COMMUNITY BUILDING FOR RESILIENCE AMONG EARLY-CAREER GEOSCIENCE LEADERS

For students from underrepresented (UR) groups currently enrolled in geoscience programs, persisting and succeeding in obtaining their degrees requires navigating spaces that were built to exclude them. The same applies to early-career UR scholars seeking employment, tenure, and promotion. Successfully overcoming the barriers to success requires resilience, or the ability to absorb pressure rather than be defeated by it (Branche 2014). Here we present on several initiatives we have led which span a fully in-person to fully-virtual continuum to build individual and community resilience among early-career geoscience leaders. First, the BRiDGE Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst started by the authors as a grassroots effort to bring more early-career speakers of color as seminar speakers to their campus, and in two years the program has grown to encompass more than a dozen departments and programs, resulted in a widely-shared publication (Keisling, Bryant & others 2020), and received a university award for "Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion." Another outcome of BRiDGE was a self-constructed community that crossed departmental boundaries to combat the isolation experienced by UR graduate students. Second, the LGBTQ+ affinity group within the American Geophysical Union (AGU), which started as an informal whisper network, was elevated to an official networking group within AGU through partnership with other national organizations, community advocacy, and online organizing. Third, in response to the unique challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and increased institutional pressure on early-career geoscience JEDI leaders in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, we started a fully-virtual support group for our colleagues. All of these examples illustrate the importance of community building for cultivating resilience among the next generation of geoscience leaders. In this presentation, the authors highlight best practices for early-career researchers engaged in community building for resilience, and for the established colleagues and mentors looking to support them. We also discuss known obstacles to, and successful strategies for, building initiatives that advance JEDI in geoscience.