Katherine (00:16)
from a planning perspective, the most robust, effective, equitable strategies are ones that combine that local knowledge or lived experience alongside technical data, right?

TxTC Staff (00:29)
In this episode, Dr. Katherine Liebernecht from the University of Texas at Austin discusses her work on co-designing strategies combining local knowledge with technical data. that meet the unique needs and challenges of the region. I'm Jamie Masterson.

TxTC Staff (00:45)
And I'm Cedric Shye, and this is Lessons from the Field Lab.

TxTC Staff (00:51)
Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Librenecht. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to jump right in. And you are the theme lead for co-design. So before we talk about the team and what we did, can you just tell us about, what does that even mean? What does co-design mean? And even tell us a little bit about...

Katherine (00:51)
All right. Thank you for having me.

Okay.

TxTC Staff (01:10)
the team makeup.

Katherine (01:12)
Sure, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I'm Katherine Liebernecht and I'm at UT Austin and lead the co-design theme of this project. And the way I think of it as co-design or co-production, there's a ton of kind of jargony terms about it, but the basic idea is just that you're working with university researchers or with researchers, but outside of universities too. So in community with residents, so with non-professional researchers.

to produce knowledge or to produce designs or produce strategies in this case. So it's just that collaborative work to kind of create something new, new knowledge, new application that's outside the bounds of a university that includes communities. And in this case, we're focused on climate adaptation strategies, focused on flooding and air quality.

TxTC Staff (02:07)
So it kind of brings in that local knowledge co-design.

Katherine (02:11)
Yeah, yeah, the way I think of it is for, and I guess the research also supports this, that from a planning perspective, the most robust, effective, equitable strategies are ones that combine that local knowledge or lived experience alongside technical data, right? Kind of the access we have data to as planners, kind of spatial data, census data, and then what we're doing in the field right now as part of the Southeast Texas Urban and Agritefield Laboratory, which is collecting

all this new environmental data around flooding and flood sensors and air quality monitoring.

TxTC Staff (02:46)
So you're a planner, so tell us about your background and how you got involved in this kind of work.

Katherine (02:52)
Yeah, I think in some ways it is. I grew up in Austin and didn't live there for a while as an adult and then moved back. And I think I did not know that planning existed when I grew up in Austin. Yeah. And I think that's yeah. And that's the case in general. Planning is kind of like under the radar a little bit. But Austin was kind even even now we're seeing so much growth. We saw so much growth in my childhood. I grew up kind of in the 80s and early 90s and South.

TxTC Staff (03:05)
I think a lot of, yeah, lot of planners come about that way.

Katherine (03:21)
and kind of my backyard landscape went from creeks and small ranches and kind of exurban landscape to basically it's just pavement and big boxes now. it's like, it's totally transformed. So I think I was always kind of thinking about that as a kid. And then also I grew up in Austin during the short like eight years that we actually did desegregation busing with our public schools. We managed to push it off until the eighties.

TxTC Staff (03:25)
Yeah, wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Katherine (03:47)
we being

the city of Austin and the school district. And then finally addressed it in the 80s. Austin is very economically and racially segregated. Has been for a long time. Certainly was my childhood, is today. And when I was being bussed to East Austin, which is the half of town that traditionally is lower income, more communities of color, less services and infrastructure, everything we see and planning with kind of uneven landscapes, I was bussed.

you know, to East Austin, Tortega Elementary, Go Owls, you know, third through sixth grade. Woohoo! We should. So it was like an hour on the bus, well, without traffic or bus breaking down both ways. So I was on the bus a lot just kind of watching, you know, as we moved across space. And you could, I could just see it then as a kid, you could see the differences in what parks look like and I assume park maintenance budget or, you know, what creeks look like and water quality and housing stock. So.

TxTC Staff (04:18)
You all say whoo-hoo.

Katherine (04:44)
Like that was all kind of cooking in my brain. And then I went into regional land conservation kind of my first career and really enjoyed it, but was frustrated because at the time I was practicing, and I think this is different now, so few people working in kind of private land conservation were talking about equity issues. And then that's when I discovered planning. I was like, oh, planners, this is what they want to talk about. These are my people. So that's how I kind of roundabout way it came to planning.

TxTC Staff (05:09)
Yeah.

Katherine (05:12)
And then when I moved back to Austin as an adult in 2012, we had just been emerging from that giant drought that happened. And then Austin had really severe flooding the year after we got back in 2013, the Halloween flood, and another one in 2015. And residents in Southeast Austin drowned during those events, which I just found like unexcusable, a city with the amount of resources and capacity that Austin has. Like no one should drown when it rains, you know? And that's what really got me interested in kind of community based.

work around flooding and heat issues and you're kind of just seeing that climate change is now impacting kind of my childhood landscape, I guess. So that's the roundabout answer of how I ended up doing kind of this co-design work, which is just thinking about what, as a planner, what seems like the most effective way to create planning strategies that actually will make an impact. I hope.

TxTC Staff (05:51)
Wow.

That's amazing, yeah. So now you're teaching at UT and kind of helping us run co-design and probably multiple other research initiatives.

Katherine (06:13)
Yeah, yeah, it's been such a great project. was, as these people know, we just did our team annual meeting yesterday and it was just, it was tiring, but it was also just a great chance to just kind of hear in person about all the other pieces of this, you know, pretty amazing project. But that's I'm doing now. Yeah.

TxTC Staff (06:29)
Yeah, so tell us

about the team. Who's on the team and then we can get into some of the stuff that we did together.

Katherine (06:36)
Yeah, absolutely. we're, it's not a giant team, but we're kind of like broken into multiple sub-projects. And kind of the piece of, the core piece of work that I think about is the work with the task force members. And I think that's because that's what I've been most involved in, but then there's other kind of pieces in the co-design constellation, which I can also describe. But for that core piece of kind of the strategy development work with the task force members, I consider a team to be

part of it. Texas Target Communities, you guys are like a key part of it. So Cedric and Jamie and G have been a key part of that. Devon, he was still at Lamar University, was a key part of that because he was just kind of our like feet on the ground helping us both recruit task force members, but also helping us facilitate the meetings and get everything set up and just add it so much kind of local legitimacy to the project. It was so wonderful. And then there's a

several graduate students who have been pretty involved in the task force work as well, including Sean Murphy, whose dissertation is partly focused on it. And Farzana Ahmad is now a PhD student at UT Austin who has been working on this piece.

but, and then, so that's the kind of the co-design piece, but kind of the key piece of the co-design team is the task force. you know, when we started to develop this research proposal before we even found out that we got funded, I was, when Paola had asked me to lead the co-design piece, I was really struggling with how, you know, kind of the collaborative community-based work I had done was on a much smaller scale geographically, like at neighborhood scale.

TxTC Staff (08:05)
Mm-hmm.

Katherine (08:07)
And I was just really struggling with how are we going to do something across five counties? You know, because as you guys know, like co-design work, community engaged research, it's hands on. It takes a long time. There's a lot of trust building. And I was just trying to I was really trying to wrap my head around like how, especially because that proposal call came up so quickly, we didn't create the proposal with community members, with our community partners. We kind of kind of left space for them to provide input later if we got funded, but didn't have time to do that kind of careful.

collaboration for the proposal that I know you guys are used to doing too and I am as well. So that's all to say that when we wrote the proposal, I still remember clearly like a comment in the Word doc that we're working on online from Jamie. Jamie's like, oh, we could use our task force model. I was like, great. That sounds like a reasonable approach for something this scale. And so that's what we have adopted. Y'all's task force member, excuse me, your task force model.

TxTC Staff (08:55)
Laughter ⁓

Katherine (09:06)
⁓ In this case, the structure we have are there are two task forces, but they very often met and worked as one team. And it's about 10 to 12 members on each of the two task force. One of them is focused on community organization leads. So we have representation from places like the county, from different counties, from schools, school principals, school leadership, from churches, from

cultural institutions like the Museum of the Gulf Coast, from community-based organizations like Charity Productions and ⁓ the Port Arthur Community Action Network. And then another task force group that's focused on technical professionals. So people are working professionally in the fields of kind flood mitigation or air quality. So I really consider the task force as part of that co-design team too. So.

TxTC Staff (09:57)
Yeah, absolutely.

Katherine (09:57)
kind of a group

of university researchers with these community representatives.

TxTC Staff (10:02)
Well, I was going to ask, you know, you mentioned that the proposal went really fast to write, but we were working really closely with Lamar University. So could you speak to how we worked with Lamar University to recruit task force members?

Katherine (10:16)
Absolutely. And I'll just, I guess I also need to mention too, in addition to that, all that task force strategy development work that we've done together in co-design, we also have other sub-projects. So I want to make sure they get mentioned too, that Lynn and Shishan and Sean are working on the visualization piece, which is creating visualizations of the strategies for co-designing. There's a new initiative from this past year of Carrie and Casey working on

what they're calling community workshops that are focused on air quality, better understanding community perceptions of air quality. So they're kind of wrapping that piece up right now. And then Lee Hasselbach has been leading a series of kind of test beds focused on low impact development that were funded and built through a different grant, but she's using the data from it as a way to kind of explore what an implemented strategy might look like. But yeah, in terms of our relationship with Lamar,

during the, you know, before the proposal, during the proposal, now, and also that key role that they played in forming the task force and reaching out to task force members. So as you guys know, Paola and Leve had known each other for a number of years before this proposal came together, before this project started, working on flood-related research in southeast Texas, along with Patrick as well and others. So when this proposal opportunity came up and we thought we'd work in southeast Texas with that...

seemed to be a good fit. Paola reached out to Leif Hasselbach at Lamar, and then at that point, Leif was able to connect us, even at the proposal development stage, just kind of share the idea about the proposal with the flood coordination study, which is a group of, and you guys can correct me, but I feel like it's at least 150 people on their mailing list. ⁓ Yeah, it's a big group of flood managers and folks who work for public agencies and local government, all focused on kind of

TxTC Staff (11:53)
Right, yeah, it's a big group.

Katherine (12:02)
coordinating across entities around flood mitigation response in southeast Texas. So when we got funded and when we start to create the task force, the technical task force members, a large group of them came out of that flood coordination study. So we were able to build on all that work that Liev had already done, those community connections that she had, those connections with professional groups. So that really catalyzed that piece of it.

And then for the community organization lead task force members, least the way I see it, we were able to build on existing relationships that you guys had as Texas target communities with people in kind of the Houston area, Southeast Texas. You had done some work before, for instance, right, Bob and Shanna from the Southeast Texas Regional Planning Commission. You, of course, have worked really closely with Charles X White and also TACO Academy.

TxTC Staff (12:57)
Mm-hmm.

Katherine (12:57)
So

that was a good baseline for the task force. And then when Devon came onto the project, he was able to help us kind of scope out and recruit additional members to both of those task forces, especially the Community Organization one.

TxTC Staff (13:12)
Catherine, can you tell us about the meetings themselves with the task forces? What were some of the meetings about? What did you do? And what were some of the things the community task force members were saying?

Katherine (13:11)
Yeah.

Yeah, so we kind of, you know, we met over kind of two and a half years and the early meetings were, as you guys know, trying to describe our intent about the project, get their feedback early on on it, figure out what's going to work with rhythms of meetings, got immediate feedback that quarterly meetings were going to be what it was, not six to eight a year, which is totally reasonable. And then really that next phase was...

TxTC Staff (13:45)
Yeah.

Katherine (13:51)
kind of joint problem definition. We came in as researchers saying, okay, we're thinking about focusing on flood strategies. We would love to hear from you about your community, the things you love about your community, challenges that you see. You guys facilitate this piece. And for me, that was just so informative, both because it was really evident early on that there was a lot of interest in thinking about air quality too, which I have not done air quality work before this project.

And I think it's harder to design planning strategies around air quality too. mean, a lot of it is need for more regulation and enforcement of those regulations. And there are things you can do with air filters. And we're pursuing some of those with the corsey Rosenthal boxes. But that seemed from that initial conversation about defining challenges in their community, that was an.

TxTC Staff (14:24)
Yeah.

Katherine (14:42)
a real focus that and kind of the health implications of it. So even at that early stage of the project, kind of taking that feedback and ensuring that we broadened the scope of focus of co-designed strategies to include air quality. And also at that same time, equity was willing, to step in and, you know, kind of elaborate on the work that Dongying was already doing on.

health issues, you know, around air quality because of that interest. So that first phase was kind of better understanding the way community members were defining problems or considering their community and also community assets. And then the second piece was thinking about locations that they knew of that were experiencing flooding impacts and also air quality impacts and then working with the rest of the broader scientific team to kind of take that technical data.

TxTC Staff (15:06)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Katherine (15:33)
on flood data, flood modeling, air quality data, air quality monitoring, equity data, bring it back to the task force and kind of share that with them and have them think through how their list of priority sites might match with some of that data and there some adjustments from that. ⁓

TxTC Staff (15:51)
So there was just kind

of back and forth that started early on with the task force team and the technical scientists and social scientists where, know, you tell us a little bit about that site selection piece? Because that was something we did early on that we built upon over the years. So what did that look like?

Katherine (15:54)
Yeah.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, great point. It's very additive, right? Back and forth.

And, you know, we just really benefited so much from Texas Target Communities meeting facilitation and meeting planning skills. I mean, just, I feel like that was some of our really valuable task force meeting work early on was just thinking through, okay, what's the objective for this meeting? What's the point?

for this task force meeting. How are we going to go about doing it? How are we going to try to do this in a way that's not completely overwhelming in terms of the amount of information we're sharing and how can we get clear input over a two hour meeting that's not just a bunch of scientists kind of standing there and like spewing information at community members but that's interactive and fun and energizing.

TxTC Staff (16:49)
Right.

Katherine (16:55)
So yeah, those early meetings with the strategy, or I'm sorry, with the site selection, we brought in big maps, made a big regional map, went through it, asked task force members to mark areas that they knew of, like intersections, parts of towns that had seen pretty severe flooding in the past, to mark areas that they knew had challenges with their quality, took all that data, went back, mapped it.

And then that's when we layered in the data from the scientific team of those 20 sites. What does income data look like? What does socioeconomic data, demographic data look like in these neighborhoods? What existing information do we have about air quality? What existing information do we have about flood levels during the Harvey event? And then brought that back, and then they went through, made a map for each of those sites.

and then went through pros and cons of all the sites and also information that only local residents would have had at that point, right? Are there potential community partners who would be willing to help us implement these strategies, right? Are there hurdles that you know of or obstacles that would prevent us from being able to work in this area for various reasons? So kind of tossed all that together in multiple kind of rounds of conversations and facilitated exercises.

TxTC Staff (17:56)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Katherine (18:16)
So that was ⁓ the site selection piece and then the third phase, I guess, of the co-design piece. And we didn't really get to the fourth phase, unfortunately, but I can talk about that too. But the third phase was going through and then getting input on various flooding and air quality mitigation strategies. And we did that in meetings. We also did that through a survey just to make sure that we input from every task force member, which I think eventually we did get. And for that one...

the facilitation strategy we came up with, actually when we were brainstorming in person at the annual meeting last year, was a deck of cards. Each card would have key information about the strategy in a photo or a map or an example. So good information, but not overwhelming amount of information, and in a format that you could compare across strategies.

TxTC Staff (18:48)
Mm-hmm.

So we did a lot in those two hour meetings. Yeah, because I remember getting those set of different sites. But then I remember we actually ended up like pairing them down to a couple of sites with the task force. And then that kind of that created lots and lots of discussions.

Katherine (19:06)
Yes, we did. We did. Yeah. my gosh.

Yeah, lots of back and forth of, you know, community members identifying a particular intersection, taking that back to the kind of the scientific part of the team and saying, okay, we're thinking about this area, and then kind of making a judgment of, okay, how are we going to draw the boundaries on this? Does that look about right? Taking that back to the task force members. Does this kind of what you had in mind when you marked this intersection? Was it kind of generally this area? Yes. Okay. Bringing it back to the technical team and then layering in all that data.

And then bringing it back to the task force members and saying, hey, here's this one particular intersection that you guys were interested in. Here's information about equity flags in this area. Here's information about air quality. And then in that in-person meeting, there was one in April 2024 that wasn't at. You guys were there, though, so you can chime in about it. Definitely some little bit of horse trading, little bit of like, well, let's put together these two sites. Well, let's prioritize this one.

TxTC Staff (20:18)
Yeah.

Katherine (20:21)
I think when we went into that meeting, we had thought, okay, we'll just come out with one pilot site. We don't want to over promise. That's such a key part of all this work to try not to over promise. So let's start with one pilot site. And then of course, at the end of the meeting, we decided to do two because it felt equitable to do one in Port Arthur and one in Beaumont. It felt like there was good energy there with potential community partners.

TxTC Staff (20:44)
And we were able to match those sites with some of the courses at the university to kind of visualize some of the potential strategies and ideas. so I think there's some really cool products that have come out from that. Can you speak to other products or other things that have come about because of the work with the Community Task Force?

Katherine (21:07)
Yeah, and I will say too that actually one of my favorite pieces of the co-design process was Devon coming back and saying, you know, there's a lot of community interest in Port Arthur to think of the former golf course, Pleasure Island Golf Course, as a co-design site. Could we also treat that as a pilot? that was really, he led that and it wasn't as part of the task force meetings as the other two sites, but.

You know, in a lot of ways we were kind of using some of the same processes. And I've always really appreciate that part of the project. To me, that was like truly community led. You know, it's like, hey, we're talking about strategies, you know, in this case for the built environment. Here's a really special place in Port Arthur that needs some assistance. And there's a lot of community energy around kind of re-imagining it. So in a way, I feel like that's our kind of honorary third co-design site.

TxTC Staff (21:42)
Right. Yeah.

Katherine (21:59)
But yeah, as far as kind of the products and the outputs, yeah, you guys have done such a tremendous job at A ⁓ integrating coursework into focus areas on those two sites, as well as some of the other physical locations in the project that we're not necessarily coming up with additional sites for, but that are really important, like the Hal Booty pump station site as a good comparison kind of across the project.

So all those classroom outputs, I I still think the highlight of when Paola reported back to the Department of Energy last spring of all the material she shared, I think the student designs for the site in Port Arthur around the flooding work and the health work, I think were probably the favorite things of all that she had presented back to them. So the coursework's been really amazing and kind of hats off to you guys for leading that. But other products that are coming out of it, you know,

We've been working, we being the co-design team and in particular some of our task force members like Ellen Buchanan has been working closely with the water team to try to create some kinds of mapping and scenario work and visualizations around one of the prioritized strategies, which is this idea of restoring or expanding the protection of floodplains as a way to mitigate for flooding into the future kind of in the long term.

kind of through a green infrastructure approach. Helen has been a real help, has connected me to folks at other nonprofits in the area that have their own work already about a priority map for expansion to the existing Big Thicket area. And a lot of that priority expansion area is in floodplain. So we've been able to use that mapping as a baseline to kind of think about, well, you know, if we have a sense of areas of floodplain that we could expand protection for, we can take that.

map data over to the water team and then the water team is able to eventually, there are a lot of back and forth as we talked about yesterday, eventually we'll be able to run basically that really cool flood model that we looked at yesterday where you kind of see the water kind of moving through the landscape and compare that with a more expanded protection area for a floodplain versus not in that kind of Nettus River basin. So that piece around the Big Thicket potential expansion.

TxTC Staff (23:48)
Mm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Katherine (24:16)
And floodplain protection is one of those outputs which, you know, we're anticipating will be done by spring. And then other pieces that have had connections from the strategies generated from that kind of two and a half year process. Sean and Chushen and Lynn have been working on visualizations in downtown Port Arthur in that study area that the task force members chose. And eventually, I think our hope is that

the preferred strategies for that area will all have some kind of visualization for it. In addition to that, they're also mapping out other strategies that have been highlighted in local plans as a way to kind of show community members, all right, this is what we say we're planning for. How would that impact different neighborhoods in the area? How would that impact flood mitigation, things like that? So those are some of the outputs. And I think even things like, you know, I'm really interested in writing up a process based on y'all's task force model, all that amazing.

TxTC Staff (24:51)
Mm.

Katherine (25:11)
that you did. think it would be really useful for other community engagement research teams at other universities to think through. We have our strategy cards, which I'm working with folks here at UT to get them kind of printed up professionally, just as kind of a tactile example of some of the outputs from all that back and forth with task force members around strategies.

TxTC Staff (25:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's amazing that feedback loop, looking back now over the past few years, seeing how it really did build upon itself over time, just like going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And it's like, we're actually co-designing. It all makes sense to me now. I just got it. Just now.

Katherine (25:44)
Right. Yeah, co-design is just a lot of back and forth. Yeah, right. I also mentioned,

right, it's all coming together. That's why we do these end of project podcasts, I guess, right? And I also wanted to mention too, out of the first set of meetings with task force members, you know, I think coming to the project, we're planners and we're engineers and we're thinking about physical infrastructure or physical strategies.

TxTC Staff (25:58)
Yeah.

Katherine (26:11)
such strong interests from task force members on what you might call social strategies or social infrastructure, things around communication, things about information flow, things about how we communicate both the data but also the urgency and also even just response communication. When there's flooding, making sure that evacuation routes, yes, they show the main highways but they also show the local roads. Just thinking about different types of kind of

TxTC Staff (26:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Katherine (26:39)
quote unquote, softer strategies that aren't based in kind of physical infrastructure, but that makes such a key difference for community members. And a lot of that came out of Constable Bates' kind of focus on his experience as a first responder during flood events and his kind of identified knowledge and need of strengthening communication strategies. And that's not something our team has a lot of, you know, I think we all totally agree with him. We don't have a lot of.

professional expertise in that, but I think as we put together that resource list for our task force members to present back to them or give back to them in April, that's a piece that we're focusing on is kind of adding more detail about particular resources that might help strengthen some of those communication systems.

TxTC Staff (27:23)
Yeah, I I remember thinking about task force members that took us a little bit deeper into the community. Like Dr. Janice Milo, who had, with her church, had this huge food drive that they did. And I remember one of our classes, we're doing like community engaged efforts throughout Port Arthur and Beaumont. And we went to like 15 different sites and tons of students went around. She was like, well, I have people that come to my church every Wednesday, hundreds of cars. Like you guys should come there.

and asked them the question because they live here. And we got so much input for the project. And the students created this amazing engagement report about Port Arthur Beaumont that actually furthered the work that we were doing. And it was just cool work with a community member taking it a little bit further. So just stuff like that that I think was just pretty amazing to witness.

Katherine (27:55)
Yeah.

Absolutely.

I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think like the structure was focused on these strategies, but then just with such a big team and with people on the team having different interests and skill sets and connections to different groups that were there potentially to be able to engage. think that was that was something that, you know, we didn't put in the proposal, but I feel like those are some of the most meaningful outputs. Yeah. Yeah. Like the Pleasure Island piece as well. And the other thing I was going to mention to you

TxTC Staff (28:34)
The organic.

Katherine (28:41)
You know, at the proposal stage, Gita and I emailed a bunch and, you know, Gita has this existing interest in ensuring that the climate data she's working on and the downscaled models are useful for community members, useful for local residents. So I promised her, yes, we will take time in a task force meeting to get input on those downscale projections. And that ended up being a big piece of work for us, as you guys remember. Yeah. Summer.

TxTC Staff (29:03)
That was a haul.

Katherine (29:07)
Yeah,

mean like spring 2024 through that fall meeting, I think it was in early September. Just, I mean, and to me that really drove home just wow, this is where the work happens in this co-design piece because, know, just like trying to grapple. I'm not a climate scientist trying to like understand the models myself and then kind of think about what language is helpful and how can we structure two hour meetings so it's meaningful and helpful and good output on getting feedback on this.

TxTC Staff (29:16)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Katherine (29:35)
on these data, it was, I I still remember some of the conversations, just light bulbs going on immediately. could kind of see behind people's eyes, like, ⁓ you know, thinking about folks at TACOA just thinking, my gosh, this is gonna change the way that we can do recess, right? If we're having this many more days over 90 degrees and X percent humidity, what does that mean for our kids being able to go outside? So just like that immediate feedback on the reality of these projections of... ⁓

TxTC Staff (29:49)
Yeah.

Katherine (30:02)
hotter, more humid Port Arthur in 50 years.

TxTC Staff (30:07)
Catherine, why is this work important?

Katherine (30:11)
I really think that, I mean, I think there's value in, I guess, what we would call it the university and just knowledge discovery, right? I think I'm not saying that all research has to be applied, but I do really, my research is all applied. And I think part of that is I feel like things are really urgent. And I think I'm just very practical too, you know, just temperamentally. So for applied research, this work is so critical because I just don't think, I don't.

I personally think there's a lot of value in applied research that doesn't have space for local voice and local knowledge. And that probably is my prejudice as a planner, right? But I do think, and the research backs it up, that taking the time and building the trust and bringing in the input and integrating it with the scientific and technical data into planning work, into research that's focused on the built environment, it's just critical to get

good outcomes, to get outcomes that are effective and useful and will be adopted by community members and decision makers and that will make an impact. I think to me that's kind of the magic of it or the superpower of it that when you bring together that local knowledge with all that big data, that's when you get really robust, strong planning outcomes because one without the other, you're just a little lopsided.

So I think it's really important because we can produce all the knowledge that we might do at the university level. But if we actually want it to be useful and put to use, it's going to have to have some kind of anchor connection to community. And I think these community-engaged research processes, as time-intensive and difficult and challenging and rewarding and amazing as they are,

TxTC Staff (31:50)
Thank

Katherine (31:51)
That, to me, that's the pathway that I have found that allows us to do that. And I'm not saying there aren't other ones, but for me, that's what I've seen and witnessed as working to create research outcomes that are meaningful and that potentially could be adopted and make a difference.

TxTC Staff (31:55)
Mm-hmm.

And what do you want community members or decision makers to know about this project?

Katherine (32:14)
wow. So much. And, you know, we're still trying to figure out the best way to not just share the co-designed outcomes, but just all the information, all the data generated across this amazing, whatever it was, 70-person team. So once we have a platform where that information is there and accessible, I definitely want decision-makers and local residents to know where that is and know how to access it.

TxTC Staff (32:16)
You

Katherine (32:40)
But I also, I guess my other message would be, even though this project had to end a couple years short, I want everyone that we worked with in Beaumont and Port Arthur and the five counties in the area to know that the research team is still there and we are so interested in continuing this work and other forms, even if it's a small project, even if it's just coming in for weekend and helping with something.

if it's connecting a class, you know, the way that you guys have with your work through A to kind of local projects in Beaumont and Port Arthur. So I think, you know, my message for decision makers and for residents in Southeast Texas in this area we've been working in for the past three years is that just because a project is ended doesn't mean that the connections to the universities and the researchers and our kind of research community have ended.

and that I think so many of us are interested in trying to pursue future projects and getting some of this stuff, you know, making sure that the work we've worked on together ends up in hands of community members and decision makers and gets connected to resources that can help with implementation.

TxTC Staff (33:50)
great. Okay. Yeah. This is such a nice feel good episode. It is. It's so feel good. So like data, data, data, stakeholder engagement. We threw at you a of questions. You did great. Thank you.

Katherine (33:51)
I feel so earnest. Yeah, right.

Yeah. I know. That's right. Okay. Am I done talking into this? All right.

Well, thank you guys so much. That was fun. ⁓ Yeah. Wow. I don't know about this mic thing.

TxTC Staff (34:11)
Yeah.

Is there anything, I

guess while we're here, we got a few minutes left. Is there anything that you can think of that, maybe I wanted to add that and say that? Why are you not next couple of minutes? And then we'll be talking with Christopher Bates, Constable Bates and Ellen. So if there's anything to set up for them, maybe not, but. Yeah. We're going to do an episode just with them. They're going to. We're going to attach them to this episode. Is that what we're doing?

Katherine (34:20)
Yeah, let me just like...

Yeah, that's awesome.

TxTC Staff (34:41)
We could do that. I was thinking we could just do like a 30 minute, just like a standalone episode with stakeholder.

Katherine (34:46)
Yeah,

are they going to call in at the same time? Maybe. Yeah, I'm just curious. It'll be kind of fun. Yeah.

TxTC Staff (34:50)
⁓ Maybe?

They could.

I think they'd be fun together.

Katherine (34:58)
Yeah. You guys did such a good job asking your questions. I think you hit everything on your list.

TxTC Staff (34:59)
either.

I can, I

can ask questions for days. yeah, Cedric can for sure. I can, wait, wait, wait, back up, me more about that thing.

Katherine (35:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, I guess I, I mean, I didn't really talk about things that didn't work, but I have a couple of notes on that, but we, since it's the full, well, yeah, and I just don't.

TxTC Staff (35:18)
⁓ yeah, let's do that real fast then.

You want to ask it,

Jamie? So what were some of the challenges and some of the things that didn't work?

Katherine (35:29)
Yeah, I learned a lot. I always do in these projects. I learned a lot from you guys as folks who have been working, know, Texas Target Communities have been working for multiple decades at this point in community engaged research in Texas. Some of it lessons from other community engaged projects that I was thinking about a lot throughout those three years. I think one of the biggest challenges I have found as a university researcher is knowing that

absolutely kind of best practice, very ethical. You have to ensure that you offer payment compensation to community members who are participating in this work. Like their time and their knowledge is valuable and we need to compensate that and that needs to be part of the budgeting process. It is so hard sometimes to get the money out of the university into the hands of the community members and I feel like that's been, I think every community engaged research project I've done, it's been hard and I don't know how to make it easier but I feel like it's a limitation because I know

TxTC Staff (36:14)
Yeah.

Katherine (36:24)
I know there are researchers that just like, I'm not going to mess with that because it's too difficult. But it is also a best practice. And it's not that that didn't work for our project, but I know it's been slow and I know there was some back and forth and people like, hey, I haven't gotten paid yet. And I think it's been administratively challenging for the folks at Texas or at A that were in charge of that piece. So that's something that I think about a lot. I think things that were challenging too, it's that

TxTC Staff (36:28)
Mm-hmm.

Katherine (36:50)
I do know everyone, especially because we community organization leaders and technical professionals who made up our task force. both of those scripts are really busy during their regular lives, Working for a flood control district, local government, industry, running nonprofits, being leadership for churches and for schools. So I understand that, you know,

TxTC Staff (37:01)
Mm-hmm.

industry all of it yeah

Katherine (37:17)
meeting quarterly for two hours, that was an in-person, right? It's really valuable, I think. And there were times later on after we established trust and kind of got in rhythm, we did some things over Zoom and that was fine too. But I always felt such like incredible time pressure during those two hours to try to get as much information as possible. And I think we did it really well creatively, but I definitely, I can definitely remember a couple of the meetings where I'm like, this is not working. In fact, when we were working on the strategies,

TxTC Staff (37:22)
Mm.

Yeah, so much in. Yeah.

yeah.

Katherine (37:46)
getting that input that February 2025 meeting. Cedric, I think, who did such a good job of just pivoting, just like, okay, this is not, yeah, let's combine these, let's put this stack over here. We're not gonna, no one, okay, no one cares about this one, or maybe I should pull this up. Why did I decide to get everyone an information pack? We should have just made giant poster. It was such real-time, fast learning.

TxTC Staff (37:53)
Yeah, we're changing it. Yeah, we're not using this one.

Yeah.

Katherine (38:11)
But I think that is the beauty of co-design is that you're also learning how to do the work in real time. And it's not that you can't follow a cookbook and you can't just drop a process from one place to another. But I think over time, you do kind of get a sense of energy levels and capacity to kind of move through some of this complex information. But I also feel like our task force members were so forgiving and generous that they're like, yeah, that isn't working. OK, let's do it this way.

TxTC Staff (38:37)
Yeah.

Katherine (38:38)
It was okay to be kind of in real time adapt to it. And that's good, right? That's how science should be too. And I think, I'm just looking at my other list. I guess my biggest sadness about the project is that we're ending before we had budget to go out and do broader community workshops around the strategies and we're ending before that part of the project happened. And we didn't have to do that project and we didn't.

absolutely promise to do it, but I feel like that would have been a really impactful way to have these broader conversations. So for me, I think a challenge is, and I'm challenging myself to do is try to find funding from other sources to continue that work and hoping that task force members that we won't lose momentum with them, that, you know, if we come back in six months or a year and say, you know, hey, particular community group, would you be interested in hosting these workshops with us that we can get some traction? So that's my hope moving forward.

TxTC Staff (39:09)
Yeah.

Katherine (39:34)
I think that's all. Yeah. Thank you guys.

TxTC Staff (39:34)
Thanks, Catherine. That's great. Very succinct.

Yeah. You're so good at this. You are. You're very natural. You're very, very natural. Yeah, you're amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. Really? You probably don't think so, but it was great. It's perfect. That's what you're supposed to do. Perfect. No, it's great.

Katherine (39:44)
Really?

I just feel like I'm just talking, talking, talking. Now, you guys can edit. That's right. Yeah. Well, thank you for doing this. ⁓

People are really excited about these podcasts. I think it's a great capstone to this project. Yeah.

TxTC Staff (40:01)
Yeah,

I think it'd be great to everyone to listen to and reflect back. As we were leaving, I was like, wow, these are kind of like some of my friends. I know. I was like, man, this is kind of sad a little bit. I know. I know. And you haven't even been the whole time. Yeah, not even the whole time. I was on here for two years. thought, Like half. But I was like, oh, wait, I missed the first year.

Katherine (40:09)
Yeah!

Right.

Right. ⁓

Yeah. Yeah, but you were at the, I think you were at the first, the problem definition task force meeting. Yeah, as a student. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, you guys have a wonderful weekend. Yeah.

TxTC Staff (40:25)
The first. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was fun. Wow.

Yep, we'll be talking

about Don't work too much. Yeah, take a break on Saturday or Sunday if you can.

Katherine (40:38)
Yeah.

Yeah,

definitely. right. And so I can't the weather has been amazing Yeah All right, take care. Bye

TxTC Staff (40:44)
I know. it's really do it outside. Yeah, if you have yeah, if you're gonna work. Yeah. Okay, Catherine. We'll see you. Bye. Bye.