Emphasizing the Unity in Community

Jason Douglas still remembers the community meeting when a Southeast Los Angeles resident produced a disturbing photo of a neighbor’s feet covered in oozing blisters. “These were second-degree burns, and they happened at the park – a place where we commonly believe people can find some reprieve from the heat,” says Douglas, UC Irvine associate professor and vice chair of health, society and behavior in the Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health.

Through many community listening sessions and meetings, he and his research team learned that residents were concerned about the lack of parks and open spaces but also about the infrastructure of the parks they currently had.

“Basically, what we heard was that the parks in these underserved communities didn’t have the same shade infrastructure and nature-based landscaping – such as trees, plants and grass – that parks elsewhere did,” Douglas explains.

To look into the problem, his team included co- investigators from several universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Chapman, Morgan State and Tennessee State, as well as the nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment. Funded by two NASA grants, they used satellite remote sensing technology – along with thermal photography – to document and analyze temperatures at open spaces in West Los Angeles compared to those in South Los Angeles, two regions that differ in racial and ethnic composition, income and historical neighbor- hood investment.

“Research should make communities better places to live.”

The researchers found that regional microclimates alone did not explain differences in land surface temperature between the two communities, as a full 36 percent of all parks and open spaces in South Los Angeles reached or surpassed the thermal burn pain threshold – the point where heat can damage the skin and underlying tissue – while zero parks in West Los Angeles did.

“This is thermal inequity, and it presents a major public health hazard,” says Douglas, noting that many of the parks in South Los Angeles feature artificial grass, cement, metal and rubber. “It’s mainly about the materials and resources used in these parks. And, of course, it’s ultimately about the fact that we’ve not invested appropriately in underserved communities.”

Increasing Visibility

Douglas’ research is just one shining example of what UC Irvine’s new Office of Educational & Community Partnerships wants to celebrate, says Vice Provost Stephanie Reyes-Tuccio, who leads the unit.

“Campuswide, UC Irvine faculty have a history of engaging in community-based research. The work may look very different depending on whether it’s coming from engineering, education or public health, but it’s an important part of what happens at UCI every day,” Reyes-Tuccio says. “The creation of the new office reflects making the support and expansion of this work an important campus priority. Now we’ll have a small but mighty staff in my office to encourage more community engagement and make sure what we’re doing is visible.”

That makes perfect sense to Douglas. “I do community-based participatory action research,” he says. “I work in and with underserved communities to identify the most pressing social and environmental challenges. Then we use our research and our data to advocate for policies and practices that benefit our communities.”

For example, Douglas and his team created the Research Leadership Academy, which trains residents to use NASA data and tools, as well as thermal cameras and handheld air quality monitors, paired with narrative and critical dialogue, to document their environmental exposures and experiences of place.

Recently, policymakers from across the state – including those from the city and county of Los Angeles – gathered in Compton to discuss heat mitigation strategies, especially looking at public parks.

“Our research helped spur this discussion,” Douglas says. His team has also been actively working with Communities for a Better Environment and almost 180 other L.A. County-based organizations to oppose artificial grass, a material that worsens urban thermal heat, on playgrounds and playing fields. Douglas says that academic research should benefit the people and inform good legislation: “Research should make communities better places to live.”

Reaching Out Broadly

Increasingly, though, universities nationwide have faced a skeptical public demanding that higher education demonstrate more real- world currency. But Reyes-Tuccio doesn’t see this as a problem. She relishes the challenge of highlighting the impact of UC Irvine research. “We’re up for the task here,” she says. “So many of our researchers are already doing this work. Now our aim is to build an even bigger tent that unites diverse fields campuswide – from engineering and medicine to sociology and the arts.” UC Irvine’s newly formalized community engagement infrastructure will simply bring the public benefit of groundbreaking research into better focus, Reyes-Tuccio notes.

Of course, engaging with the community isn’t just about benefiting the public, says Susan Bibler Coutin, UC Irvine professor of criminology, law and society, as well as anthropology.

“Research also is enormously strengthened through partnering with community members,” she says. Grant funding from the Haynes Foundation for Coutin’s and doctoral student Jahaira Pacheco’s recent research on how immigration policies impact a community’s well-being was used, in part, to form a paid research team that included community members from Latinos in Action California, the United Cambodian Community of Long Beach and the Filipino Migrant Center. The locally based researchers were integral to the project’s success.

“Community members have considerable expertise through their own lives and through serving their own communities,” Coutin says. “They suggested questions that I might not have thought of. They also made sure that the research approach the team adopted was one where the participants in the study would feel comfortable talking to research team members.”

The group produced preliminary findings, which were first shared with the various communities involved, and now researchers hope to expand their project.

Coutin was also able to participate in a UC Irvine gathering that featured mayors and other city leaders from surrounding communities. “They were all interested in how to reach people who may not feel safe engaging with the government,” she says. “This is an issue that touches public safety, community health, civic engagement and more.”

Benefiting Society

Meanwhile, professor of pharmaceutical sciences Mahtab Jafari’s specialty is improving lived experiences so they’re more healthful, positive and meaningful. As founder and director of UC Irvine’s Center for Healthspan Sciences, she’s a leader in translating evidence-based research into actionable lifestyle choices for students and the broader public.

Joining with colleagues from the School of Physical Sciences and the Charlie Dunlop School of Biological Sciences, Jafari spearheaded research demonstrating that practicing nature therapy significantly improves student mood. The interdisciplinary project prompted the installation of five campus nature wellness stations, where passersby are encouraged to mute all devices and observe, hear and smell the nature around them for 10 to 15 minutes to decompress.

“Taxpayers pay for our salaries. As a scientist, I believe this is our responsibility: communicate research and make sure the public benefits.”

“This initiative has not only benefited the UC Irvine community, but it’s garnered a lot of media attention and interest from local school districts looking to replicate the model,” says Jafari, who also works closely with Orange County organizations such as United Way to advance knowledge about dietary supplement safety, healthy cooking and more.

Farther away from home, Jafari has partnered with farmers in Alaska to study Rhodiola rosea, an adaptogenic plant known for combating stress-induced fatigue.

She has provided scientific guidance on optimal harvest times based on molecular biomarkers and assisted growers with FDA-compliant product labeling, which has boosted their efforts to develop the new market. “Taxpayers pay for our salaries,” Jafari says. “As a scientist, I believe this is our responsibility: communicate research and make sure the public benefits.”

New Possibilities

Grounded in child development, neuroscience and sociocultural literature, UC Irvine professor of informatics Constance Steinkuehler’s research is also answering this call to involve communities in research, communicate the results and ensure they share in the benefits.

When a corrections officer and an incarcerated person form a team and square off across a chessboard with another team at San Quentin, the traditional, rigid power structures of California’s oldest prison begin to blur. The gameplay, part of Steinkuehler’s research, is a radical experiment in carceral reform.

In conjunction with California penal revision efforts and the nonprofit San Quentin SkunkWorks, a team of incarcerated innovators and outside professionals, she’s working to develop a causal model to explore why games can be restorative.

Along the way, Steinkuehler is teaching a graduate-level quantitative research methods class to her incarcerated collaborators (officially co-investigators).

“We’re looking at how the constant friction and repair at a game table serves as a micro- mechanism that generates emotional self-regulation and a feeling of kinship,” she explains.

Of course, the implications could go well beyond gameplay or incarceration. “These are people in some of the most difficult circumstances, with often very polarized affiliations, showing us something about the possibilities of cooperation, about mingling across lines,” Steinkuehler says. “I think that could be pretty important for our democracy and for society as a whole.”

---

How Does the Office of Educational & Community Partnerships Intend to Make a Mark?

Stephanie Reyes-Tuccio, vice provost of the new Office of Educational & Community Partnerships, says that success for the unit will be measured through institutional benchmarks, strategic initiatives, and student and community outcomes, including:

Achieving the Carnegie Designation

UC Irvine will soon apply for the Carnegie Designation for Community Engagement, which Reyes-Tuccio describes as the institutional “gold standard.” “UCs – and UCI in particular – have not been well represented enough when it comes to being considered national leaders in community engagement, despite the fact that it has always been a core part of our work,” she says. “We definitely want to change that.”

Securing Recognition and Awards

Reyes-Tuccio’s office also aims to elevate UC Irvine’s profile as a national leader in public scholarship by identifying and submitting faculty-engaged research projects for major national awards. It’s already celebrating a first success: ¡PloNO! Santa Ana, a collaboration among UC Irvine public health researchers and community organizations and activists concerned with soil lead contamination, recently earned an honorable mention by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation at the Engagement Scholarship Consortium.

Promoting Faculty Engagement

The office recently worked with the campus’s Academic Senate regarding guidance on how community-engaged research is evaluated in formal tenure and promotion processes. Reyes-Tuccio says that UC Irvine wants these processes to reflect deep institutional support for community-engaged research to encourage faculty and graduate students to continue investing their time and efforts in engaged research, which can be time- and labor-intensive but also can make the research produced more relevant and impactful.

Enhancing Student Readiness

For undergraduate and graduate students, Reyes-Tuccio says that she expects more community engagement to be embedded into the formal curricula across disciplines. The ultimate point is to prepare the next generation of leaders who can connect their academic work to real-world outcomes and the communities most impacted by the knowledge produced here. The office will promote student learning and research outside the classroom, formally recognizing cocurricular skills, and establish clear evidence that these experiences set UC Irvine graduates apart in the job market.

Creating a Community

Reyes-Tuccio’s office will support a faculty advisory board featuring a designated representative from every academic school and a community advisory board to connect external perspectives directly with university leadership. In addition, look for an annual community engagement symposium to serve as a recurring platform to highlight collaborative research and honor both scholars and community members. “We had our inaugural symposium in April,” Reyes-Tuccio says. “It was well received by both campus and community partners and helped us build relationships and share the incredible work being done together, so I predict this will be an important yearly event.”

Encouraging the Big Tent

Reyes-Tuccio defines the ultimate cultural success as establishing a “very big tent” where engagement spans a diverse spectrum. This is achieved on one end by making the campus open and welcoming for public events (like theater performances and sports) and on the other end by facilitating deeply collaborative research in which community members serve directly as co-investigators – helping shape research agendas, collect and analyze data, and implement policy. “There has never been a better time to focus on our relationships and work together to address the challenges we face locally, nationally and globally,” Reyes-Tuccio says.