Urban Wetlands: Partnership Building for Community-based Conservation Education

This Partnership Development and Planning project seeks to build a collaboration focused on community perspectives and needs related to wetlands in Metro Detroit. The partnership includes watershed non-profit organizations (WNGOs), Michigan State University professionals, and local community members. The project will consist of two major activities:1) bi-monthly, facilitated meetings between university researchers and WNGOs; 2) a 2-day conference incorporating community voices from across Metro Detroit. Full participation of a range of organizations and community members, with varying expertise, will forefront interests, goals, and perspectives ensuring informal STEM education plans and activities related to wetlands will address community needs. This process will also, via knowledge-sharing, increase participants' scientific literacy and engagement. The project will employ a participatory action research (PAR) approach to partnership development through facilitated listening, sharing and planning sessions to integrate knowledge, perspectives, experiences, and goals with respect to wetlands and water quality. The project has a deliberate emphasis on developing a long-term, mutually beneficial, and sustainable community-led partnership. A strength of this project is that it uses PAR for nested partnership, organizational, and individual capacity building. Insights gained from PAR to develop a partnership, and the Search Conference model will provide a procedural and practice example for other partnerships within the informal environmental education domain. This Partnership Development and Planning project is funded by the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program, which seeks to advance new approaches to, and evidence-based understanding of, the design and development of STEM learning in informal environments. This includes providing everyone multiple pathways for accessing and engaging in STEM learning experiences. 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.