Community Work for Climate Resilience: Forging Justice at the Nexus of a Polytechnic and Grassroots Organizations

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.