The Environmental Policy Design (EPD) program is strongly committed to community outreach. Our goal is to develop strong and engaged relationships with members of the local community as well as with governmental, advocacy, and service organizations. This provides our students opportunities for hands-on learning and working experiences, and it makes it possible for some of the academic resources at Lehigh University to be used for addressing the various environment-related problems and needs in the local community and broader regional area.
Some of our students have worked directly for local organizations while completing their degree in EPD. For instance, Geena worked on an education project for a regional conservation organization – the Wildlands Conservancy – throughout her tenure in the EPD program. This organization has a primary goal of preserving, protecting, and restoring the environmental resources in the Lehigh Valley area and it strives to provide children opportunities to enjoy these unique environmental areas. In contrast, Christina addressed issues of food insecurity in low-income urban environments by developing an urban gardening program in the Broughal Middle School, which boarders the Lehigh Campus. Christina taught Broughal students how to grow their own food in public gardens here in the city of Bethlehem, and she taught them how this can both minimize their carbon footprint and improve their overall health by adding fresh vegetables to their diets. These instances of community engagement exemplify how our students can develop experience and expertise in program development dealing with environmental protection within non-profit organizations; they also demonstrate the breadth of locally and regionally important policy issues – environmental conservation and food security – around which the EPD program has and will continue to develop productive relationships with the local community.
There are several routes through which the broader EPD Program engages in community outreach efforts. First, as mentioned above, some of our students work in local organizations and government agencies while completing their degrees. For instance, Rachel is the director of the Nurture Nature Center in Easton, PA and director of environmental outreach for the Center. Rachel conducted research for her Master’s Thesis that will directly inform the model of science education that the Nurture Nature foundation is developing for under-resourced rural communities in the regional area, who are threatened by water-related risks. Her research draws on recent advances in decision-science around individual risk-preparedness in order to inform the work that regional organizations are doing to help communities to adapt to changes brought on by climate change. Tracy is another EPD student that worked for a local organization while completing her EPD degree. Tracy was promoted to the position of coordinator of the Land Recycling Initiative at the Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation (LVEDC) after completing our program. In that capacity she has been an advocate for promoting environmental sustainability in LVEDC activities and has played a significant role in ensuring that a recently awarded $300 million dollar Housing and Human Development grant would devote significant resources to addressing local sustainability issues. Some of our students also begin working in local organizations as EPD students and then stay on as full-time employees after graduation. Scott, for example, began work for the Sustainable Energy Fund in Allentown as in intern while completing his EPD degree, and then went on to accept a full-time employment position working on sustainable energy development in the Lehigh Valley after he graduated.
A second way that EPD engages in community outreach efforts is through the dedication of our students’ paid and unpaid research and volunteer time to address local problems. Kylie, for instance, is employed as manager of the Lehigh Farmer’s market, during the summer, but she has also conducted research on how local laws and policies can redirect local institutions and businesses to greater reliance on food purchases that come from the local area, which will redirect economic resources to local and regional farmers. This research will be used in a “Lehigh Valley Fresh Food Access Plan,” which is a project of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley. Another one of our students, Lauren, has conducted a paid research project for the Lehigh Valley Research Consortium. This project involved gathering data on a variety of environmental indicators (e.g. air quality, water quality, habitat fragmentation, etc.) in the Lehigh Valley to paint a picture of the overall state of environmental quality in the Lehigh Valley. The research will go into next year’s “State of the Lehigh Valley Report,” which is distributed to local government officials, organizations, and businesses who are interested in coordinating and regionalizing public and private services and projects. As a EPD teaching assistant, Lauren also carried out an important local air monitoring project with students in the Environmental Studies Program’s undergraduate course on Environmental Policy and Planning. Specifically, as part of a community-based effort to increase use of the new Greenway running through the south side of Bethlehem, administrators at Broughal Middle School came to the EPD program with a request for someone to assess the air quality on the Greenway and compare it to the air quality on the city streets. Lauren conducted an air pollution monitoring study with undergraduate students, which provided this information and analysis. Since it turned out that the air quality on the Greenway was significantly better than the air quality on the main arterial streets that Broughal students usually use in moving through south Bethlehem, Lauren then worked with the undergraduate students to present this information in four power point presentations to the parents and students at Broughal Middle School.
A third way EPD engages in community outreach efforts is by involving our students in direct outreach efforts. Most of our work in this regard has focused on addressing the issue of food insecurity in the local community by maintaining and otherwise supporting the development of urban agriculture in the local community. Our students log a significant numbers of volunteer hours during the growing season to plant, water, harvest, and distribute food grown in three community gardens on the south side of Bethlehem, PA. Working with members of the community, they provide both expertise and labor, as well as coordinate the donation of excess food to local food pantries that are in dire need of fresh fruits and vegetables to feed the rapidly increasing number of people that have been relying on free food since the 2007 recession began. Jason, a graduate of the EPD program currently offers significant expertise to members of the local community interested in urban farming while also managing the Goodman Campus Community Garden (which is a garden for Lehigh students, faculty, and staff). Likewise in running an after school gardening program for Broughal Middle School as a “Community Fellow” in the EPD program, Christina contributes significant amounts of time to teaching and maintaining the community gardens. Christina has also made inroads into generating interest and enthusiasm in the local community for the development of additional urban agriculture projects by reaching out to troubled children in the area and bringing them into local gardening activities. Our students are also using the local gardens to grow fresh food for senior citizens that rely on food provided by the Bethlehem Hispanic Center on 4th Street for their daily meals.
The EPD program views these various forms of community outreach and engagement as a fundamental success. Our students are working for organizations, doing research, and directly supporting various environment-related institutions and projects that improve the lives of people in Bethlehem, PA and the broader Lehigh Valley. The various activities and projects they engage in provide an opportunity for students to learn valuable skills and gain job experience. Importantly, our outreach activities and projects simultaneously provides students an opportunity to bring what they are learning about innovative policy design in the EPD program to bear directly on local and regional policy. Through these efforts we believe we are providing students with hands-on experience and skills in creating environmental policies that can push society to a more environmentally healthy and sustainable future.
While our success in this area is notable, an important goal for our outreach is to become more of a partner and resource for local government institutions. We would like our students to offer their expertise to decision-makers by working with them to create local ordinances and plans that are truly progressive and visionary in the environmental policy arena, since this is what our program specializes in teaching students to provide. Building up these institutional relationships with local officials can take time, although we are satisfied that our students are already influencing local laws and policies in less direct but nonetheless important ways. If we can become a resource that citizens, community leaders, government officials, and local businesses turn to in their efforts to solve environmental problems through innovative and visionary environmental policies and planning, then EPD’s outreach goals will be even more successful.