Your efforts are OUTSTANDING and congruent with our smaller scale Organization's Mission.  This is Kristi Fink, Executive Director for Texas Educational Seismic Project (Non Profit, Public Charity, www.txesp.org).  I have (am) facing challenges initiating exciting engagements with public, private, primary and secondary schools.  In Texas, it one large hurdle is convincing Principals and Superintendents that hands on, inquiry-based instructional methods enable students' learning potential beyond rote memorization.  Students who inquire and investigate their world do learn the required concepts mandated by State and Federal Guidelines; however, implementing our Educational Seismic Project has proven difficult likely to (1) pressure on teachers' classroom performance, (2) lack of vision / Content Expertise, and most importantly (3) a foundation of trust that learning objectives will be not only be achieved, but far exceeded.  we are very interested in collaborating with your Organization to help us connect more within Texas communities!  

Lastly, we have successfully engaged with students in remote areas such as Seeley Lake, MT.  We have brought STEM to the forefront by leveraging video teleconferences for Career Day discussions, TXESP curriculum activities' discussion, and connecting their school to other Professionals.  The remote schools, in particular, suffer the most as they have limited community opportunities to observe, work, and connect with STEM Professionals beyond the "local" businesses.  

We also leverage nation or state wide events for community outreach opportunities - aiding us by building name recognition and credibility of our Organization's dedication  We have used "Connect2Texas" for video conferencing, but have also used Skpe when necessary,  As part of the "March For Science" recent movement, women in STEM have connected with educators and now engage local Girl Scout troops learning about differing college and career pathways.  Another example is searching for Event volunteer requests thru Professional Organizations,  or Sponsoring Universities and Businesses.  We will be presenting at STEM Texas in October as one example (organized in part by the University of Houston).

Hi Kristi - wow! What fantastic work you are doing! It sounds like we have a lot of common goals and may be able to connect on several levels. Let' connect and discuss further (donnac -at- unavco.org). I love the teleconference Career Day! For our summer internship programs (community college aged students) we do brownbag carer lunches and they are the highlight of the program for students every year. We're trying to get more resources out there about careers in STEM (specifically geosciences) - you might be interested in our slowing growing video collection of Geoscience Career Spotlights.    

I appreciate your challenge in getting the school administrators on board. Have you worked with or connected with Mike Odell (see below) from the Univ. Texas, Tyler? He's done a fantastic job of integrating PBL into multiple charter schools. 

Our project is in the pilot phase and I'm anticipating once we are a bit further along we will encounter similar challenges and will be looking to groups like yours to help us work toward solutions. 

Great questions! We are in the pilot phase right now and working in three regional pilot areas (Atlanta, Oklahoma, San Bernardino). In each of the three regions we are working to connect our university partners with both local educators and community activists. This has largely been done through personal, networked connections. In all three cases, we designed the community topic of investigation to be one either focused in a URM area or a topic that directly impacts URM groups. It's very much a work in progress. We've found that having a lot of conversations with community groups already working on these issues is helping to lay the foundation for engaging the students. Our focus is to bring "geoscience" to help address the issue challenging the community. Many of the groups are aware of the local issues but have not used science/geoscience to help frame the solution.     

Hi Tami. We have quarterly check-ins as a team and update our internal pages. Your question prompts me to think about the frequency with which we update our externally facing pages. I think we should aim to do these updates quarterly as well.  

:) I think people will be interested in your progress and advances.

Hi Dale! Thanks for your interest and questions. Your question about mutually reinforcing activities is a good one. We haven't identified those clearly yet, in part because the three regional alliances are at different stages of formation. 

We anticipated that communication and community building were going to be challenging and we've certainly confirmed that! This being said, within the regional alliances (which include individuals co-located in the same city/area *and* at least one person from the national team) the communication as been relatively good. We need to better put in place mechanisms to share information between regional alliances and are headed in a good direction there.

Geosciences is not doing too bad with respect to gender. Geosciences is generally considered oceanography, atmospheric sciences, and geology. With respect to BS degrees conferred, in oceanography we've got parity, geology is close to parity, and atmospheric sciences lags pretty far behind. There is a retention challenge with females post-early career. I don't know that I've seen statistics for rural vs. urban. 

Hi Mike - thanks for the reminder. I do remember that now.

We are running three pilots right now and ultimately looking to scale up. I think there is a strong potential for synergy with your programs. Let me do a little more brainstorming and check in with others on the leadership team and I'll follow up offline with more detail.

Is Tyler classified as 'rural'? 

Dale - I agree, NGCP is a great organization! I served on the Colorado Leadership Board for the Colorado branch of NGCP and there is huge potential for partnering organizations. The biggest success was the professional development for leaders in various organizations. The Colorado Collaborative's challenge was getting groups to (1) register in the NGCP database and then (2) search for partners in the database. We found that there was reluctance to create yet another password and profile.