What is community engaged research?

Mary Ann Piette: Community engaged research is where the community helps us set the goals and the priorities. We’re talking usually about geographic communities, a city, a county, an area. And we want to make sure that when we’re doing research, we understand the local needs and the stakeholders. We want to identify public-private challenges, disadvantaged communities, energy, justice and environmental issues, as well as economic issues in the community.

Carol Burns: To build on what Mary Ann said, we intend to have an impact. We intend to inform decision-making. We intend to develop, discover, and deploy technologies that could have a meaningful impact on climate, on energy, on quality of life. But the problem is unless you are engaging the community and defining those goals, unless you are helping them feel confident in the way that you are constructing, designing, and executing the research, you may be ineffective in getting community buy-in for that impact that you seek.

Mary Ann:  One of the key attributes of community engaged research is it’s very local. So it may be in a hot and humid climate or a climate that experiences extreme heat or a climate that has wind resources, and the community may have various feelings about new wind turbines being in their landscape or forest products or different types of energy technologies. So when we think about the energy technologies in the community, we want to understand the pros and cons of their experience with these new technologies and to make sure that we understand the benefits that may be economic, they may be health benefits, they may be educational benefits. There are a lot of challenges to consider at the community scale. 

You have to invite them in early and listen. 

What does this mean for a researcher at the Lab? What do they have to do differently?

Mary Ann: You may need community-based organizations and local contacts to partner with to help identify resources and work with you to find ways to get people to show up. We know we need many new techniques to collect information from the community in a fair way.

Carol: Traditionally, we tend to think about the discovery to deployment pipeline. We have a cool capability, and we have a wonderful material, or we have a wonderful technology or a wonderful instrument, and we just know it’s going to solve a problem, and we develop it to optimize it against performance characteristics that we define. And then, lo and behold, you find it is impractical in an environment because of the input that it won’t work at my house “because of…”, or that doesn’t work in our community “because of…”. And we don’t tend to think that far down the road initially in some of our scientific endeavors.

So what it means for our scientists is how do I think differently? How do I think more broadly about how we have to engage with communities to understand the constraints that may not just be physical constraints? 

Fortunately for Berkeley Lab, we have some wonderful internal resources who can help us think through some of those issues because we have people who have been involved in technical assistance programs and wonderful resources in our government community relations staff who know local stakeholders. So it’s a little bit easier or more readily accessible for Berkeley Lab staff to be able to dial into those resources than it might be in some other context. 

Mary Ann: We’re coming up with guides and principles. And guidebooks and procedures for community engagement. 

How is community engaged research part of how we think about service and team science?

Carol: People come to the national laboratories to work because they want to help solve big problems. Those could be big mysteries of the universe, or they could be pressing problems in energy and the environment. Our scientists are already committed to the idea that there is a problem I want to help solve. That’s embedded in our service value. This just adds to the sense that team science is now going to expand to include other stakeholders.

Team science will now include working with educational entities to help train the workforce that will be executing these solutions. It will also involve working with communities to help design the solutions and with private sector entities who can help inform how you would manufacture something.

As much as we’ve done, we have much more to learn. That’s part of the reason why we wanted to start this dialogue.