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Culture plays a significant role in students’ learning and understanding. Teaching and learning are most effective when teachers make curricula relevant to students’ cultural, linguistic and experiential backgrounds, and when they take time to know and understand their students and the community they serve. The Culturally Sustaining STEM (CS-STEM) Institute is a feasibility study designed to support professional learning of in-service and preservice teachers in community-based settings. Funded by NSF AISL and ITEST programs, the study is comprised of three goals: supporting preservice and in-service teachers’ practices of culturally-sustaining STEM pedagogy, enhancing pre-adolescent learners’ knowledge of historical and current STEM practices in Gullah Geechee culture, inviting dialogue that critique and challenge perceptions of who participates in STEM agency and how through a Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) model. A primary component of the study was a pilot summer 2021 STEM camp for fifth and sixth grade students in Georgetown, SC, located within the geographical footprint of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. The multi-PI team utilizes constant comparative analytic methods to analyze transcripts from observations and interviews, as well as the educators’ products to measure how the educators understand and apply culturally sustaining pedagogies (e.g., lesson plans). They also measure how the youth convey their understandings of culturally-embedded scientific content and practices by using constant comparative and multimodal analysis of transcripts from interviews and observations, as well as youth-generated artifacts. This research addresses why CS-STEM is important, development and enactment of CS-STEM curriculum, and how CS-STEM increases STEM literacy.