just RPI. They put down roots, maybe not forever, but they’re really here while they’re here. They commit to being present and being transformed in that presence. They learn about the places and organizations that make this place a rich community for so many. They make real friends in the community. They contribute to locally-envisioned projects in ways that are meaningful to them, both by lending a hand with basic tasks, and infusing projects with technical and specialized knowledge and ideas they gain in their classes. This knowledge of local conditions and histories makes its way into classroom examples and problem solving, inspiring fellow students to get involved more, and better. The institution supports this community work by contributing significant and stable financial support to local community organizations. The organizations can sustain and expand their work, consistently incorporating RPI students and co-creating new projects that contribute to just climate resilience and strong community networks. Students are grateful for the time community members take to teach them, and the people they meet and form bonds with are appreciative of their willingness to learn and bring energy to their projects and their neighborhoods.
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