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2015 Autumn | Education & Outreach

Creating Training Resources for EPA Region 10: the Importance of Effective Community Involvement

Student(s):

Jenny Thai Nguyen

Program or Department(s):

  • Program on the Environment
  • University of Washington

Site supervisor(s):

Julie Congdon

Partner(s):

  • United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region 10

Faculty advisor(s):

Andrea Otanez, Department of Communication, University of Washington

For my internship, I created a comprehensive toolkit consisting of both archived and new resources for EPA employees. To gather the necessary information, I interviewed EPA employees and attended weekly unit meetings. For my personal research, I conducted a literature review on the potential barriers and solutions to increased community involvement. Results indicate that the limited environmental coverage in the media is one barrier. Potential steps to combat this problem is to increase engagement with the community on social media, place more decisions in the hands of the public, and to consider both the cultural and racial diversity of low-income communities.