Community-Centered Environmental Advocacy

A HumanitiesX Course Showcase

Presentation day at Active Transportation Alliance’s headquarters

What is advocacy? How can local advocacy efforts be more inclusive of all stakeholders? These questions were at the heart of Community-Centered Environmental Advocacy, a new course designed by HumanitiesX fellows Dr. Tim Elliott (Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse) and Dr. Danielle Vance-McMullen (Public Service), in collaboration with community partner Jim Merrell of Active Transportation Alliance (ATA). ATA is a coalition-based organization that works to make walking, biking, and public transit safe and equitable options in Chicagoland.

The course first introduced students to advocacy and environmental justice as theoretical concepts, encouraging students to understand advocacy not just as protests and petitions, but also as a process of building coalitions and consensus. Then, students moved their inquiry into Chicago, learning about the advocacy successes and challenges at Big Marsh Park, on Chicago’s Southeast Side.

Big Marsh is a former industrial site that has been partially restored to create parklands, trails, a bike park, natural habitats, and a site for the Ford Calumet Environmental Center. The advocacy work at the site is ongoing, but current stakeholders recognize the benefits of engaging more young people in planning the park’s future. The HumanitiesX students spent most of the term researching and experimenting with tactics to bring the voices and ideas of young people to bear on the park’s future.

Students tour Big Marsh Park by bicycle early in the course.

The Project

In partnership with ATA, students formed teams to research, design, and pilot tactics to raise awareness among young people about the park and the opportunities to advocate for its future. On teams, students piloted a range of engagement tactics, including on-campus tabling, in-park tabling, and surveying.

Also core to the students’ work were class conversations and reflective writing prompts that asked students to consider how community participation and environmental justice require deliberate tactics to engage all stakeholders.

At the end of the term, each student-team made a presentation to ATA staff, summarizing their group’s engagement tactic and its pros and cons. These presentations were designed to both share students’ results and engage ATA in larger conversations about a range of possible ways to engage young people at Big Marsh Park and in other youth advocacy projects.

Lollipop for your thoughts? Tabling for input from college students.

The Course Team

Faculty Fellow Tim Elliott is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse (WRD). Dr. Elliott primarily teaches professional and technical writing courses, many of which feature service-learning projects that engage students with community partners to create written deliverables for partner organizations. His research focuses on public-facing technical writing, with an emphasis on community engagement.

Faculty Fellow Danielle Vance-McMullen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Service. Dr. Vance-McMullen teaches courses in nonprofit management, resource development and fundraising, and research methods. As part of this teaching, she has previously worked with student groups to complete dozens of community-engaged experiential learning projects. Her research primarily focuses on donor behavior, fundraising, and nonprofit competition in new charitable giving contexts.

Community Fellow Jim Merrell is the Advocacy Director at Active Transportation Alliance.

Student Fellow Laura Murphy is a senior majoring in Communication and Media with minors in Entrepreneurship and Environmental Communication.

Student Fellow Mariam Zaki is a graduate student in DePaul’s Masters of Public Health (MPH) program, concentrating on Community Health Sciences.

HumanitiesX Commuity Fellow Jim Merrell, with Faculty Fellow Tim Elliott. Merrel was leading the HumanitiesX fellows on a tour of key sites for transportation advocacy in downtown Chicago.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

From their experiences teaching the course and engaging with the community, the HumanitiesX team took the following key lessons:

1. Sites of environmental advocacy always have a complex history and many organizational stakeholders. One of the benefits, but also challenges, of locating the students’ work at a complex site like Big Marsh Park was that the course partner, Active Transportation Alliance, was not the only organizational stakeholder in the park and its future. The student teams often found that their planned engagement tactics had to be vetted by multiple stakeholders, slowing down their progress. This caused some stress, given the short timeline of the course.
2. It’s worth it to devote attention to team formation, team communication, and team feedback! Because of the intensive teamwork required by the course project, the course faculty put extra effort into developing activities to support collaborative teamwork. These activities worked well, and Professors Elliott and Vance-McMullen will carry them forward into their other courses.
3. Sometimes, an organizational audience is more appropriate than a public audience for a final course project. While most HumanitiesX courses end with a public event or a public-facing text, in this case, given that the goal was to prototype and test engagement methods, the Active Transportation Alliance was the most appropriate audience for the students’ work.

Students at ATA’s headquarters, presenting on the engagement methods they piloted.

Other DePaul students will have the chance to explore these same issues in future courses. Building on the HumanitiesX experience, Prof. Elliott has developed a syllabus for a new Experiential Learning course focused on how non-profit organizations can engage young people to address environmental issues.