Active Societal Participation In Research and Education (ASPIRE) aims to cultivate a generation of geoscientists with the leadership knowledge and skills, scholarship, and material support to communicate the social relevance of geosciences, and thereby, to broaden participation in these fields. The proposed project will evaluate the effectiveness of place-based science as a vehicle for increasing diversity in the Geoscience. The ASPIRE collaborators will organize Mobile Working Groups (MWG) that will be led by an academic geoscientist who works with a local community on issues that require an expertise in the geosciences. These MWG leaders are referred to as "gate-openers". Each MWG will focus on a single issue linked to a single community, but ASPIRE will support multiple MWGs working across a variety of issues and geoscience topics.
During the pilot period, ASPIRE will: 1) learn from the experiences and qualities of geoscientists who already possess experience leading community-relevant research, 2) support them "individually and collectively" as leaders of MWGs over a period of one year, 3) identify from their prior and current experiences the sort of leadership required to bridge underserved and geoscience communities, and 4) define and refine the leadership, networking, and logistical support needs that a fully implemented "bricks and mortar" center would require. Over the course of the pilot project, ASPIRE will conservatively involve up to forty individuals from across a variety of geoscience institutions, with an additional thirty or more participants, support staff and evaluators. The PIs hypothesize that in institutionalizing a new mode of geoscience research (MWG), learning from the leaders' experiences with MWG, and refining a leadership development program based on findings, they will have a scalable leadership tool and organizational structure that will rebrand the geosciences as socially relevant and inclusive of geoscientists from diverse backgrounds.
