Tracking the Journeys of Environmental Education Centers to Amplify Staff and Community Voices in Authentically Co-creating Programs

Abstract Information: In 2022, eight environmental education centers (from the Alliance for Watershed Education of the Delaware River, AWE) were offered a training journey in their approach to community engagement with the Standards of Excellence (SOE) framework developed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s urban programs. The framework includes measurable indicators of success and commitments to racial equity, social, and environmental justice. The SoE model aimed to empower center staff by training them to recognize and identify their own biases related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ), and simultaneously work towards authentically engaging community members to amplify the voices of the community groups they worked with. In the first phase of the program, findings from an external evaluation indicated that trained staff increased awareness of DEIJ-related topics, their personal biases, and the processes to build meaningful relationships, and also gained skills to apply their learning in action with the help of an established, step-by-step framework to guide community engagement. Center staff had increased their skills, knowledge, and capacity to be more thoughtful partners and embark on growing or developing new relationships with partners from racially and ethnically diverse groups. This program is continuing with another eight centers from the same alliance and includes external evaluation in the second phase as well, which continues to track and evaluate the centers’ journey toward community engagement. The evaluations across both phases have been used both as a way to understand centers’ progress in their learning journey and to inform ways to support center staff and their community partners most effectively. The first phase of the evaluation conducted multi-site case studies employing a culturally responsive approach, attentive to the unique contexts of the centers. The next phase of evaluation will build on this and continue to design meaningful evaluations, by learning from the experiences of other evaluators whose work has supported the connected work of non-profit staff and their community partners. This roundtable will invite evaluators to contribute their knowledge of community engagement approaches that are most helpful in supporting non-profit staff to engage voices that have been historically excluded from discourse in the environmental field. It will pose specific discussion questions that focus on understanding the processes and outcomes (including skills, knowledge, and actions) through which each group engages in collaborative learning and partnership building. While the centers of focus are part of the AWE network that fosters the exchange of resources, ideas, and learning, we see added value in engaging with a broader group of evaluators beyond the environmental evaluation community to engage in shared learning about the most effective evaluation methods, frameworks, and tools to use. Essentially, the session led by evaluators working on different phases of the evaluation, will engage the attendees in identifying ways to sustain environmental education centers’ ongoing efforts to be more inclusive and equitable through staff development and community partnership building.