In 2020, the Center for Scientific Collaboration and Community Engagement (CSCCE) launched an 8-week online training course for individuals who support collaborations and communities of practice in STEM (a group we collectively refer to as community managers). It was designed to offer actionable strategies, core frameworks, and a shared vocabulary to professionals in a range of institutional settings. 

The course, Scientific Community Engagement Fundamentals (CEF), involves two 90-minute live sessions per week, with some independent study in between. CEF was created to meet the needs of individuals working in an emerging profession for which they had little prior training and in which they might experience isolation as the only person in their organization in a similar role. 

Our goals, therefore, were to equip learners with tools they could immediately apply to their day-to-day work, offer clarity on the importance of their roles as less visible leaders, and hold space for them to form new professional connections with others in their cohort (each intake of the course is limited to 20-25). 

At the end of 2023, after training almost 300 individuals from more than 150 organizations, we conducted a medium-term evaluation of the impact of the course to see if we were meeting these goals. Thanks to funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, we designed a survey that asked about the impact of CEF at three levels: the individual learner, their organization or community, and the STEM ecosystem as a whole. 

In brief, we found that: 

• 95% of respondents have applied multiple CEF concepts, frameworks, and activities in their roles to improve overall community strategy (68.6%), improve existing content and/or programming (67.4%), develop new content and/or programming (64%), and build alignment with team members (55.8%) – among other things.
• On an individual level, the vast majority of respondents reported positive socioemotional outcomes such as increased confidence (87%) and connection to peers (90%).
• On a community / organizational level, 74% of respondents reported at least one improvement in member participation within their communities, and 51% reported multiple improvements – as described by deeper engagement across the modes of CSCCE’s Community Participation Model. An even greater percentage (79.1%) selected multiple additional improvements beyond member engagement, such as such as the development of scaffolding and community engagement strategy.
• On an ecosystem-level, 38% of respondents reported multiple improvements in their organizations’ and communities’ relationship to the broader STEM ecosystem, such as improved communication with external stakeholders or communities, greater clarity about their community’s place within the broader STEM ecosystem, and new collaborations with external organizations or communities.

In this presentation, we will expand on these findings, with a particular focus on how training individuals supports increased engagement in STEM communities and collaboration across a range of settings (academia, professional associations, and more). We will also touch on some of the ways in which the course is impacting the broader ecosystem, and how we anticipate this to continue for years to come.