Empowering Students with Geospatial Tools to Help Reduce Community Inequities

Providing K–12 students with equitable access to math and science learning is essential for young people to develop a proficiency in STEM. Statistically, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) students face barriers to excelling in math and science as early as kindergarten due to a variety of factors. A child’s socioeconomic status, family support, and a school’s economic status, and other factors can influence how a student responds academically.

The nonprofit organization trubel&co was launched to provide opportunities for BIPOC students through the use of geospatial tools to expand STEM education and support the next generation of high school students. trubel&co integrates STEM education with civic innovation to create a pipeline of changemakers committed to improving their community using data analytics, responsible technology, and inclusive design. The organization’s goal is to accelerate young innovators’ drives to help address their communities’ most complex challenges through STEM and design coursework, service learning, and professional development workshops. trubel&co’s mission also prioritizes the technical fluency of each student by supplying student cohorts with guidance and geospatial resources.

trubel&co’s team of mentors empowers students to design geospatial tools for social change to fix the problems they care about most. Students are paired with a peer and learn how to take a geographic approach to understanding issues like access to education in Black and brown communities, political reform in rural areas, health equity, food security, climate change, and other pressing challenges. Each student is introduced to geographic information system (GIS) technology with the goal of using qualitative and quantitative insights from the research they conduct.

trubel&co’s team of mentors empowers students to design geospatial tools for social change to fix the problems they care about most. Students are paired with a peer and learn how to take a geographic approach to understanding issues like access to education in Black and brown communities, political reform in rural areas, health equity, food security, climate change, and other pressing challenges. Each student is introduced to geographic information system (GIS) technology with the goal of using qualitative and quantitative insights from the research they conduct.

To begin analyzing the causes and conditions of community challenges, students use GIS to

• Organize and clean collections of data.
• Create dashboards and web applications to visualize complex data.
• Perform critical data analysis that validates lived experiences.
• Brainstorm practical solutions to resolve the challenge they are researching.

“We push our students to think through experiences that they're approximate to,” said Nick Okafor, Founder and Executive Director, trubel&co. “We help them to think about what their relations are to different communities and how their perspective can be rooted in power. We really appreciate their insights as 16-year-olds to be able to think challenges as a local citizen and how they can use that to really ground, not only their exploration of STEM education, but their journey into solutions and innovation.”

Each student is provided with eight weeks of instructional material to support self-guided learning to develop insights to solve problems based on the geography of the communities they are part of. To ensure that students can thrive with interactive learning, trubel&co adapts the curriculum to meet the specific needs of each cohort. This is done by understanding the demographics and cultural elements of the students’ communities to help them thrive. Through collaborative learning, each student creates a GIS application for a hypothetical client, such as an elected official or community decision-maker, to whom they would present their solution. For example, two students in the 2023 Southwest Florida cohort used ArcGIS Dashboards to create an interactive Florida Farms at Risk of Sea Level Rise Dashboard that evaluates land depletion across the US and analyzes overlaps with sea level rise in Southwest Florida. Their research highlighted that hundreds of farms were at risk in the region and could become nonarable causing devastating impacts to local agricultural communities. To address this, they advocated for sustainability and adaptation practices such as micro-irrigation or agroforestry.

Inspired by lived experiences, another example of a local challenge students researched is the displacement of people because of climate change. Students identified this problem as a high-priority challenge and created an ArcGIS StoryMap to address the following questions for pseudo clients, including environmental scientists and climatologists, GIS specialists, data analysts, and community engagement specialists:

• What demographics are most affected by droughts?
• What are the effects of sea level rise on Florida residents?
• How can GIS mapping be used to show climate gentrification?

By analyzing the impacts of climate change through a geographic lens, the students found connections between redlining and gentrification for vulnerable and historically marginalized populations.

“I learned how to use GIS through the lens of both social impacts and business strategies,” said Okafor. “And so, we strive to provide that to our students and hope communities see the potential of GIS to unlock innovation, unlock insights, and to be grounded in community learning.”

Local educational institutions and education champions such as The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and NewSchools Venture Fund, help trubel&co expand its geographic influence. A long-term goal is to help students cultivate geospatial thinking across more communities each year. The opportunity for students to think spatially about community challenges has motivated them to develop a deep interest in using research and GIS skills to help the communities they call home. The GIS and STEM education trubel&co provides has begun to bridge the gap for marginalized communities and continues to help students contextualize what liberation means for their communities.