The culmination of my graduate academic experience as part of the Community Development Graduate Group at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) was my thesis entitled “EJLP: A Case Study of Relationship Building in a Community-University Partnership Program.”
This research was conducted in partnership with the Feminist Research Institute (FRI) at UC Davis, centering their Environmental Justice Leaders Program (EJLP). The EJLP is a program through the university that works to bring together professional, community-based environmental justice leaders into collaboration with university researchers at UC Davis. Environmental justice (EJ) leaders who take part in this program work within their communities across California to address EJ issues related to transportation and energy justice.
I worked with the EJLP beginning in the summer of 2023 as a graduate student research assistant. In this role, I began to learn how the program functioned, as well as the opportunities and challenges in running the program under different circumstances. Previously, the EJLP invited EJ Leaders with varying degrees of professional experience, from across the country to participate. Through collaborative processes at FRI, we established a new criteria for the EJLP cohort that could help improve upon the momentum of previous cohorts.
Through this thesis project, I interwove four bodies of theory including feminist, community-based participatory research, environmental justice, and design theories to make sense of the EJLP. My role was assisting in the program redesign and implementation. During this process, I conducted a formative, developmental evaluation leveraging methods of usability testing, a mid-program survey, and semi-structured interviews with UC Davis research partners working with the EJLP.
Findings suggested that the EJLP was successful in launching the eight partnerships in formation to the benefit of both EJ Leaders and their UC Davis research counterparts; however, results were preliminary and further evaluation is needed to determine the if partnerships were sustained and remained beneficial to both parties. Overall, the data from my research highlighted the value and importance of the EJLP and the steps the program, as well as others like it, can take to build better community-university partnerships that center the long-term needs of community leaders and their organizations.
Megan Taylor Williams 