Stories

Civic Science Fellow Mulika Musyimi helps San Francisco communities document their own climate stories

Deep beneath San Francisco’s streets, 16 high school students follow Mulika Musyimi through dark tunnels to see the storm water management system. A city engineer explains how teams monitor water flow during storms, maintain the pumps that prevent flooding, and coordinate with treatment facilities. 

The students catch glimpses of massive pipes and junction boxes with their smartphone flashlights while the engineer describes the technicians, inspectors, and environmental specialists who keep this hidden infrastructure running. It dawns on the students that these are good jobs that require technical training but not necessarily four-year degrees—jobs that could be theirs one day.

For Musyimi, the 2024 Civic Science Fellow at the Exploratorium, this moment captures everything his project aims to achieve. Five students from the San Francisco Shoreline Leadership Academy had chosen to participate in his fellowship project, and he’d been guiding them to see their city through new eyes—as resident documentarians of climate vulnerability and community assets. Making the invisible visible revealed not just the literal infrastructure hidden beneath the city, but the career possibilities, environmental challenges, and community knowledge that often go unseen by both scientific institutions and the communities they serve.

“It almost felt like an underworld,” Musyimi says of the tunnel tour. “It opened up this portal of curiosity. But it also showed how this critical infrastructure could be catastrophic if destroyed by an earthquake or storm surge. These are public health and climate issues on so many levels.”

The tunnels were one piece of a carefully structured program. Every Wednesday for ten weeks, the students gathered at different sites across San Francisco. They explored Recology, the 47-acre recycling facility that processes the city’s waste and hosts a sculpture garden made from reclaimed materials. They met with landscape architects who’ve designed shoreline parks, planning officials from the Port of San Francisco, and ecologists studying bay wetlands. Each site visit paired hands-on exploration with expert knowledge, building toward the students’ final presentations.

Through it all, each student carried a disposable camera, part of Musyimi’s adaptation of a participatory research method known as “photovoice” that puts the tools of documentation directly in community members’ hands. The students from five different San Francisco neighborhoods photographed their communities through a specific lens: What do you treasure that sea level rise might threaten? What assets need protecting? What changes are already visible?

“There’s a temptation to just elevate what’s wrong, the deficits in communities,” Musyimi says. “But the beauty is also recognizing its varied assets. What do you actually enjoy about your community that you’d be concerned about losing?”

Documenting hope and change

Musyimi’s path to the Exploratorium began along Kenya’s coast, where he grew up among cooks, farmers, hotel workers, and tailors. His talent for bridging different worlds emerged early. As an undergraduate at San Diego State University, he worked as a Kiswahili interpreter for the International Rescue Committee, helping Sub-Saharan African families settle into California culture.

“That work taught me to recognize areas of unintended confusion or miscommunication,” he says. To truly hear their fears and concerns, “you have to meet people where they are and really train your listening skills.”

After earning a master of public health degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, where he was also a Human Rights Center Fellow at Berkeley Law, Musyimi stepped into the Exploratorium role and found himself translating again. This time, it’s between scientific institutions and the communities most affected by climate change. The Civic Science Fellowship offered a chance to formalize what he’d been doing all along: ensuring science serves the people who need it most.

His first day in August 2024 coincided with the Bay Adapt Summit, immediately immersing him in the region’s climate planning community. The Exploratorium was hosting the event, and suddenly Musyimi found himself surrounded by planners, scientists, and officials all working on sea level rise adaptation. It was a powerful beginning, but it also revealed how much of this work happens in professional spaces, among people already engaged with the issues.

Soon, the disconnect became even clearer. At a community event known as the East Oakland Futures Fest, Musyimi met Black families who’d never heard of the internationally recognized institution where he was working. “Kids didn’t even know what the Exploratorium was,” Musyimi says, still pained by the discovery. Living just across the bay from one of the nation’s premier science museums, these communities had no idea it existed.

This isn’t unique to the Exploratorium: Science museums nationwide struggle to reach beyond their traditional audiences. But for Musyimi, working on climate adaptation in the Bay Area, the gap felt particularly urgent. How can institutions engage communities in climate resilience conversations and solution building if those communities don’t even know these resources and spaces exist, let alone how to access them?

Musyimi has been working to take science beyond the museum walls, looking for outreach opportunities like the Futures Fest event. His team also sets up biweekly prototype exhibits on the museum’s front plaza, including one displaying the photovoice documentation from the Leadership Academy students. “We’re trying to put it out there, to see what types of engagement, what types of questions people have,” Musyimi says. 

The pop-up exhibit captured what these young San Franciscans treasure and what they fear losing, becoming a bridge between institution and community. Photos showed murals in Chinatown, tall buildings built on landfill in Mission Bay, puddles of water lingering in a Safeway parking lot in the Marina district, days after the rain.

Rising to the challenge

But this kind of outreach faces structural challenges. Photos taken over 10 weeks during winter and spring only capture part of the story. A full picture requires sustained engagement across seasons, across communities, across time—the kind of continuity that temporary fellowships struggle to provide.“Building trust takes time,” Musyimi says. “It also requires thoughtful structure to be enacted.”

Eighteen months sounds substantial, but it’s barely enough to build sustainable relationships and test a model more than once without revising or paring down expectations, he says. “It takes time to get a grasp of the culture within a host organization.”

Maintaining that trust is another challenge. When fellows move on, their relationships and institutional knowledge often goes with them. “Once I leave, there will be a gap,” Musyimi says. “I don’t want to perpetuate patterns that feel extractive or tokenizing. Sustained community building is both long work and deep work.”

The challenges intensified after the November 2024 election, which reshaped the landscape for environmental and climate work. “For me, one of the ways I’ve coped is really trying to turn back the mirror to myself, this work,” Musyimi says. “We all have blind spots. The discipline also has blind spots. Really interrogating what could we have potentially done to mitigate such an outcome.”

He found support through the Civic Science Fellows network, which was particularly valuable when he was still finding his footing. “The sense of community has been crucial,” he says. “Having like-minded people to navigate a lot of different changes with, and at a basic level, just supporting each other as human beings.”

This peer support has become even more critical as Fellows help each other navigate the changing political landscape. Some of the work, such as community-based participatory research and environmental justice initiatives, may need to be “folded into other work” in the current climate, Musyimi says. “If we want it to survive, it might need to reemerge when things are safer.”

In the meantime, Musyimi continues to prototype exhibits with the Exploratorium’s Climate and Landscapes team, testing different formats and documenting the photovoice pilot program, analyzing what worked, what didn’t, and how the model could scale beyond five students to reach broader communities.

Reflecting on the work of civic science, he says it requires bringing all of himself to the task. “As someone who shows up as a migrant, as someone who is Black, but also someone who is queer, it makes me think about wanting many more experiences to be represented,” Musyimi says. “In doing so, we all make the science enterprise better.”