More than 30 SEAS faculty, staff and students attended a workshop led by White House Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer Madeline Reeves and U-M Ford School Professor Barry Rabe.

For those looking to have an impact on policy, clear and concise writing is essential, said Madeline Reeves during a workshop with University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS) researchers on April 26. Reeves is the Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and came to campus to co-lead a workshop on “Policy Engagement Training for Sustainability Scientists.” She was joined by Barry Rabe, a professor in the U-M Ford School of Public Policy, who shared his experience and advice from four decades of environmental policy work.

More than 30 faculty, staff and students attended the workshop, hosted by SEAS’ Center for Sustainable Systems (CSS). They learned about different avenues to engage in policy, from writing memos and op-eds to giving testimony to policymakers or agencies and more. Rabe shared advice about how to leverage what he called U-M’s “intellectual playground” with its tremendous diversity of expertise.

Reeves, an alumna of the U-M Ross School of Business, recommended that researchers develop relationships with political staffers and with the government agencies that implement policy. She also discussed how to embed justice and equity considerations—a key value at SEAS—into research and advocacy, and showed attendees how to use the administration’s Justice40 Initiative screening tool.

The workshop was supported by a grant from the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Science for Public Good Fund to SEAS PhD students Chandler Sachs and Martha Christino, who organized the event. Sachs and Christino worked in policy research before coming to U-M for graduate school, so when they heard that CSS was looking to deepen its policy engagement, they were eager to participate. “Research without impact is meaningless. Knowing which national and local policy levers to press on is one way we, as sustainability scientists, can have an outsized impact on the world around us,” said Christino.

The workshop concluded with groups of researchers drafting policy memos and developing plans to keep working on and eventually publish them—even if they have to follow Rabe and Reeves’ advice to wait for the “right moment.” 

Joshua Newell, CSS co-director, reflected: “SEAS and CSS produce research that is ripe with solutions to accelerate climate action and sustainability, and policy is one of the key levers to drive it. Thanks to this workshop, we now have concrete tools, ideas and momentum to help us translate our research into policy action.”