Stories

Civic Science Fellow Lisa Maillard works to help funders support more effective community-engaged research

When Lisa Maillard and her colleagues walked into a municipal building in Florida, ready to conduct a workshop on climate resilience, their reception was less than enthusiastic. They’d traveled there as part of a collaboration between the local officials and their organization, the Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments program, a partnership with NOAA, hoping to help stormwater vulnerability assessment. But the community liaison had a blunt message for them: “No one wants to do this, so you better make it worth our time.”

Skepticism radiated from the municipal workers who’d been corralled into attending. They had previous experience with science-based mandates filtered down through multiple layers of bureaucracy and dropped on their desks without anyone ever asking if these tools or plans made sense for their specific community.

For Maillard, now a Civic Science Fellow at The Pew Charitable Trusts, that reception represented a fundamental problem in how research gets funded and conducted. The issue isn’t the quality of the science, or even the good intentions of the researchers. The problem was deeper: a broken relationship between scientific institutions and the communities they claim to serve.

“It was really an exercise in humility,” says Maillard, who was a graduate student at the University of Michigan at the time. “I didn’t know anything about this community, compared to the people who live here. I didn’t know what they’d tried, what they hadn’t, what their infrastructure looked like.”

She had previously encountered this disconnect during a climate science class, when she read a paper by Professor Emerita and climate co-adaptation scholar Maria Carmen Lemos describing the concept of climate co-production. The idea is that a lot of climate science fails to influence decision-making not because it’s bad science, but because it’s created by climatologists in isolation from the people who might actually use it. “I remember reading that paper and being gobsmacked that this wasn’t talked about more,” Maillard says. “It seems so obvious when you hear about it.”

The concept stuck with her as she traveled to the Seychelles—a small island nation near Madagascar facing severe climate threats—for her master’s research. Policymakers there told her they needed maps of which buildings are going to flood, socioeconomic data indicating where the most vulnerable populations are, and more flexible tools that allow planning for multiple possible futures with climate change. In other words, they needed information packaged and presented in ways that matched their real-world challenges.

With that lesson in mind while working to develop tools with communities in the Great Lakes and Gulf Coast regions, she asked what they needed most. A common refrain was that they needed funding in order to do the work. Maillard began to see a better way forward. Rather than convincing one researcher at a time to adopt community-engaged approaches, why not work with funders who could require and support such approaches across their entire portfolio?

“It’s a really powerful way to scale up climate action, or just impact in general, if it’s done correctly,” she says.

Working with funders

Now Maillard is applying this concept as a Civic Science Fellow with Pew’s Impact Funders Forum—a network of more than 80 funding organizations committed to closing the gap between research and outcomes. She’s working on what she calls the “meta-work” of civic science. Instead of directly engaging with communities, she’s helping funders develop better practices for supporting community-engaged research.

Her main project centers on creating a Funding Practice Lab that will gather field-tested efforts from across the network to use as models for future projects. But this isn’t your typical static data archive, it’s a “supercharged repository.”

“Regular repositories often get built and forgotten because it’s too time-consuming for people to dig through all the documents and read everything,” Maillard says. Instead, the Funding Practice Lab is structured to mirror how funding actually works, with resources organized by stages of the funding process: scoping what you want to fund, identifying potential partners, creating solicitations, and supporting the funded work. Underlying those stages are resources about the funding organizations’ operations, and efforts focused on continuous learning and evaluation at every stage of the process.

The platform will also house the actual tools already being used by Forum members: requests for proposals that better encourage community engagement, sample guidebooks for applicants, project narratives from funded work that detail both successes and “pivot points.” And this repository will be open and public-facing, not limited to the funders who created it.

One innovative aspect of the platform involves changing how funders think about projects that don’t go according to plan. At a recent conference, Maillard met a funder who hosts what they call a “failure fest,” a celebration of projects that didn’t go as expected.

“A lot of it is framing,” she says. “If you label them as pivot points, then it doesn’t have the stigma around it. Part of moving this forward is sharing what doesn’t work.”

This openness to learning from setbacks reflects a broader shift in how these funders approach their work. Rather than simply writing checks and waiting for final reports, they’re embracing continuous engagement and adaptation.

The Funding Practice Lab also includes activities built around these shared resources, serving as conversation starters for funders to tackle specific challenges: How do you encourage meaningful community engagement? How long before research begins should scientists and community members start collaborating?

A key insight from her Civic Science Fellowship cohort that has informed Maillard’s work is the crucial importance of timing. “When you do the work, and when you approach someone about doing the work, is equally if not more important than how you frame the work,” she says. This means thinking strategically about funding cycles, election turnover at the local level, changes in state regulations, and other factors that might make communities more or less receptive to collaboration.

The Fellowship community has also provided an important support, particularly during a period of significant uncertainty and change. “The sense of community has been pretty crucial,” she says. “Everyone has discussed the value of having like-minded people to navigate a lot of different changes with, and part of that is keeping the work going, but also just at a very basic level, supporting each other as human beings.”

Applying the lessons

Looking back on her journey from that confrontational meeting in Florida to her current role helping shape funding practices, Maillard sees a consistent thread: the importance of humility and genuine curiosity in research.

“In that Florida workshop, we made a point to say right away, ‘We’re here, and we’ve got all sorts of maps and data, but you know your community, and all we are trying to do is bring your expertise together,’” she says. That message of respect for local knowledge transformed a hostile room into a productive collaboration.

The lesson extends beyond individual research projects. When funders support research that ignores existing community knowledge, Maillard says, they’re often funding projects that are “essentially just reinventing the wheel” and rediscovering through academic methods what communities, including indigenous communities, have known for generations.

The Funding Practice Lab is scheduled to launch in early 2026, with the potential to reach far beyond the 80 organizations in the Impact Funders Forum. Through strategic communications and the network’s participating funders sharing resources with their contacts, Maillard hopes to create ripple effects throughout the funding ecosystem.

Looking ahead, she envisions the platform encouraging more systematic impact evaluation by helping funders develop better metrics for understanding whether their approaches actually create the changes they’re seeking. This includes innovative methods like “outcome harvesting” and “ripple effect mapping” that trace not just immediate effects but secondary and tertiary impacts of funded work.

Long-term, the Lab could help reshape how the Impact Funders Forum itself operates, serving as both a resource hub and a catalyst for deeper collaboration among funders committed to societally relevant research.

Through her work with funders, Maillard is betting that better infrastructure could make such community-engaged research standard practice rather than the exception.

Maillard is part of the 2024-25 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her fellowship is supported by The Pew Charitable Trust.