ESA-wide C&E
In addition to the C&E Section, there are numerous official groups within ESA who actively work on community engagement and/or support ESA members’ building their capacity to do community engagement well.
They include:
- Sections: Black Ecologists, Communication & Engagement (that’s us!), Environmental Justice, Human Ecology, Inclusive Ecology, Latin American Chapter, Policy, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and numerous discipline-specific sections.
- Human Dimensions Collaborative (est. 2019)
- Engagement at Annual Meetings Subcommittee (Chair, Sarah Anderson); part of Meetings Committee
- ESA Committee on Diversity & Education
- ESA Public Affairs Office and Committee. For a history of an aspect of this work, see Nadine Lymn’s “ESA ‘s Evolution in Public Policy and Media Outreach from 1993 to 2013.”
- The Engage ESA project led by Melissa Kenny and Frank Davis (2018), in collaboration with several Sections, led to this 2020 report: “Increasing the Impact of Public Engagement Within and Beyond the Ecological Society of America“. Co-authors include two past-chairs of the C&E Section and several section members.
- The launch of the Communicating Science section in The Bulletin of the Ecological Society, led and edited by a C&E Section past-chair.
A range of one-off community engagement efforts take place at annual meetings. We’ve listed a few on-going or particularly impactful efforts that can serve as discussion points. They are not the only possibilities, nor are they the explicit way that members are expected to do community engagement at annual meetings. Hopefully, they can inspire and inform such efforts in the future.
- Cross-Town Walk: Google results and a lesson plan guide if you want to do your own walk
- Earth Stewardship Initiative
- Registration scholarships for non-members, particularly associated with public engagement and justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion efforts