Being Civically Engaged in Your Community
By Nancy Holt and Arthee Jahangir
While the Biden presidency is a relief to many scientists, there is a long road ahead in building a country that actively utilizes science for decision-making. If you’re looking to transition out of academia and use your skills to “make a difference” in the policy arena, a great place to start is in your backyard — i.e., your community.
Civic engagement is probably one of the least common set of skills early career scientists develop during the course of their training. It also probably is the one that diverges the most from the rewarded norms of academic life — leading it to be a difficult journey from the lab bench to the policy roundtable.
Simply put — civic engagement is when individuals or groups work together to address issues of public concern to improve the common good. It can take on many forms, including volunteerism, activism, and/or electoral participation. Here we focus on how to participate in one specific type of civic engagement that we see as a good first step forward — engaging in local science policy to support better decision making where you live.
As two New Yorkers with PhDs in the sciences, we are committed to using our professional experience within and outside academia to give back to our City and local scientific community. Nearly three years ago, we co-founded an effort called Science for New York (Sci4NY), which provides graduate-level scientists and beyond firsthand civic engagement opportunities in the policy arena in NYC.
Our organization is rooted in the idea, like most good scientific endeavors, one learns best by doing. This is more often referred to as experiential learning and is a career development tool more commonly found in degree programs outside of the sciences. It also draws from our personal experience that it is very hard to explain how policy decisions are made from outside of the process.
Through the course of building successful projects under Sci4NY, we’ve learned a lot of lessons about how to become civically engaged in the complicated landscape of NYC. We are sharing our insights here in hopes of inspiring others to enhance their outreach efforts and become more present in their own communities.
Be polite, persistent and patient.
Just because you might be offering pro bono support, it can still be a process for others to understand how to make use of your scientific skills. Policymakers, and especially elected officials, are very busy people, so emailing or meeting them once won’t likely establish a meaningful outcome. It took us a full year to place our first Sci4NY intern in City Council Member Ben Kallos’ office, where she supported proposed legislation to limit pesticide use on city-owned land. In short, we advise you to be politely persistent — checking in and offering ideas on how you can help, while recognizing that the policy process has ebbs and flows that require patience.
Critical thinking skills are generally more valuable than subject-matter expertise.
Even if you’re an expert in cancer immunology, you can offer meaningful insight into science policy related to COVID-19, climate change, STEM education, composting, etc. When we get requests from policymakers to draft policy briefs, our volunteers have always had the core scientific literacy skills to complete these requests, regardless of their academic field of study. It’s not necessarily what you know, but how to acquire, synthesize and communicate the information. You can always ask other academic experts to weigh in to help you complete the most technical parts of the task.
Timing is (almost) everything.
Meeting deadlines is one of the most important skills across most professions. It is also one that is generally underdeveloped in academic scientists — sorry, it’s true! Decision makers often operate on rapid turnaround timeframes when a particular set of real-world circumstances generate a window to move a policy issue forward. Without being able to synthesize and communicate information quickly, valuable input likely gets left out of decision making simply because it was too late to be incorporated.
Written communication skills are a must.
We can’t overstate how important writing skills are in the policy space. For starters, you’ll need to know how to write a policy brief and talking points. An often less discussed, but possibly more useful format is drafting an op-ed. Policymakers generally actively read and write op-eds, as they are the generally accepted way to publicly raise the profile of important issues. As a result of our inaugural Sci4NY op-ed workshop taught by Manhattan Borough Historian Dr. Robert Snyder, our interns published a handful of op-eds that promoted some high-level policymakers to reach out in hopes of establishing a collaboration.
Active listening is critical.
As scientists, it’s natural for us to work to explain facts and knowledge to others. When you’re communicating with policymakers, community leaders, and the general public, this can come off as being lectured. To effectively engage others, it is better to listen to what issues interest them most. Once you’ve established a working relationship, it can set the stage for you to propose science policy suggestions that you’re particularly passionate about. We saw this play out firsthand when we worked with a city office on a project about building resiliency to climate change in local communities — requiring us to switch from being the experts to being the listeners in the process. Months later, the city is now asking us how to bring scientists closer to local communities and policymakers.
In policy, unlike science, it’s mostly who you know.
Civic engagement centers on people. The best researched ideas won’t have an impact unless you can share them with decision-makers. Building such a policy network is often a substantial challenge for scientists, who are generally judged by just the opposite — i.e., what they know. NYC is particularly tough place to break into the policy space, as most fields here are somewhat siloed and wary of outsiders. One low-hanging fruit is to attend a public meeting of your local community board or a City Council hearing. Another is to look for groups like Sci4NY, who have already built a large network that you can leverage when trying to get started. Recently, one member of our team, a postdoc in nursing, used the networking skills she learned from us to land a job with the Department of Public Health and Environment in Colorado.
Bonus: Advocate for your research institution to support your science policy career development.
If we could wave a magic wand to bring more researchers into policy work, we would have scientists be able to choose local engagement projects as part of their graduate career experience. Currently, our many dedicated volunteers do this work in whatever spare time they have. This availability challenge is generally compounded by research advisors that discourage activities that take time away from lab work. We believe such an academic outlook misses the value that experiential learning can add to the research experience and society over all. Researchers need to make the case to the powers that be that such experiences are a win for both the degree-granting institution and its graduates.
Wanting to see policymakers use science in their decision-making process and making that happen in reality require very different investments of time and energy. The first steps in being part of that outcome is understanding how policy works and how you successfully operate in the space. If you can doing this locally, while in the earlier stages of your career trajectory — all the better.
Nancy Holt is a co-founder of Sci4NY. She holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from UC Berkeley and is a former AAAS fellow.
Arthee Jahangir is a co-founder of Sci4NY. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from Albert Einstein School of Medicine and provides career mentoring support to NYC scientists.
