Water and Equity: Co-developing Research and Engaged Approaches to Transforming Environments (WE CREATE)

WE CREATE is a cross-college program designed to address grand challenges at the nexus of water and equity through investments in research, community engagement, and interdisciplinary graduate training. The program will launch research projects in the United States and internationally, employing a co-production model of scholarship in which communities and University researchers together design project objectives and pilot solutions. Closely linked to the research agenda, we will create a new interdisciplinary graduate fellowship program that trains the next generation of scholars to develop salient, credible, and legitimate partnerships with communities and practitioners. Research collaborations will address root causes of water and equity challenges, including incentives, policies, competing values, and mismatches in scale and scope that drive unequal distribution of clean water and associated benefits. In tandem, we will launch a new graduate fellowship program that responds to a need for training in collaborative, community-engaged research. The program will consist of a new practicum course, experiential learning in interdisciplinary research tools and methods, and funded externships and research fellowships. Through participation in the fellowship program, we will create cohorts of both graduate students and faculty from across the university committed to working with communities to develop actionoriented research.