21st International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

Under the National Science Foundation grant for Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems Educational Resources, a transdisciplinary group of 10 graduate students were recruited from several universities across the United States to design short and long-term strategies to global wicked challenges. Between October 2019 and March 2020, the team met weekly through a online platform to participate in weekly learning modules and scheduled talks from subject matter experts to learn about topics, such as team development, stakeholder engagement, problem solving, and disaster relief and resiliency (DRR) contexts in Puerto Rico. Simultaneously, our team met with with Caras con Causa, an NGO focused on sustainable community engagement and development through education, environmental stewardship, and community economic development programming in the municipality of Cataño, Puerto Rico, in order to adapt and enhance our hypotheses about engaging community members and implementing solutions. Citizen science and participatory mapping techniques were determined to be a promising strategy and feasible set of tools for Caras to collect valuable real-time socioenvironmental data on local DRR efforts through schools and students participating in their programs. The team concluded our engagement by presenting our story map, a combined set of participatory google my maps and R-generated geospatial maps that include indicators for disaster risk areas, social vulnerability, and ecological reserve development. In final review, Caras representatives were interviewed to reflect on engagement successes and identify shortcomings for improvement of future cohort challenges.