Sean Michael Ferguson

1. Sean Ferguson
2. Affiliated to California State University Channel Islands, PECE group, UC Irvine, H.O.P.E. Gardens GR, but otherwise independent.
3. I am recently involved with the PECE design team and hope to support the collectives growth throughout 2023 brief description of your project and/or research interests, skills you have that you can bring to a collaboration and why you are interested in engaging with Open Data.

I'm mostly obsessed with two projects right now. The first has been housed on PECE's STSinfrastructures as a pedagogical experiment. With Sharon Ku, Jongmin Lee, and Shawn YiXiang Sun plus a large number of undergraduate engineering and CS students we've been trying to figure out a way to have authentic interactions between students across global spaces. This Global Classroom project has been implemented in Mainland China, Taiwan, U.S., and Korea. We will be presenting some of this work at the Making and Doing virtual session on 12/8 alongside some of the very cool work of Rebecca Witter and Dana Powell. There are more partners and projects just starting to get put together here: https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-and-engineering-across-borders

The second project is supporting a Coastal Research Center centered at California State University Channel Islands. With Megan Kenny Feister, Kiki Patsch, Jose Castro-Sotomayor, Sean Anderson, Marc Beyeler (https://beacon.ca.gov/staff/), and a huge number of new partners scattered across EPA region 9 we are trying to develop a two-pronged strategy. One is community capacity building based upon, hopefully, funding from EPA starting in 2023. This is the https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2022-08/EJ_TCTAC_Overview_web... TCTAC (pronounced tictac!) RFA, see below for an abstract. Second, the research center will happen anyway, we just have to figure out how. I'm a paid consultant with CSUCI and BEACON to figure out how to make the disparate pieces fit together and get an organizational home going. Our big concern is making the research and resources entirely situated within community groups, schools, activist organizations, and ... well we haven't figured that all out yet. This means a robust data-sharing strategy and strong collaborations.

EJ Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program (EJ TCTAC)

EPA-I-OP-OEJ-22-02

Title: Building a Thriving Communities Coalition for Climate Justice in EPA's Region 9

Project Geographic Area: Region 9

California State University Channel Islands (CSUCI) and our project team are leaders in community-focused justice work by harnessing our individual and institutional capabilities to form coalitions supporting thriving communities in our region. Our project unites existing university partnerships into one central hub that will work collaboratively with regional partners to exponentially grow our capacity in environmental and energy justice causes within Region 9 while meeting EPA TCTAC mandates. We have intentionally structured this proposal to decenter academic institutions within the communities we seek to serve, while simultaneously leveraging the institutional capacity and expertise afforded by a university structured around learning, mentorship, and community-embedded work. With our committed partners, we practice environmental justice and engagement starting from the voices of community members and their assets. Partners draw from experience with BIPOC, unhoused, LGBTQ, youth, rural, and other underserved communities. Partners share expertise ranging from reef restoration to artistic expression to policy advocacy. That diversity uniquely positions our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to integrate initiatives in community outreach and capacity building across Region 9, engage diverse stakeholders to participate in science-based policy-making and regulatory responses, and harness extensive quantitative and qualitative resources to inform our actions and decision making. Two arms of our technical assistance hub—Community Organizing & Action Lab (CORAL) and Digital Justice Lab (DJL)—establish a robust set of tools, services, assessment strategies, and coordinating events. We support community partners—spokes—to equip participants in the TAC with the tools they need to address climate and energy issues on their own terms, for their own communities, and in ways that deliver needed impact to the most vulnerable and historically marginalized.