Stories

Former Civic Science Fellow Lia Kelinsky-Jones is helping universities become true partners in tackling environmental challenges 

When Lia Kelinsky-Jones began working with the town of Blacksburg, Virginia, she wasn’t expecting to fundamentally change her career trajectory—or discover her passion. But as she explored food security risks highlighted by the town’s climate vulnerability assessment, something clicked.

“I just fell in love with what I was doing,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “Thinking deeply about the role of local governments in addressing climate vulnerability—especially tied to our food systems—it excited something in me that hasn’t gone away.”

She partnered with the town’s sustainability manager, Carol Davis, who showed Kelinsky-Jones how she goes about documenting and planning for food-system risks facing the community, from flooding and drought to supply chain disruptions. But tackling these pressing issues alone was daunting, Davis told her.

“Local governments often grapple with sustainability issues in isolation,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “Carol made it clear to me that municipalities needed partners, that climate adaptation and food security are deeply interconnected, with collaborative relationships between local government officials and academic researchers being important.”

This partnership led Kelinsky-Jones to questions that felt both deeply personal and broadly important: Could local governments find stronger, more effective partnerships with nearby research institutions? Were universities truly addressing local communities’ on-the-ground policy needs?

It’s questions like these that brought her to the Civic Science Fellowship at Johns Hopkins University’s Agora Institute, where she launched an ambitious project investigating how America’s leading research institutions—called R-1 universities—engage with local sustainability managers like Davis who are tackling these urgent climate policy challenges.

Having completed her Fellowship, Kelinsky-Jones reflects on a key insight from her research that still motivates her work: 81 percent of sustainability policymakers expressed interest in collaborating with R-1 staff on at least one of their sustainability challenges.

Addressing this gap by building bridges between academic science and local policy is at the heart of her vision of civic science, a vision she’s carried forward into her current role as a research assistant professor at Virginia Tech.

Finding a Path to Formal Civic Science

Although civic science was a new term for Kelinsky-Jones, its principles were deeply familiar. For more than a decade, she had worked in multiple roles at Virginia Tech—liaising between university resources and community needs, managing international development projects. At the same time, she was completing a master’s degree and most of her doctorate part-time, researching how international development policy influenced university-led international food security projects to move toward sustainable, equitable, and participatory food systems. 

These years of studying and addressing university engagement gave her a practical perspective that naturally aligned with civic science’s emphasis on co-production of knowledge and engagement.

“I didn’t know the term ‘civic science’ even existed until I read the job description for the Fellowship,” Kelinsky-Jones recalls. “But I immediately realized this was exactly the work I had always aimed for: science in service to society, with society informing science in return.”

She credits the detailed, thought-provoking project description by Adam Seth Levine of the Agora Institute at Hopkins for sparking her interest. Engaging with the mission outlined in the Fellowship offered an unexpected sense of alignment.

“I was excited about the synergy between what I cared about deeply and the civic science work,” Kelinsky-Jones says.

Changing the Question: Mapping the Engagement Gap

Most research on science policy engagement focuses on the academic side of things: What are scientists producing and for whom? This occurs at the neglect of asking, what do communities really need? 

As a Civic Science Fellow, Kelinsky-Jones worked on innovating ways to shift universities’ attention away from research “supply” towards what she calls the “demand side.” 

“We systematically inventoried community-engagement efforts at R-1 universities across the country that explicitly sought to address policy needs,” she says. “We found that almost every university had a center that connects climate or sustainability research with policymaking.” 

Then she dug down, conducting in-depth interviews with local sustainability officials who are charged with figuring out and organizing ways for communities to reduce and adjust to the effects of climate change. She asked them, “What do you actually need from universities? Are you getting it?”

What she found was striking. “These sustainability professionals overwhelmingly said they wanted these partnerships, but eight out of 10 reported unmet sustainability needs by their local universities,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “It was clear that there was often a disconnect about what universities think communities need from science, and what the communities actually say they need.”

The needs communities described require a diverse team to sort out, not a single university department. Local governments want research looking at how to communicate climate change to residents to inspire action. They want research that could help them prioritize the many tasks needed to respond to climate change, such as building green infrastructure like charging units, retrofitting buildings, transitioning to renewable energies, and engaging communities. And they would like the opportunity to just talk things out with an expert from time to time.

“We can’t solve complex problems like flooding or food insecurity by working in a silo,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “These challenges inherently need many kinds of expertise working in concert.”

A Framework for Seeding Future Collaborations

Kelinsky-Jones’s research offers an approach that universities can use toward identifying gaps that need to be addressed in their own communities and taking steps toward filling them. She has shared her methodology and findings with people in the Research University Civic Engagement Network, hoping to inspire new dialogue and deeper types of engagement. She and Levine also published their findings in the open-access journal Sustainability and Climate Change to help practitioners everywhere develop more strategic partnerships.

“We presented our research to university engagement officials and sustainability professionals,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “I had someone from NOAA reach out months afterwards about our methodology, expressing interest in applying it elsewhere.”

This approach takes time, but the potentially transformative process of relationship-building and university-community policy engagement has become her roadmap for future work.

“This type of systemic change takes significant time and intentional effort,” she says. “It’s not a quick fix.” (see also her Frank Gathering talk on this topic)

Building on the Fellowship

Since the Fellowship, Kelinsky-Jones has received a major grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to continue precisely the type of community-based research inspired by her earlier collaboration with Blacksburg’s sustainability manager.

Now a research assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Agricultural, Leadership, and Community Education and a faculty affiliate at the Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation, Kelinsky-Jones is using the grant to lead a project focused on resilient food systems in Central Appalachia. The work is rooted in participatory policymaking, where communities themselves contribute to identifying and prioritizing policy solutions. She has convened an advisory group of food-system nonprofit leaders and regional stakeholders to guide project decisions and ensure local voices are front and center.

Kelinsky-Jones is employing a methodology called “joint fact finding” that engages regional planners, local governments, and community organizations in identifying crucial local policy actions. From farmland preservation strategies and creative zoning mechanisms to incentivizing local food markets, the initiatives she explores are intended to help communities adapt swiftly and meaningfully to future disruptions.

“In my work right now, the people affected aren’t just subjects of research. They help set the agenda, shape the process, and determine what makes sense to their communities,” Kelinsky-Jones says. “If a community member knows from experience that flooding happens regularly, you need that person at the table—not just scientists studying flood models. That’s the heart of civic science: ensuring the voices of the people who understand the context best aren’t just heard but actively guide the science itself.”

Her time as a Civic Science Fellow continues to influence Kelinsky-Jones’s perspective. “I realized through my Fellowship just how critical and challenging it is to ensure that our research doesn’t simply live on shelves,” she says. “The real question is, how can science become actionable knowledge that communities and decision-makers can, and will, use?”

“The Fellowship opened entirely new questions to pursue,” she says. “It challenged my assumptions about research impact, pushing me toward questioning not just what research we do, but how and why it actually gets used in real-world communities.”

And she’s eager for potential funders and university policymakers to see how crucial co-production of knowledge is as well. “Civic science work isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential for addressing issues like climate change and resilience,” she says. “Science that neglects community knowledge will not be as useful or sufficient for our collective future.”

Looking forward, Kelinsky-Jones will continue to cultivate her vision of engaged universities partnering deeply with their communities and growing not just more resilient local food systems, but stronger bonds of trust and collaboration.

“Every new project, every new Civic Science Fellow adds another critical strand to the fabric that binds science and society,” she says. “I can’t imagine anything more needed or valuable.” 

Lia’s Civic Science Fellowship at the Agora Institute was supported by the Rita Allen Foundation.