Community Engagement and Empowerment (CEE) Committee

The CEE Graduate Student Peer Mentoring program connects fellow graduate students together to navigate through academics, professional development, and personal development. The relationships between mentors and mentees are the core of the program, and are scaffolded by programming and events hosted by the CEE Community & Wellness Coordinator and the Committee. There are four events per academic year, including a kick-off, a career panel featuring academic and non-academic trajectories, a well-being and work/life balance-focused event, and a year-end celebration.

CEE recognizes the historical role our disciplines have played in manifesting social biases in the built environment. We feel that it is essential to educate our students in the historical intersections of CEE and people-first engineering solutions. To this end, we are transforming our undergraduate programs at the University of Michigan, and generating tools to advance CEE education globally. 

In collaboration with the Center for Socially Engaged Design (C-SED), the Community Engagement and Empowerment (CEE) Committee is generating case studies that illustrate the society-related implications of specific civil or environmental engineering projects. Three CEE Ph.D. students have been working under the guidance of Dr. Sara Hoffman, C-SED’s DEI Curriculum Development Manager, to research case studies and generate classroom materials, including pre-reading assignments, class facilitation plans, active learning activities, and student reflection prompts. Case studies will be integrated into a transportation course (civil), a water treatment and reuse course (environmental), and an air quality course (environmental). To date, the transportation case study is complete and has debuted in an ENGIN 100 section.

Faculty in civil and environmental engineering programs are motivated to integrate people-first engineering pricnciples into their teaching. In response, the Committee has created a public-facing database of examples of CEE projects or policies that show unintended consequences, disparate stakeholder outcomes, or inequities in the planning or implementation. Known as the DEItabase, it provides a starting point for faculty in CEE disciplines at UM and beyond who would like to broach these topics in their classrooms. Cases are tagged by subject area to enable efficient searching for specific course topics. Importantly, others can contribute and grow the resource for the community. These endeavors are poised to drive meaningful change in CEE education, making a lasting impact not only at the University of Michigan but also within the broader engineering community.

The CEE community is committed to fostering open and respectful dialogue, and we believe that to achieve this, it is necessary to coalesce around shared values and norms of behavior. Both the College of Engineering and the University of Michigan have values statements that are well-aligned with CEE values. The challenge the Committee is undertaking is linking those values to specific behaviors that exemplify how the values should manifest in the execution of CEE’s academic mission. A statement of norms will be collaboratively developed to reflect how our community currently exhibits our values, as well as aspirational behaviors that our community members wish to further embrace and make the norm.

The Committee values the contributions of identity- and interest-based student organizations that work toward inclusion on campus. In alignment with this value, we have committed to support and partner with these organizations. We have liaisons among our committee members to NSBE, SHPE, MANRRS, SWE, oSTEM, and GoSTEM. Our liaisons work with the org leadership to determine how to assist them in their mission; we are careful to follow their lead and avoid issuing instructions.

A CEE graduate student parent reached out to the Community Engagement and Empowerment (CEE) Committee for help finding community and resources for parents on campus. The CEE Community & Wellness Coordinator assembled a resources page to streamline the search for support with childcare, medical care, and financial support for our student parents. In addition, we are creating a listserv open to all CEE parents (staff, faculty, students, postdocs) as an informal space to share information about parenting in Ann Arbor.

In alignment with our commitment to open dialogue, the CEE Community & Wellness Coordinator, in collaboration with the Committee, has instituted thoughtful communication about and celebrations of heritage and identity-based observances such as Black History Month, Pride Month, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, etc. These range from department communications to events open to the whole engineering community. Careful consideration goes into each celebration to ensure that it is inclusive of members within and outside of the heritage or identity, it increases attendees’ cultural competency, and it is respectful of the celebrations history and origins.