Author: Chelsea Schelly

Call for Proposals: 

Sustainable & Resilient Communities Early Career Award or New Research Directions Award

Summary: The Tech Forward Initiative on Sustainability & Resilience (ISR) invites applications from Michigan Tech faculty and staff for the Sustainable & Resilient Communities Early Career Award or New Research Directions Award. The Early Career Award is intended for early career researchers on campus (assistant professors or research staff in the first five years). For early career faculty and staff who have already used their start-up funding or who have limited access to start-up funds, preliminary work in sustainability & resilience research can contribute to future research leadership. The New Directions Research Award is for established researchers on campus (tenured faculty or research staff who have worked at Michigan Tech for more than 5 years) who are pursuing new ideas or topics in their work. For more established faculty and staff, starting a new research direction to contribute to sustainability & resilience research can be challenging, and this award provides an opportunity to develop new research directions. ISR expects to award 2-4 Early Career Awards and New Directions Research Awards for faculty and staff who aim to make significant contributions to research addressing sustainability & resilience. This is potentially a one time opportunity for researchers to grow their engagement with sustainability & resilience in new ways! 

Objective: The goal of these Awards is to advance new activity associated with research and leadership in sustainability and resilience at Michigan Tech. Sustainability and resilience are grand challenges that require collaboration, engagement across disciplines, and institutional leadership. Through these awards, ISR aims to grow Michigan Tech’s leadership in sustainability and resilience in ways that can be maintained through continued engagement. 

Funding Amount and Funded Activities: Awards are expected to provide $5,000-$7,000, and ISR could support up to 4 proposals at this funding level. In exceptional circumstances,1-2 awards up to $15,000 may be considered, although funding level is expected to be commensurate with expectations for impacts associated with future increases in research activities and impacts. Awards expenditures should be planned for February-December 2022. Funding may be provided for student hourly work, access to or collection of seed data, professional development opportunities, and/or pilot/proof of concept work, etc., that can contribute to future research proposal development. Researchers are expected to build a detailed budget and budget justification explaining why the award is necessary to support the work. All proposals should clearly explain what additional sources of support will be leveraged, if any, and what the expected results from this funding are in terms of value added for the researcher, for ISR, and, importantly, for the broader Michigan Tech community. Most importantly, proposals should explain what kinds of impacts the work will have for the Michigan Tech community and how this award will propel productivity in sustainability & resilience research. 

Mentorship: As part of this award, each awardee will be matched with a mentor/potential future collaborator from Michigan Tech to support development in sustainability & resilience research leadership. Proposers should identify 2-3 potential mentors/future collaborators (Michigan Tech faculty or staff) from across campus. The ISR WG will help to create mentorship/collaborator matches and support the structure of early mentorship discussions. 

Deadline: Submissions via email are due no later than January 10, 2022. A second round of Awards may be available in spring 2022, pending funding availability. Awardees will be expected to complete a post-award report and present to the ISR WG about their work after the award period.

Submission Process: Proposals should include and will be evaluated based on the following: 

• A title indicating whether the submission is to be considered for an Early Career or New Directions award
• Project start and end dates; must be begin after February 2022 and be completed by December 2022

• Project description, clearly explaining the significance of the work for growing Michigan Tech’s leadership in research that addresses grand challenges for creating more sustainable and resilient communities (2 pages maximum; at least 11-point, Times Roman font, 1-inch margins)
• A paragraph that details what kinds of impacts the work will have for the Michigan Tech community and how this award will propel future research productivity in sustainability & resilience research
• Identification of 2-3 potential mentors 
• A detailed budget and budget justification, including details on what additional resources, if any, are being leveraged for the proposed project. These additional resources may include other sources of funding, other data or laboratory needs, etc. 

Proposal narratives, potential mentors, budgets, and budget justifications should be submitted as a single document via email to Chelsea Schelly, cschelly@mtu.edu. Given the flexible nature of this award, potential submitters are encouraged to reach out with questions or to pitch ideas before developing a proposal. ISR looks forward to receiving your inquiries! 

Michigan Tech is hiring a university Director of Sustainability and Resilience! The detailed job posting is available here. This is a very important position for Michigan Tech, and a very important step in the right direction for the University. I hope you’ll share this job announcement with anyone who may be interested, and I hope Michigan Tech finds and hires an innovative, passionate, and forward thinking professional to meet the unmet needs on campus in coordinating and providing long term, strategic vision for sustainability and resilience. Tomorrow needs Michigan Tech because tomorrow requires sustainability and resilience thinking, and here’s hoping this new position means Michigan Tech is ready to be proactive about planning for and participating in a more sustainable and resilient future!

“Sustainability” is most conventionally defined as the ability to meet the needs of current generations without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to also meet their own needs. This definition was popularized in the Brundtland Report. It assumed that balance could be achieved by considering long term impacts across three dimensions: social, economic, and ecological. More recent definitions of “strong sustainability” embed these three dimensions within one another, as concentric circles rather than a Venn diagram, recognizing that economic systems should operate to support social wellbeing and that both social life and economies ultimately depend on ecological systems.

One immediate question we can ask about the conventional definition of sustainability is: are we meeting the needs of current generations? Globally, the answer is clearly no; we live in a world rife with poverty, unnecessary malnutrition and starvation, and death from preventable disease. Narrowing our gaze to the United States, the answer is also clearly no; events throughout the summer of 2020 highlighted the continued violence, including systemic and structural violence committed by the very institutions intended to uphold law and order and justice, towards people who are Black (and Indigenous and People of Color, hereafter abbreviated BIPOC) in America. People who have historically been marginalized and oppressed by centuries of settler colonialism, genocide, slavery, and segregation in America continue to have unmet physical, economic, and social needs including safety, wellbeing, and inclusion.

There is another way to think about this word and concept “sustainability” – we can ask ourselves, is this system as it exists sustainable, meaning can it continue to exist in the long term (like seven generations)? The systems of violence and oppression based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and ability are not sustainable. They are quite literally tearing our country apart, as we become an increasingly polarized, increasingly violent, and increasingly unsafe nation, for BIPOC and everyone else who cares about the rights to safety from physical harm and justice through institutional process shared by every human on earth.

Finally, we can also ask, is Michigan Tech as an institution sustainable? Is its ability to respond in meaningful ways to current events, to make itself relevant to its students and the social world, supporting its ability to sustain itself as an institution of higher education? The answer is definitely and absolutely no.

Michigan Tech has failed to provide any kind of institutional response denouncing white supremacy (even when it is right here on campus) and continues to fail to provide support for BIPOC students who are categorically less safe than their white student counterparts. Every BIPOC student I work with has experienced hate in this community, sometimes at the hands of the police. Every time this is brought to the attention of Michigan Tech administrators, they respond as if they’re shocked by some isolated incident of hate rather than treating reality as it is: we live in a society that is systematically racist and oppressive to BIPOC, and it is the obligation of an institution of higher education to acknowledge empirical realities and educate their students about them.

An event at a recent University Senate meeting makes this lack of sustainability perfectly clear (start at 1:45). When a student read a thoughtful, heart wrenching open letter about how hurtful and damaging it is that the University continues to remain silent about these issues, the most senior administrator in the room asked for, of all things, a minute of silence! With a student imploring them to stop being silent, University administration literally responded with more silence.

BIPOC students at Michigan Tech know that this is an emotionally and physically unsafe place to learn. It will be impossible for Tech to increase the diversity of students on campus without addressing this reality as a systemic, structural issue. Michigan Tech is making itself irrelevant, and therefore unsustainable, in the world of higher education.

As you’ll hear if you listen to the end of the University Senate meeting, there are faculty on campus who care deeply about seeing structural changes that will better support BIPOC students. As a member of the Department of Social Sciences, I’ve been collaborating with a group of faculty and students since summer 2020 to develop a shared statement and list of commitments to action we can take at a Department level to address systematic oppression and systems of violence that harm BIPOC students, faculty, and staff at Michigan Tech. The University administration has told my Department that, although no written policy exists, we are not allowed to post that statement on the Department’s website, lest it be confused for an official university statement (which only the Board of Trustees is allowed to make). So, let me be unequivocally clear that this writing represents my perspective as a social scientist, a scientific expert in understanding social life. It is my professional opinion, but mine alone and not representative of anyone at Michigan Tech, that Black Lives Matter, that BIPOC students are not being supported in the ways they deserve, and that our University’s non-response is one indication that this University is not sustainable.

There is a newly formed Michigan Tech chapter of the Climate Reality Campus Corps, a national movement of University campuses associated with the Climate Reality Project. The student leaders of the Michigan Tech chapter recently hosted a 24 Hours of Reality event explaining the science, impacts, and solutions of the climate crisis while also highlighting how Michigan Tech fits into the bigger picture. The video of that presentation is now available for anyone to watch here. The Michigan Tech Climate Reality Campus Corps is asking Michigan Tech to start planning for a transition to 100% renewable energy for campus electricity. Michigan Tech can demonstrate its leadership in sustainability and resilience through this commitment, and student leaders on campus are ready to have conversations about making this campaign a reality!

Are you interested in how Michigan Tech gets, uses and saves energy? If so, stop by the Sustainability Stewards meeting on Wednesday, October 21st at 8pm to see information from the Energy Pie-Chart, the 50% commitment to wind, alternative energy on campus, and easy ways you can reduce your energy footprint today.

Guest speakers include: Larry Hermanson from Facilities Management, Jay Meldrum from the Keweenaw Research Center, Rose Turner from the Sustainability Demonstration House, and Kendra Lachcik from the Campus Corps.

You can join the meeting via Zoom! https://michigantech.zoom.us/j/9499596761