Our Specific Commitments to Anti-Racism

In early June, 2020, the Center for Community and Citizen Science acknowledged that while some of our ongoing work is explicitly oriented toward equity and social justice, we have also failed to advance equity and justice through the entirety of our work, particularly in the context of academia, which is inextricably linked to historical and ongoing marginalization of BIPOC. We have an obligation to examine our own work, our own everyday actions, and our institutional context, and identify ways that these perpetuate racism. We must examine our various forms of power, and find ways to use them against white supremacy. 

We will continue to update this space as our work evolves. We welcome any resources and suggestions on how we can use our Center to advance anti-racism actions in the many areas that overlap with community science and citizen science, including conservation and natural resource management, STEM education in and out of schools, environmental justice, and community-based research and monitoring, agriculture, and sustainability. We also welcome your skepticism, your hard questions, and your critiques. We recognize that this work is critical, and are committed to a long-term process.

As promised in the June 2020 statement, we are working on more specific commitments, listed below, which will guide us in the months and years ahead. We intend for this to evolve as we learn and grow, and hope that it may be useful to our community of collaborators and beyond. The next step in our process is to identify specific actions, tools, frameworks, etc., linked to these commitment statements.

Center Operations and Culture

• The Center for Community and Citizen Science (CCS) will devote resources including time, language, and space to identify both elements of institutionalized racism built into the systems we work within, and the ways in which we uphold them broadly, in order to dismantle them throughout our work, collaboration, teaching and research.
• The Center for CCS will make active efforts to recruit and retain diverse students, postdocs, and other staff into paid positions.
• The Center for CCS will identify and address where and how norms of white-supremacy operate within our workplace so that our recruitment efforts are supported by an anti-racist workplace culture.

Research and Teaching Practices

• The Center for CCS will engage in strategic collaborations with, and amplify the work of, scholars who have long-held expertise in anti-racist, decolonial, culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies and research methodologies. This will then manifest in bringing resources to these scholars and the inclusion of these ideas in our teaching,  research, and other programming. 
• The Center for CCS will use anti-racist pedagogical practices. This includes teacher/educator workshops and trainings, and the teaching that faculty and students do at the university.

Evaluation and Assessment of our Work

• The Center for CCS will use tools such as racial equity impact assessments to guide development and assess ongoing implementation of our projects.