Collaborative Research: IMPLEMENTATION: EVOLVED - Embedding a Vision to Operationalize, Lift up, and Value Equity and Diversity in the Consortium of Aquatic Science Societies

EVOLVED (Embed a Vision to Operationalize, Lift up, and Value Equity and Diversity) is a comprehensive and integrated set of activities that embeds the principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and justice into the backbone of the Consortium of Aquatic Sciences Societies (CASS). CASS membership includes 20,000+ aquatic scientists from all career stages working across academic, government, and industry sectors. CASS initiated transformative diversity, equity, and inclusion work through a 2021 BIO-LEAPS planning grant, which laid the groundwork for EVOLVED. In that process, CASS leadership demonstrated a collective commitment to equity and inclusion and a desire to elevate this work to one of CASS’s primary priorities. The EVOLVED program will focus its work in 3 areas: (1) developing programming to serve members of underrepresented groups (broadly used to refer to individuals from communities that are historically underrepresented in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), (2) re-envisioning CASS’s values, exploring biases and assumptions, and reexamining culture, to transform the CASS climate into a welcoming and open forum for diverse peoples and perspectives, and (3) building organizational infrastructure to support and sustain CASS's cultural evolution. The project includes a comprehensive mixed-method evaluation of all major initiatives. Together, the EVOLVED activities will catalyze cultural change at multiple levels: across CASS as a collective, in single societies, and by individual members within societies. The EVOLVED program will embed diversity, equity, inclusion, access, and justice into the cultural fabric of environmental, ecological, and organismal biology-focused aquatic sciences. This program will develop, implement, and assess activities that scale-up equity driven advancement across three levels of action: individual members, societies, and the CASS collective. EVOLVED will mechanistically link structural and cultural change aimed at breaking down major barriers to building diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) within a consortium of professional, scientific societies and serve as a model for transformative culture change at the collective consortium level. To operationalize this, EVOLVED will: (1) build programming to serve members of underrepresented groups (broadly used in this proposal to refer to individuals from communities that are historically underrepresented in STEM), (2) re-envision values and mental models within CASS to transform its culture into a welcoming and open forum for diverse peoples and perspectives, and (3) build organizational infrastructure to support and sustain CASS's cultural evolution. Broader impacts of this work include increased engagement with minority-serving institutions within CASS, integration of DEI-focused values within individual CASS societies, and adoption of DEI-centric policy, management, and conservation work across the CASS collective. The proposed activities broaden participation of underrepresented groups in environmental biology disciplines; ensure more diverse voices are involved in biology-focused policy, conservation, and planning; and ultimately foster disciplinary excellence and environmental justice. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.