2017 Outreach and Engagement Funded Grant Proposals

Improving Power Outage Prediction and Response through Community Partnerships

Weather is one of leading causes of power outages and these outages can result in significant economic losses. Ohio ranks 3rd nationally in significant weather related power outages. As a result, we seek to develop more accurate tools for predicting weather-related power outages though collaboration with electrical utilities. Our long-term goal is to establish an industry-university center that is focused on developing better power outage models by bringing together university researchers and industry practitioners. This planning grant will be used to build stronger collaborations with the electrical utilities that serve Ohio. This will be accomplished by hosting an industry workshop, providing students with career-relevant training and then placing these students in internships with our industry partners, and developing improved power outage models for the utility industry.

Team Lead: Steven Quiring, Department of Geography, College of Arts and Sciences

STEMCoding @ OSU

The growth of online coding tools has made it easier than ever to incorporate computer programming into introductory STEM. However, for certain subjects like physics there is little in the way of content to draw from for this level and even less research on what activities amplify student learning of scientific concepts. OSU Marion Prof. Chris Orban developed a large set of programming exercises for freshman physics classes that are being implemented in high school physics classrooms. One of the key barriers for introducing more computer programming into introductory STEM courses is that few STEM teachers are comfortable with computer programming. The proposed program will include a summer continuing education course that teachers will complete, which includes observing high school camps during summer 2017 where our computer programming content is being used. For more information about this program, please go to u.osu.edu/stemcoding.

Team Lead:

Chris Orban, Ohio State Marion

Summer Success: A Kindergarten Readiness Camp for Children from Low-Income Homes in Columbus

Ensuring that all children arrive to kindergarten ready to learn and prepared for its academic and social rigors is a critically important issue in early childhood education and policy. In reality, many children arrive to kindergarten without the requisite skills needed to succeed. Children from low-income families, facing poverty, homelessness, and associated challenges, are at greater risk for poor kindergarten readiness. The current proposal seeks implementation grant funding to address gaps identified during a pilot instantiation of "Summer Success," a kindergarten readiness camp developed through a community research partnership serving 4-year-olds in the local Weinland Park community, a predominantly low-income urban community in Columbus, Ohio. The four-week, 140-hour program is designed to systematically and explicitly develop a comprehensive set of critical skills that help children arrive to kindergarten ready to learn, including core academic skills in literacy, math, and language, social-emotional skills, motor skills, and interest in creative arts.

Team Lead:

Laura Justice, College of Education and Human Ecology

Planting Urban GEMS Youth Work in South Columbus

Planting Urban GEMS Youth Work in South Columbus will engage approximately 100 vulnerable youth to empower them in partially addressing food insecurity in their own community by growing healthy foods and contributing to community wellness/healthy eating movement. Planting Urban GEMS will establish an aeroponic food production facility to provide positive youth development opportunities for 14-22 year olds in South Columbus. This Connect and Collaborate funded project melds the innovations and youth engagement of the Urban GEMS initiatives with work of the Parsons Avenue Merchants Association to create greater potential for sustainability and larger community impacts.

Team Lead:

Deanna Wilkinson, College of Education and Human Ecology

Mapping the Food Environment in Central Ohio Connecting the Food Mapping Team and the Food Opportunity Research Collaborative Proposal

The Ohio State University is committed to addressing food insecurity in Central Ohio. Currently, two interdisciplinary teams at the university focus on understanding and engaging with communities on food insecurity: the Food Mapping Team (FMT) and The Food Opportunity Research Collaborative (FORC). To date, the work of the FMT has focused on developing a quantitative and spatial description of food insecurity while FORC focuses on qualitative depictions of the lived experience of those who are food insecure. The primary purpose of bringing these teams together is to integrate and expand their individual work and to provide a holistic description of food insecurity in Central Ohio, fill a gap in the current food insecurity work/literature, and engage communities.

Another purpose is to enable these two teams to create a shared theoretical framework and agenda, which will improve the likelihood of securing additional extramural funding. The teams plan to pursue a Geographic and Spatial Sciences NSF grant. Utilizing Community-Based Participatory Research methods, both the FMT and FORC incorporate the community in the research and engagement process. This planning grant allows the teams to deepen existing community partnerships and expand into new communities throughout Central Ohio. Through additional partnerships with Columbus Public Health and Celebrate One, an initiative targeting infant mortality in Central Ohio, another aim of this new collaboration is to develop methods in which data generated from this work can inform food and health policies at the local, state and federal levels.

Team Leads:

Glennon Sweeney, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity
Michelle Kaiser, College of Social Work

Building Community Resilience through a Culturally Responsive Leadership Development Program: A Community-Based Participatory Research Project

The proposed culturally responsive bilingual leadership project uses community-based participatory approach to research. The program, distinct in recognizing and utilizing community assets, will focus on the leadership development of Bhutanese Nepali refugee women in Central Ohio as a core component to address mental well-being and building community resilience among the refugee population. Participants will attend two-hour training sessions every two weeks for four to six months, focused on five key areas: (1) political literacy, (2) economic/financial literacy, (3) legal literacy, (4) health literacy, and (5) school system literacy. This empowering project will be implemented in two cycles and provides an opportunity for refugee women to build their leadership skills so that the participants can be active citizens within and outside of their communities.

Team Leads:

Binaya Subedi, College of Education and Human Ecology
Arati Maleku, College of Social Work

Engage and Innovate

There is an opportunity for the Materials Innovation Lab to serve both industry partners and undergraduate students by providing real-world, experiential, community-engaged learning through the application of innovation theory to problems and challenges posed by industry. Our goal is to establish an Engage and Innovate program to enable a community-engaged environment benefiting students and OSU and industry partners in an impactful and sustainable manner while advancing the scholarly goals of the university. Our approach is to leverage learning, success, and momentum from initial innovation experiments to expand scope and reach. These experiences will form the basis for creation of a portfolio of offerings that provide real-world, experiential learning through externships and curriculum development for our students while generating student touch-points and valuable outputs for our partner's product development programs.

We currently have many of the pieces in place to accomplish this objective in our Innovation Lab, but need to expand our approach to better integrate with our OSU partners, develop and formalize our process, and improve efficiency and effectiveness of the program. The outcomes and impacts will provide students with real-world, experiential learning though externships, qualified industry contacts, potential industry-sponsored internships, and experience in interdisciplinary collaborations and innovation methods. Industry partners will gain better access to the university, undergraduates, and high-quality outcomes enabling long-term, mutually-beneficial relationships with a trusted partner to develop innovation talent as an extension of their R&D organization.

Team Lead: Jay Sayre, Institute of Materials Research

Ohio State Partners:

Institute of Materials Research
Fisher College of Business, Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
College of Engineering, Department of Engineering Education
College of Arts and Sciences
College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences

External Partners:

Erdos Institute
Worthington Industries
FORJAK Industrial
Battelle
Select Sires
Procter & Gamble
Black and Decker
Entrotech
NiSource
SunEdison

Assessment of Potential Energy Demand Management Strategies in Agriculture

High demand charges can dramatically increase the electricity prices for many commercial and industrial electric consumers. While the impact of demand charges on electric bills is significant, many electric consumers are uninformed of these costs, how their demand charges are calculated, and the impact of their usage patterns. The overriding goal of this project is to assess how electric peak demand affects agricultural facilities and, in turn, the manner by which farmers can implement energy management plans, production strategies and make investments in equipment to minimize cost associated with demand charges, fostering long-term positive and sustainable benefits for their operations. Until we have a record of when individual motors are running throughout the course of a year, we cannot fully understand the situation or effectively explore solutions with the agricultural sector. We will leverage university and private farms to facilitate research that addresses current knowledge gaps related to electricity usage in agriculture.

Team Lead:

Eric Romich, OSU Extension (Wyandot County)

Ohio State Partners:

OSU Extension
OSU Western Agricultural Research Center
OARDC
College of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

External Partners:

Energy SOS

Reaching Urban School Settings with Teaching and Learning (RUSS) Gardens

Food and Agriculture as a Systems Intervention in Rust Belt Communities is an ambitious new collaborative project that seeks to leverage a local sustainable food system (including urban and nearby rural agricultural diversification) as a full-system approach to addressing the systemic crises of deindustrialization in Mansfield, Ohio. It aligns community needs and ambitions directly with key Ohio State Discovery Theme goals within the Food and Agricultural Transformation and Sustainable and Resilient Economy themes. This programs long-term goal is to create functioning, productive RUSS Garden classrooms in all of the Mansfield City Schools and across Richland County, as sites of cross-curricular learning, near-peer education, health and wellness practices, and small plot, high yield production that will eventually provide fresh produce to school meals.

Team Lead:

Kip Curtis, Department of Environmental History, Ohio State Mansfield

Ohio State Partners:

OSU Extension
OARDC
Department of Education, Teaching and Learning, Ohio State Mansfield
Department of Development and Community Relations, Ohio State Mansfield
Department of English, Ohio State Mansfield
College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, School of Environment and Natural Resources
The Ohio State Math Literacy Initiative
The Initiative for Food and AgriCultural Transformation (InFACT)

External Partners:

North End Community Improvement Collaborative
Mansfield City Schools

Project OPIATE: Opiate Prevention Initiative Action Through Education

The opiate problem in the nation has grown immensely, and Lake County, Ohio, is no different. In 2016, the number of opioid-related overdoses more than doubled from the year before. The causes of the epidemic of both opioid-related deaths and misuse span the social ecological model, and therefore interventions need to address the individual, the family and social networks, healthcare and paramedical care, and policies and systems. This project will implement strategies that address key components of the social ecological model focusing on education and awareness in teens of the risk of opioid use. We will recruit youth from 4-H in Lake County and from two Lake County school districts to participate in the Lead & Seed training program, focusing on the SAMHSA Strategic Prevention Framework.

These youth and adult leaders will then be trained in to present the Youth-to-Youth pHARMING Effects presentation to their school-aged peers and parents. Finally, the youth and adult leaders will use Generation Rx tools to continue brief, tailored messages over the course of the semester. The value of this approach comes through alignment of evidence-based, youth development programming with promising tools already in use in the state to test the impact of putting the pieces together. We will evaluate our work and plan for both local sustainability and state dissemination.

Team Lead:

Andrew Wapner, College of Public Health

Ohio State Partners:

College of Public Health
OSU Extension (4H Youth Development)

External Partners:

Lake Co. General Health District
Lake County Extension Office
Lake Co. Educational Service Center
Mentor Schools
Willoughby-Eastlake City Schools
Lake County ADAMHS Board
Crossroads

Designing Together: Diversifying Participation in Engineering Education with High-Need Urban Schools

This proposal for a Connect & Collaborate implementation grant seeks bridge funding to support innovations emerging from a two-year, partnership-based research study focused on diversifying participation in engineering. The original study received funding by grants from Battelle and The Ohio State University Office of Outreach and Engagement. This proposed project involves adapting two different middle school engineering curricula (one arts-infused and one conventional), which the OSU team has piloted in Hilltonia Middle School (a Columbus City Schools [CCS] district identified high-need school). Currently, we are implementing the two curricula as weekly extracurricular activities for 6th grade students.

Team Lead:

Deborah Grzybowski, Department of Engineering Education, College of Engineering

Ohio State Partners:

College of Engineering, Department of Engineering Education
College of Engineering, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
College of Engineering, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
College of Education and Human Ecology, Diversity, Inclusion and Community Outreach

External Partners:

Columbus City Schools
Beta by Design
Ohio Department of Education