Planning: Building Community Resilience in the Food-Energy-Water and Society Nexus

This planning award supports development of a community partnership addressing food, energy, and water (FEW) security concerns in rural Alaska. The PI team will meet with community members both virtually and in person to build trust and discuss the local challenges to FEW security in a remote rural context. Through a series of workshops, meetings, and consultations, the PI team and community members will explore issues such as infrastructure, the built environment of the village, and social factors that affect security and resilience. This participatory project lays the foundation for a community-based study of food, energy and water security. With planning support, the PI team will form an advisory board and conduct a series of engagement activities to build a relationship with the community and help the researchers better understand residents’ needs and concerns. A series of formal and informal meetings and workshops will be held, providing residents with multiple opportunities to participate. Two workshops will focus on perceptions of food, energy and water among children ages six through nine. Informed by these activities and the advisory board, the PI team will develop a place-based challenge-solution matrix, which will be refined through community input. The final matrix will be distributed to community members as a poster. This matrix will be the basis for a community-centered research proposal addressing the most salient FEW questions identified during the planning process. 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.