Holyoke Community Energy Project
The first EPiC Award of 2025 goes to the Holyoke Community Energy Project, a research collaboration co-designing clean energy solutions that address residents' energy needs, center the community's voice, and work to repair a legacy of environmental injustice in Holyoke, Massachusetts. HCEP engages Holyoke residents through workshops on home energy use, barriers to and interest in energy alternatives, and both community solutions and city-level planning. Their equitable collaboration model, described as ’participatory convergence,’ brings together “interdisciplinary specialists from UMass and community partners to produce collaborative research that is rigorous, relevant, and has reach beyond academia.” Within UMass, the Community Energy Lab fosters inclusive planning, shared authorship and mentoring across student and faculty members. This ethic extends to collaboration with community partners, where the Spring 2022 convening of a Community Advisory Board integrated diverse perspectives on research ethics, shared goals, and communication. HCEP research has generated academic publications, conference presentations, media engagement, and policy influence with Holyoke city leadership, including the mayor. A core commitment of their work is resource-sharing with community partners, ensuring support for equitable participation for any community member interested in participating through participant compensation and funds for meals, transportation, and childcare.
Please join us in celebrating all the collaborators in the Holyoke Community Energy Project, led by Drs. Krista Harper, and Nicholas Caverly from the Department of Anthropology, Camille Barchers from Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Erin Baker in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Joseph Krupczynski from Civic Engagement and Service Learning, and Raphael Arku from Environmental Health Sciences (not shown in image).
On Distant Keys
The second UMass ADVANCE EPiC Award goes to On Distant Keys. On Distant Keys is described as “an ever-evolving collective of artists, writers, and scientists collaborating to envision speculative futures in response to climate change.” Though they now have over 40 participants, the core team began with several faculty members across disciplines through an architecture seed grant and a UMass ADVANCE mutual mentoring grant. Their initial equitable practices were more “informal and organic, emphasizing mutual respect, shared agency, and the acknowledgment of diverse expertise.” Their equity and inclusion practices became more defined during their 2023-2024 exhibitions, “The Futuring Lab” and “Y3K: On Distant Keys.” Their programming, themed around the wisdom of “The Sages,” “The Tricksters,” “crip time” and “The Fates” was planned with careful attention to diverse representation and equitable recognition. The collective is committed to shared authorship, participatory planning, rotating facilitation, and other equitable practices. These collaborative practices have generated a catalog, a website, and a brief documentary, as they work to continue “to foster a safe and encouraging environment, one that cultivates groundbreaking interdisciplinary insights and creative outcomes.”
On Distant Keys is led by Professors Sandy Litchfield and Ray Kinoshita Mann of the Department of Architecture, Edie Meidav, Malcolm Sen and Katherine O’Callaghan of the English Department, Madeleine Charney of the UMass Libraries, and Julie Brigham-Grette and Robert DeConto in both the department of Earth, Geographic and Climate Sciences and the School of Earth and Sustainability. Please join us celebrating the equitable collaboration practices they are developing and modeling for our campus.
Self-nominations for the 2025-2026 Equitable Practices in Collaboration Awards will open in the fall. Watch this space for the chance to shine a light on inspiring and transformative collaboration practices.