Stories

Angélica Valdés Valderrama helps community leaders transform local challenges into sustainable solutions

When power or water fails at her home in Puerto Rico—a frustratingly common occurrence—Angélica Valdés Valderrama knows exactly where to go. She settles into a bright corner of a co-working space in San Juan, grateful for the reliable infrastructure.

“Whenever I have water or power outages at home, I can always drop in here,” she says. “They have a generator and a more reliable water supply.”

It’s a fitting base for Valdés Valderrama’s work as a Civic Science Fellow at Ciencia Puerto Rico, where she is developing tools to evaluate the impact of CienciaCoLab, a collaborative and participatory space that equips local leaders to design and implement community science projects.

“Every community faces different challenges,” she says. “But they all have some structural barriers to being able to create any sort of lasting change. Our mission is to pass along the tools that we know are helpful for creating those kinds of opportunities.” In practice, that’s meant projects focused on issues like food access and disaster resilience.

Raised in Puerto Rico, Valdés Valderrama studied economics and political science as an undergraduate and then earned a master’s degree in agricultural economics, both at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. She is now a doctoral candidate focused on equity in federal nutrition programs like SNAP and WIC at Tufts University. There she participated in the Yale Ciencia Academy, a program co-created by CienciaPR that helps graduate students with career planning and skill building.

“Traditional academia isn’t where a lot of us are seeing ourselves now,” she says. “We’re seeing shifts in the research enterprise and fewer academic jobs. I wanted to think outside the box but stay in research.”

Her experience with the Academy opened doors to CienciaPR. “I’d been searching for a way to bring my expertise back to my community, to the place where I want to set down roots,” she says. “When I saw the Civic Science Fellow position, it was wild how perfectly it matched what I do: evaluation with an equity lens.”

The challenges of assessing impact

When Valdés Valderrama joined CienciaPR, she benefited from the guidance of Andrea Isabel López, the organization’s previous Civic Science Fellow. “Andrea has been fantastic,” she says. “She was extremely helpful in helping me understand what the scope of this was, how to get the most out of this program.”

Even so, Valdés Valderrama immediately faced what she calls “the worst possible scenario.” The CienciaCoLab pilot she was tasked with evaluating had already ended, and there were no before‑and‑after measures on which to base an analysis of what had worked and how to improve. “I walked in, and there was nothing,” she says. “Obviously, I panicked. But after the panic, I realized that mess was my opportunity.”

She began interviewing the team members who implemented the pilot and discovered CienciaCoLab had maintained strong relationships with the six community leaders who had participated. “I saw the chance to do more of an impact evaluation,” Valdés Valderrama says, “which is fantastic in this field.”

The pilot projects spanned six social determinants of health: food access and nutrition, elder social connection, youth science learning and leadership, disability inclusion and access, disaster resilience, and community health communication. She conducted in-depth interviews with five participants and visited their communities. “It was surprisingly easy how quickly these folks opened up to me. I think it really speaks to the excellent experience they had during the program.”

Her evaluation surfaced two principles she now builds into every step. “First is rigorous adaptability,” she says. “Having a central structure is important, yes, but also the flexibility to respond to the needs and realities of communities that are dealing with so many different things.”

This approach had proved critical when CienciaCoLab’s first pilot was interrupted by a hurricane in 2022. The next time around, they started in April instead of September to avoid peak hurricane season, but still built in contingency plans for atmospheric events.

The second principle is transparency, Valdés Valderrama says. “We have been as open as possible with folks, letting them know how we’re evaluating and when they’re being evaluated, always doing things with consent. Full partnership requires radical transparency.”

She also helped the team further implement a “decolonial approach” that recognizes and centers community expertise. “We are complementing their knowledge, not replacing it,” she says. “These are people who are already doing important work in their communities.”

Tangible outcomes

By April 2025, Valdés Valderrama had gathered enough insights to present preliminary findings at the Advancing Research Impact in Society Summit, held in San Juan in 2025. More importantly, she could document tangible outcomes among CienciaCoLab’s participants.

Sor Faustina Rodríguez, who directed a community center in a disadvantaged sector of Ponce, used her CienciaCoLab training to secure foundation funding, not once, but twice, expanding her original program and launching a new health initiative. “She didn’t do it alone,” Valdés Valderrama says. “She printed out all the resources we provided and shared them with community members who helped shape her ideas. She involved her community the entire way.”

Lohary Munet Piñero secured sponsorship from a local company for materials for her community garden project, while Lucía Santana Benítez leveraged her training to secure scholarships for herself and the youth she mentors to attend a national leadership conference.

“Numbers can’t capture how profound the experience was for those six participants,” Valdés Valderrama says. “That’s the narrative part that often gets left out when you’re only looking at statistics.”

For the second CienciaCoLab pilot, which launched in April 2025 with a cohort of five community leaders, Valdés Valderrama deployed a real-time monitoring system. The team also formally implemented a card game they had created on the fly for the first cohort after Hurricane Fiona interrupted their meeting schedule. The card game helps participants organize their grant proposals section by section.

“One really helpful thing we did was bring in a designer early. Not just for graphics, but someone who thinks about processes,” she says. “With the card game, participants can write out grant elements in a format that feels more like play than something intimidating.”

This approach addresses what Valdés Valderrama sees as structural barriers to science participation. “We’re trying to break down the hierarchical barriers of science, to get rid of the gatekeeping. These folks are doing important work, and we want to make sure the resources they have available reflect that.”

Moving forward

The Civic Science Fellows program connected Valdés Valderrama to a national network of boundary-spanning professionals. “I’ve been able to connect with civic science folks doing similar work or working in completely different fields,” she says.

The spring 2025 convening in Boston proved particularly valuable, opening her eyes to career possibilities. “It was helpful to see there are still funders, philanthropic organizations willing to step up,” Valdés Valderrama says. “And also just to see the breadth of jobs and functions available, positions that have been dreamt up and created for people who are boundary-spanners.”

As she looks toward her next steps, Valdés Valderrama hopes the insights she gleaned during her Fellowship can help funders see the challenges many face when seeking grants. “Consider how your application and reporting processes create barriers,” she says. One of the biggest obstacles is the 501(c)(3) requirement; another is documentation that’s only in English, with plenty of terms that may not be familiar beyond philanthropy circles. She described her work at CienciaPR as akin to a boot camp that trains people to understand and speak the language funders use.

The work of civic science is gaining momentum, but it is still a challenging path to pursue. For each of the organizers in both CienciaCoLab cohorts, doing civic science is actually their second, often unpaid, job. Funders can help change that, she says. “Think about how important it is to provide funds for the support people need to do this work, including decent salaries for those of us who want to keep doing it.”

For Valdés Valderrama, civic science means building resilient bridges between communities and researchers, between knowledge and action, and between a Puerto Rico buffeted by hurricanes and power outages and the sustainable future its people are working to create.

Valdés Valderrama is part of the 2024-25 Civic Science Fellows cohort. Her fellowship was supported by the Rita Allen Foundation.