Building community: A sustainable framework for DEI working groups in geoscience departments

The attraction and retention of systematically-marginalized students continues to be a major challenge in the geosciences. Despite a plethora of recruitment strategies by organizations including the National Science Foundation and systemically-marginalized scientists themselves, there has not been significant progress in this arena. Furthermore, slow changes in the racial and ethnic diversity of the geoscience population have been accompanied by the less documented hostile experiences of systemically-marginalized geoscientists. We argue that geoscience departments at academic institutions should ground their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming in a sustainable framework to build a community that is accountable for DEI. We showcase the effectiveness of this framework through a student-led group called GeoPath at a predominantly white, research-intensive institution in the U.S. GeoPath is structured around a) non-hierarchal leadership, b) affirmation of individuals’ multiple identities, c) recognition of and accounting for in-group vs. out-group dynamics, and d) supporting a community mindset that was grounded in DEI education (scholarly literature, published statistics, evidence-based practices, and lived experience of systemically-marginalized people). Through the GeoPath approach, we have identified barriers that the geoscience community faces which can be grouped into four themes. Additionally, we present a set of tailored DEI initiatives to educate the community on how to address these barriers. We assessed the effectiveness of these initiatives through a survey of the geosciences department community and found that over 85% of survey respondents felt a greater sense of community within the department and 95% agreed that they were better informed in the various challenges and barriers community members faced. With this newfound knowledge, the departmental community began creating and implementing their own DEI initiatives, which we define as “community buy-in”. This contribution seeks to illustrate the efficacy of our GeoPath framework, with the hope that DEI working groups in geoscience departments will implement the GeoPath approach to build sustainable cultural changes that hold the community accountable for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and ultimately result in the increased attraction and retention of valuable talent and perspectives from systemically-marginalized students.