Navigating Community-Engaged Research to Understand How Drought Affects Water Quality

Community-engaged research (CEnR) is becoming more prevalent in environmental health. With a spectrum of community involvement characterizing this research, it has the potential to foster a diverse set of collaborative dynamics. Our research team has facilitated a regional CEnR effort focusing on the effects of drought driven by climate change. Specifically, the CEnR is focusing on regional water quality by analyzing samples from privately owned groundwater wells and examining the samples for heavy metal contaminants. This special report outlines lessons learned and project management strategies used to facilitate large-scale community-engaged environmental science. Recruitment methods evolved in response to obstacles and included direct mailings, listservs and social media promotion, direct recruitment by local leaders, and local newspaper coverage. Participant onboarding evolved as new recruitment methods were implemented but was standardized to achieve process efficiency. External data sources were used to align contextual information of sampled wells to the submitted samples. Open-source tools were used to streamline reporting of results to participants. Scalability, project management, bidirectional involvement with community members and organizations, and accountability are important themes to consider when facilitating environmental CEnR.