Congratulations to the 2023 Outreach and Engagement Incentive Grants Program Award Winners!
The Outreach and Engagement Incentive Grants Program serves to address significant community challenges by aligning interdisciplinary faculty, their expertise, their students, and their research. The incentive grants connect NC State faculty to applied scholarship opportunities in communities, stimulating interdisciplinary proposals to compete for funding that will foster innovation between faculty, staff, students, and community partners and help kickstart potential future research and programming.
The 2023 Incentive Grants awarded proposals will receive $10,000 each to support work through June 2024. The three Incentive Grants awardees are listed below with a brief description of their proposals.
The NC State Environmental Resource Clinic for Communities: Walnut Creek Pilot
Lead PI: Dr. Angela Allen, College of Natural Resources
Co-PIs: Dr. Caren Cooper, Dr. Madhusudan Katti, Dr. Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, Dr. Kurt Smith, Dr. Mirela Tulbure
This project will serve North Carolina communities through the Environmental Resource Clinic for Communities (EReCC). The vision for the EReCC is to provide consultation and on-the-ground support through problem scoping, environmental assessment, risk assessment, data interpretation, report-back, and risk communication. Aims of the project include co-producing study design with community partner (Partners for Environmental Justice); training students and community staff and implementing the environmental assessment; collaborating on interpretation of results and planning next steps with PEJ; and evaluating and updating the EReCC approach. EReCC will learn about the level and type of support that can be provided to under resourced communities with environmental concerns, as piloted with the Rochester Heights community.
Storytelling to Nurture Youth-Led Community Engagement in Wake County
Lead PI: Maru Gonzalez, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Co-PI: Christy Byrd, College of Education
The goal of this applied research project is to partner with Wake County 4-H and Alliance Health on an innovative and interdisciplinary Pass The Mic Camp program. This camp will use the curriculum, Amplifying Youth Voices: A Storytelling for Social Change Curriculum to foster critical consciousness and youth-led community engagement. The successful completion of this project will contribute to a growing body of research on youth-led community engagement and help expand Pass The Mic Camp and implementation of the Amplifying Youth Voices to additional 4-H, high school and community settings.
Squeezed Out: Portraits of the US Housing Crisis Through One American City
Lead PI: Sara Queen, College of Design
Co-PIs: Tania Allen, Alicia McGill
The city of Raleigh has shown unprecedented growth over the past 10 years. To expand the local conversation around the urgent housing crisis, this timely and novel project will create a visual atlas that maps the overarching forces driving the housing crisis alongside narratives of the people that are being intimately impacted by them. By pairing current research products (led by Allen and Queen through their faculty initiative Co/Lab), in the form of data-driven geo-spatial maps and timelines, with personal narratives and photographic portraits of those experiencing displacement, this project has the power to expand and thicken discussions around affordable housing shortages. Specifically, by shifting from removed debates supported with objective statistics, this project will catalyze empathetic public dialogs which include lived human experiences.