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Academia can engage with communities in a variety of ways, including an education focus (such as service-learning) or geared toward research (community engaged research, CER). These different forms of community engagement (CE) share many elements in common, while other attributes differ. This paper first compares and contrasts educationally-focused CE with CER. We then present a rubric that was developed to evaluate CER in environmental engineering, indicating what aspects are appropriate for community engaged education. The CER rubric proposes nine evaluation categories: centering on communities, capacity building, action-oriented outcome, shared leadership, shared funding, shared data, equitable valuing of CER scholarship, culturally specific assessment, and culturally specific communication and dissemination. For illustrative purposes the rubric is applied to two case studies. In the educationally-focused CE case study, a senior capstone design course in environmental engineering worked on a project defined by a community partner. The rubric did a good job revealing where improvements in the project could have been realized while also revealing that the non-profit facilitator was instrumental in engaging the community. In the second case study, a community sub-contracted an academic partner to explore residential indoor air quality. The project was at a higher level of the rubric for most criteria compared to the educationally-focused case study. Use of the rubric at the start of any project will open important conversations, thereby contributing to both the community and academic partners more fully meeting their needs. 

The Strategic Partnership for Alignment of Community Engagement in STEM (SPACES) is a collaborative research effort under the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program. The overarching goal of SPACES is to build an inclusive academic culture to address intersectional gender-race-ethnicity inequities in Environmental Engineering (EnvE) via the application of evidence-based strategies for systemic change. The two main thrusts of the project are to address systemic problems that cause: (1) underrepresented minority women faculty (URMWF) experiences of isolation in and/or departures from STEM academia and (2) the devaluation of research conducted by URMWF, especially community-engaged research (CER). SPACES is a collaborative effort of faculty and administrators from 11 universities with four leading professional societies. SPACES is adapting evidence-based practices to support women’s intersectional identities and catalyze an attitudinal change among individuals and institutional leaders. This process involves the pursuit of 12 objectives crossing the micro, meso, and macro levels and is being operationalized through 11 activities. An overview of the motivations for this project and activities to date are provided in the paper. 

Communities of color are disproportionately burdened by environmental pollution and by obstacles to influence policies that impact environmental health. Black, Hispanic, and Native American students and faculty are also largely underrepresented in environmental engineering programs in the United States. Nearly 80 participants of a workshop at the 2019 Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Research and Education Conference developed recommendations for reversing these trends. Workshop participants identified factors for success in academia, which included adopting a broader definition for the impact of research and teaching. Participants also supported the use of community-based participatory research and classroom action research methods in engineering programs for recruiting, retaining, and supporting the transition of underrepresented students into professional and academic careers. However, institutions must also evolve to recognize the academic value of community-based work to enable faculty, especially underrepresented minority faculty, who use it effectively, to succeed in tenure promotions. Workshop discussions elucidated potential causal relationships between factors that influence the co-creation of research related to academic skills, community skills, mutual trust, and shared knowledge. Based on the discussions from this workshop, we propose a pathway for increasing diversity and community participation in the environmental engineering discipline by exposing students to community-based participatory methods, establishing action research groups for faculty, broadening the definition of research impact to improve tenure promotion experiences for minority faculty, and using a mixed methods approach to evaluate its impact.