Broadening TA Pipelines through STEM Student Fellowships

This week's post features the 2023 Freedom Summer Fellowship that is focused on matching STEM students and others with place-based initiatives leveraging federal funding. If you would like to learn more please contact Cali Williams of Kyanite Partners.

We need to provide on-ramps to community engagement for engineers and professionals with backgrounds in the sciences. As we speak, community organizations and place-based coalitions receive once-in-a-generation federal funding for energy and infrastructure initiatives with technical requirements requiring specialized expertise in fundamental research and technology areas. For example, data modeling, feasibility studies, or energy auditing, to name a few.?

Expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion, or coalition building, is often easier for place-based partnerships to identify than in data, technology, and science. And even more to the point, as I've named in previous posts, identifying technical assistance providers in these specialized areas who reflect the values and backgrounds of the communities they serve is an even more significant challenge in many cases.?

That is why I am excited that for the first time ever, local governments and frontline organizations across the country will host graduate students from MIT as Freedom Summer Fellows during an 8-week fellowship that provides near-term support to help equity, sustainability, and community engagement become driving forces in local and regional economic development efforts connected to federal funding. The Fellowship is a partnership between Tish College, MITCoLab, and Emerald Cities.?

The Digital Equity and Opportunity Initiative (DEOI) I co-designed and am helping to launch this summer is planning to participate in this innovative initiative to meet our near-term technical assistance needs to be connected to the Broadband Equity and Access Deployment (BEAD) and Digital Equity Act (DEA). The DEOI is providing grant funding and technical assistance to place-based coalition partners across the U.S. South, and the near-term support will help with research, data modeling, and strategic planning will be critical to our work this summer.

Longer-term, however, I am eager to see this initiative and others continue to build a pipeline of individual technical assistance providers connected to place-based initiatives focused on equity, sustainability, and community engagement.?

For readers of this post who are educators of future engineers and researchers, there is a reason why you, too, should be interested in models like the Freedom Summer Fellowship. Research suggests that STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) majors tend to vote at lower rates than social science majors. The time commitment needed for their studies may leave them with less time for extracurricular activities, including community engagement and participation. Structured fellowships are one way to block out time for this while building on in-class learning.?

Employers are increasingly seeking engineers with a strong understanding of social, environmental, and policy-related issues. And there is growing evidence of increased student interest in social and environmental impact within STEM — a trend I hope we can play a small role in encouraging at scale.?

The future for collaboration between STEM professionals and students and broad-based movements for more significant equity and sustainability in local communities looks brighter than ever. I look forward to connecting with others who see the potential here and want to collaborate.?