Building community through virtual and in-person education and outreach programs in a field station

Background/Question/Methods

Biological field stations were originally established to support scientific research, but many field stations have added outreach and educational activities to serve the local university over time. Educational efforts have been further stimulated by a 2018 Outreach Framework for biological field stations. However, few field stations have focused on building a “sense of belonging in a community” with neighboring universities, community colleges, K-12 institutions, non-profits, and industry. Stanford University’s (SU) Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve (JRBP) staff and partners have worked to promote an intentional sense of belonging in a community to the Preserve’s Outreach Framework. To achieve this, JRBP developed intentional recruitment, inclusion, and retention practices. To assess the success of this effort, we analyzed the visitation records of educational and outreach visits to JRBP. We further analyzed the trends pre-, during and post-pandemic of these visits to understand the retention capacity of our programs, both virtual and in-person. We discuss five community-building case studies including virtual adaptations during the pandemic and post-pandemic in-person activities.

Results/Conclusions

Prior to the pandemic (2012-2019), JRBP had an annual average of 5827 educational and outreach visits a year. This includes an average of 3201 visits by SU students compared to 1736 by non-SU students. During the first year of the pandemic visits declined 45% (SU: 923; non-SU: 2119) via a combination of virtual (1080) and in-person (2629). Virtual adaptations from 2020 increased visits virtually in 2021 by 40% to 5194 (SU: 1280; non-SU: 1795; virtual: 4342; in-person: 842). Analyzing non-SU visits, the pre-pandemic average of K-12 and college visits declined 64% in 2019 and increased again in 2021 by 301%. Qualitative and quantitative results will also be presented that show how the following JRBP programs: STEAM Program for Latina Girls, MERO Program, ESA SEEDS Student Chapter with REAL, SACNAS Student Chapter with Latino Outdoors, and the Student Opportunities in Avian Research network helped achieve the sense of belonging. We recommend that other field stations build and fund an education program, develop hybrid virtual content, create new incentives for education and outreach, and build authentic and long-term relationships to help recruit, welcome and retain partnerships that promote a sense of belonging.