The Confluence Collaborative sat down with Froggi VanRiper, Co-Director of WashU’s Sustainability Exchange, to discuss the approach of the Exchange, the value of interdisciplinary work, and how WashU can support community-engaged courses.
Faculty and staff from the Sam Fox School, College of Arts & Sciences, and McKelvey School of Engineering launched the Sustainability Exchange in 2015. It’s a course that brings together students from across campus to work in interdisciplinary teams to tackle environmental and sustainability issues, with faculty members from departments across WashU serving as course advisors.
What is the approach of the Sustainability Exchange?
Froggi VanRiper: The Sustainability Exchange is a community-engaged practicum—an opportunity for upper-level students to get involved in real-life work that has real-life implications for a real client.
The ethos of our program is that we can’t operate in silos. It’s appropriate for people to become experts within their field, but we also need folks who can collaborate across disciplines, to translate knowledge across disciplines, and can use those skills to solve the wicked problems that face us in terms of sustainability.
How is the class structured?
FVR: Students are involved in the class for one semester. For the first seven weeks, they meet with their entire class on Tuesdays and in their project teams on Thursdays. In the Tuesday seminars, the class centers on project management skills: stakeholder mapping, Gantt charts, understanding timelines and critical path. We also cover key principles about St. Louis—St. Louis’s racial history and what ‘just sustainability’ looks like. You can’t operate effectively in St. Louis without understanding the city’s history of redlining; the historical context of the Delmar Divide, and the economic landscape of the community.
After those seven weeks, students meet during both class periods with their project groups. Sometimes that’s on-site, sometimes off-site. They use that time to visit their clients or to bring their clients to campus.
How does the Sustainability Exchange find and select clients?
FVR: We work with a variety of partners—nonprofit organizations, municipal agencies, and neighborhood associations throughout St. Louis. Sometimes faculty members already have a relationship with a community organization or somebody in municipal government, and they can pitch it together.
When we screen a project for whether we’re going to accept it as a Sustainability Exchange client project, we’re also looking to make sure students will interface in some way with the three following pillars of sustainability: equity, environmental protection, and economic justice. They’re not all going to show up in equal measure in a given project, but they do all have to be present.
Can you talk about one of the Exchange’s past projects and how the project team’s interdisciplinary background supported the work?
FVR: I co-directed a project in partnership with the City Emergency Management Agency for three semesters. CEMA was doing a risk assessment of sewer systems based on the likelihood of an earthquake. We brought together students with strong geospatial skills who started running analyses in GIS; we had students who were really good at communications creating a story map that communicated risk; we had students with a policy background, and I think I even had an economics student in there.
The students were practicing what it meant to talk across disciplines while trying to solve a problem of talking across silos in the community, as well.
What do students express as some of their key takeaways from the Exchange?
FVR: When we do post-degree interviews with Environmental Studies graduates, students frequently invoke the Exchange as a seminal part of their college experience that made them feel very connected to the St. Louis community. They also often express that the course helps them understand what it would mean to use their skills, post-graduation, to work across disciplines and to yield products and processes that are effective.
What would your advice be for faculty who are interested in developing community-engaged coursework?
FVR: If you and your students are going to be benefiting from a relationship with a community partner, you need to build trust, and you need to have some reasonable expectation of ongoing stewardship of that relationship, even after the course ends. When we engage with the community, it needs to be in a non-extractive way; it has to be mutually beneficial.
How could WashU’s administration help support this community-engaged work?
FVR: The structure of a university lends itself to silos, and it takes concerted effort for us to create true interdisciplinary programming because budgets are constructed within departments. If WashU could provide resources to make it more palatable to provide a course release for somebody in Sam Fox or McKelvey or Olin to work with the Sustainability Exchange, then I’m sure it would enhance our capacity to do what we do. I think it would really benefit the school as a whole because of our “In St. Louis, For St. Louis” principle. This is the ultimate demonstration of that.
St. Louis has this boomerang effect—people live here, they leave, and they come back again. Doing something that really builds that relationship between students and St. Louis increases the trust and the value that WashU has in the community, but also really gives students a sense of place and a high likelihood that they’re going to bring their skills back to St. Louis again after graduation and continue to enrich our community.
How can faculty get involved?
FVR: If you have a vision for a project, bring it to us. We want to see more faculty members across the schools approach us with their ideas for student projects. We have the capacity to more than double our class right now. The bottleneck tends to be faculty advisors.
You don’t already have to be matched with an organization. We frequently get enthusiastic faculty members who want to become involved in something community-engaged, and we frequently have community partners who say, “Here’s a project we would love to partner on, but we don’t know a faculty member yet who can work with us on this.”
Bring your ideas to us even if they’re not fully fleshed out. We can play matchmaker.
If you’re a WashU faculty member interested in getting involved with the Sustainability Exchange, please reach out to our team at confluence@wustl.edu.