About

This project is creating a set of courses and co-curricular learning experiences designed to engage students in
project-based community service contributing towards establishing lasting disaster relief and resiliency in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Our student-led projects have recently been initiated as a result of a previously existing collaborative effort between three institutions (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The collaborating institutions for the Disaster Relief and Resilience project.

The long-term goal of this effort is to establish a model for a sustainable pipeline (Figure 2) of educational opportunities that stem from highly motivating grand challenges such as these. The primary operational challenge we observe when engaging students in this context is that their learning lifecycles are short relative to resilient problem solving after disasters, which has especially long problem solving lifecycles.

Figure 2. The educational pipeline being created by this project offers multiple entry points for students and opportunities for students participating in multiple offerings to increase their leadership responsibilities and skills in collaboration and stakeholder engagement.

Thus, to facilitate such experiences, while maintaining steadily developing and demonstrable outcomes for our collaborating communities, our overarching objective is to solidify and strengthen our collaborations with current and future local partners. The outcome will be a new cadre of students who are versed in leadership, project management, capable of cross-cultural and transdisciplinary global engagements when problem solving.

Figure 3. The iterative process for developing project ideas, engagement and implementation.