Equity in Coastal Resilience: A Framework for University Engagement in Community-Based Projects

Abstract

As communities face intensifying climate hazards, it is vital to strengthen resilience in ways that explicitly prioritize social equity. This study examines how higher education institutions can better support government, nonprofit, and community partners in advancing equity-centered coastal resilience in the U.S. Utilizing a qualitative research design, we analyze discussions among researchers and practitioners during a three-day workshop. We present a framework derived from a thematic analysis of breakout group transcripts from a three-day national virtual workshop involving 113 researchers and practitioners. The analysis identified four core themes: the necessity of aligning projects with community-defined priorities; the foundational role of long-term trust and relationship-building; the requirement for flexible funding to support sustained engagement; and the value of interdisciplinary, multifunctional teams. Findings indicate that while engaged and applied research can significantly advance equitable outcomes, academic researchers face systemic barriers, including rigid tenure timelines and insufficient institutional infrastructure. Consequently, we offer a three-pronged framework centered on early and continuous engagement, robust collaboration with extension services, and supportive university infrastructure. This framework provides practical guidance for institutions to transition from traditional ‘town and gown’ models toward meaningful, community-embedded, and equity-driven coastal resilience partnerships.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, the increasing frequency and severity of disasters have posed unprecedented challenges to U.S. communities. As shown in Figure 1, coastal communities are vulnerable to a range of hazards that vary in their impacts, ranging from high-magnitude, low-frequency events to high-frequency or chronic hazards such as severe storms and flooding. Figure 1 shows the annual losses for the different hazards across the country [1].

Hurricane Katrina in 2005 marked a pivotal shift in disaster management, introducing community resilience as a key concept [2,3,4]. Resilience is a multifaceted, interconnected network of systems encompassing socioeconomic, ecological, and built environments [5,6,7]. For coastal communities, resilience involves the capacity to adapt to or recover from stressors such as coastal hazards that can disrupt all facets of society and slow-creeping sea level rise that challenges community viability. However, resilience efforts often face conflicting power dynamics and unequal impacts, underscoring the need to prioritize equity.

Equity in resilience planning is commonly understood through three interrelated dimensions: distributional equity (fair allocation of benefits and burdens), procedural equity (inclusive decision-making), and recognitional equity (acknowledging diverse identities and historical contexts) [8,9]. These dimensions of equity underscore the importance of research and practice that meaningfully engage communities and ensure that resilience strategies reflect diverse needs, priorities, and lived realities. Approaches such as The Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT) operationalize these dimensions to ensure that vulnerable populations are prioritized and that tradeoffs are considered [9].

Equitable coastal resilience must be integrated into broader sustainability and transdisciplinary research. Sustainability scholarship emphasizes that adaptation and resilience strategies should avoid reinforcing historical injustices and ensure that benefits are shared across populations [10,11,12], while transdisciplinary approaches bring together academic experts, practitioners, and community members to collaboratively define problems and co-produce actionable solutions [8,13,14].

University faculty and researchers seek to better engage with communities to enhance the value, applicability, and utility of research through engaged and applied work, including the implementation of on-the-ground projects. At the same time, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, funders, businesses, community organizations, and grassroots collectives are seeking universities to provide resources and expertise to address equity concerns, including those inherent in community resilience. This study asks: How can higher education institutions support government, nonprofit, business, and community partners in research and practice that advance equity and community resilience in the U.S.? Drawing on a three-day national workshop that brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss key equity issues in coastal resilience, we answer this question and propose a framework to guide university engagement.

1.1. Community Resilience, Planning, and Equity

Community resilience provides an opportunity for community members, through organizations or as individuals, to participate in planning efforts that enable open participation and integrate new forms of knowledge production from diverse sources [15,16]. Planning informed by hazard risk assessment provides opportunities to learn from community members’ lived experiences and to better operationalize and communicate planning efforts ahead of the next hazard event [17]. For example, living in areas repeatedly damaged by tropical storms imposes disproportionate burdens on already overburdened populations [18]. Recurrent flooding undermines property values in the impacted areas, disproportionately affecting low-income populations and threatening a community’s overall economic stability [19]. Furthermore, existing resilience planning measures often assume that communities will learn from past experiences and plan for and adapt to future hazard events. However, those assumptions may further tax populations within already burdened communities [20]. As such, resilience strongly connects with equity, justice, and inclusivity [21].

Resilience is both an outcome and a process [22,23]. As an outcome, resilience can be inequitable and introduce disparities in the distribution of resilience benefits, where some groups within a community experience greater resilience than others. As a process, resilience must recognize that different groups are affected by hazards in different ways and that all those affected by decisions should be included in the decision-making process.

Engagement with the community and stakeholders is an essential component of resilience planning and can help address equity concerns. Engaging rural communities to improve resilience through faith-based organizations as trusted social organizations was found to yield “major benefits including a greater understanding of capacities and limitations in addressing environmental challenges, increased trust and social networks, expanded engagement with a greater diversity of stakeholders, increased opportunities for new conversations, new pathways toward intervention, and stakeholder empowerment” [24] (p. 37). Hamin et al. [25] stated that “to help broaden the suite of solutions being considered by communities, and to make those solutions more holistic and inclusive, communities must consider a wider range of objectives when discussing alternative solutions,” including equity-related factors (p. 16). This broader emphasis echoes the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) planning considerations for emergency managers that involve the whole community, including faith-based and community organizations, which allows for the identification of “potential areas for strengthening existing engagement strategies and begin to create new partnerships with local organizations, particularly those in racially, ethnically, economically, and religiously diverse communities” [26].

As communities continue to adapt to a changing climate, so does the need to refine approaches for addressing equity in community resilience. Communities have identified specific equity and resilience concerns but may require additional capacity and resources to address them. Universities continue to seek ways to support activities that address the needs of communities in which they are located and beyond. Researchers and practitioners must collaborate to advance equitable resilience.

1.2. University Engagement with Communities

Universities provide spaces for learning and engagement for students and the communities they serve. Faculty at universities are typically focused on three main components—teaching, research, and service—that can extend to the community. A series of six reports, developed from 1996 to 2000 by the Kellogg Commission on the Future of State and Land-grant Universities, emphasized the need to “energize and enhance partnerships with the public served by the university” [27] (p. 1). The 1999 report on the engaged institution explicitly called for educational institutions to go beyond traditional community relationships where knowledge is transferred to key community stakeholders and instead build long-lasting relationships that serve everyone involved. Among the primary goals of becoming an engaged institution were to provide students with opportunities to conduct research and engage in applied work and to place the focus on the community’s priorities. The latter is often overlooked during the development and implementation of community-engaged and applied projects [28].

The early 2000s saw a paradigm shift away from the long-held town and gown mentality (i.e., people in the town of the school versus academics within the school) to one where governance models introduced community stakeholders as equal partners who brought their individual experiences and expertise to the projects they participated in [29]. Introducing service-learning into the pedagogy enabled students to participate in community-based initiatives while contributing directly to coursework. Other university initiatives, such as extension programs that engage community members and groups and train them in various topics, enable them to produce knowledge. While larger initiatives, such as institution-led community partnerships, may serve as intermediaries between the university and the communities they serve, questions remain about their focus on innovation and progress [29]. Each of these initiatives, however, comes with critical factors such as the availability of resources, constant and meaningful communication, and performance measurement [29,30].

Recent efforts have focused on how universities engage with communities and on strengthening partnerships between universities and community groups to address resilience issues. Hawaii, for example, has long been a site for researchers seeking to better understand the native peoples who live there and the natural resources on each island. In 2014, the Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo, a nonprofit community-based advisory group, along with the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program, convened a committee to examine how research entities and community groups could develop relationships that foster stronger connections to equity and productivity [31]. The committee developed a set of recommended best practices for researchers and community groups to consider, given their shared responsibilities and interests. The set of recommendations, called the Kūlana Noi‘i, revolved around four main objectives and associated best practices: respect, reciprocity, self-awareness and capacity, and communication. The Kūlana Noi‘i best practices are now highlighted by federal agencies such as NASA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and incorporated into projects focused on Hawaii and beyond.

In Virginia, communicative planning was used during roundtable discussions among researchers and practitioners to highlight the important role of universities in advancing equity and community resilience [32]. In this discussion the consensus among faculty and practitioners was that universities have multiple roles, as a “resource for communities, as conveners in discussions, in pursuing engaged research projects to address emerging questions and developing new methodologies, in educating students to understand the complexity of adaptation and be a part of the workforce that will tackle the issues, and in reaching out to communities with science-based information” [32] (p. 22).

1.3. Community-Engaged and Applied Projects for Resilience and Equity

In community-university partnerships, university faculty, researchers, and students can participate in engaged and/or applied projects to address resilience and equity issues faced by communities. These projects enable academic researchers to collaborate with community partners, incorporating community perspectives into the research process to address community issues. This approach blends research and practical solutions. Engaged projects, defined as user- or use-inspired research projects [33,34], involve communities and community partners meaningfully throughout the project, including problem definition and evaluation of potential solutions. According to Anderson and Douglass [35], engaged projects are “conducted in collaboration with, rather than for or on, a community… draws upon community knowledge, reflects their concerns better, and ultimately yields a practical benefit.” Applied projects, a subset of engaged projects, bridge theory and practice by applying academic expertise to develop practical solutions to specific needs or real-world problems, such as those concerning resilience and equity.

Engaged and applied projects can involve a wide range of activities that leverage academic expertise to benefit communities. In the context of resilience and equity, such projects can address systemic challenges arising from disparities and enhance communities’ ability to withstand disasters and economic, social, or environmental shocks, particularly for vulnerable populations. Examples include supporting food assistance programming, assisting rural communities with resilience planning and project implementation, supporting equitable sustainability and social justice, and planning for urban community revitalization.

However, there are challenges on the university side. For example, there is “a reluctance among some [university] administrators and faculty… to incorporate, support, and reward” [33] (p. 252) such projects, in part due to the misconception that engaged scholarship is less valid than traditional research. Addressing these concerns requires structural changes within institutions and developing a university culture that values engaged and applied projects [35]. Additionally, specific challenges arise from working with community partners, such as faculty needing to respect the community’s knowledge and be willing to share power and control [35]. Gibson [33] notes that universities are often perceived as disconnected from the community, making it difficult to establish the relationships needed for engaged and applied projects.

In summary, universities and communities can and should collaborate on projects to address issues of resilience and equity. However, the literature and examples of community-university partnerships reveal that, despite producing impactful outcomes and meeting specific community needs, these projects can be challenging to implement. A deeper understanding of the challenges of conducting engaged and applied research, and how to overcome them, is needed.

2. Materials and Methods

This study employs a qualitative research design, using workshop dialogue as its primary data source, to explore how researchers, practitioners, and community-focused organizations understand and operationalize equity in coastal resilience work. Qualitative approaches are well-suited to examining complex, value-laden topics such as equity and community engagement because they enable the collection of nuanced, contextualized insights that quantitative metrics cannot readily capture. In this study, the workshop served as an intentional, interactive environment where participants collectively reflected on barriers, opportunities, and lived experiences related to university–community collaboration. The conversations generated in this setting offered rich qualitative data that illuminate how diverse actors conceptualize equitable resilience and navigate the tensions and practical constraints inherent in co-producing resilience initiatives.

Workshops are an established method for generating research insights because they facilitate multi-stakeholder interaction, encourage reflection and dialogue, and allow participants to build on one another’s perspectives. They are particularly effective in fields such as resilience and community engagement, where knowledge is distributed across institutions, disciplines, and lived experiences. In this study, the workshop’s structured breakout discussions created opportunities for participants to share practical experiences, identify challenges to equitable resilience planning, and articulate conditions that support effective community partnerships. These interactions produced data that reflect not only individual perspectives but also the dynamics of group sense-making, an important consideration in studies of transdisciplinary collaboration and co-production. The workshop’s design also enabled the research team to observe how equity considerations surfaced organically within practitioner-researcher exchanges, making it an appropriate and rigorous method for generating insights aligned with the study’s aims. Building on this qualitative foundation, the workshop was structured to generate data through facilitated discussions, cross-sector exchanges, and interactive breakout sessions.

2.1. A National Workshop

A three-day virtual workshop titled “Making Waves in Equitable Coastal Resilience: A National Workshop on Social Equity and Coastal Resilience” was held in November 2022. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse backgrounds, including government agencies, nonprofit organizations, community organizations, and advocacy groups. The workshop focused on engaged and applied research at the intersection of coastal resilience and social equity, emphasizing how research can make a difference when implemented with communities through on-the-ground resilience projects. (While the workshop focused on coastal resilience, the discussion and findings are broadly applicable to and relevant for all community resilience efforts that include engaged and applied research beyond those of coastal communities.)

Workshop participation was by invitation, and drew from the networks of workshop organizers, the Coastal Resilience Center of Excellence at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, and with input from the workshop advisory board that comprised representatives from federal, state, and local agencies involved in resilience planning or equity; academics conducting policy and management research in equity and resilience, and private consultants and nonprofit organizations working in the resilience space. This approach ensured a high degree of technical expertise and knowledge brokerage. Participants did not receive compensation. A total of 113 individuals participated in the workshop. The analytical unit for describing the sample is the individual participant. (Demographic information collected about participants only included geographic location, sector, and organization type. We did not collect information such as race, gender, education level, or years of experience. Given our focus on equity, we prioritized participation from those working in the resilience and equity domain, rather than diversity in workshop participants’ demographic characteristics.)

While many participants (n = 27) identified with multiple sectors, their primary affiliations were distributed as follows: about 52% of workshop participants were researchers with academic affiliations, while 12% indicated affiliation with research organizations, such as think tanks, that are not affiliated with a university. Around 25% of practitioners were from the government sector, including a little over half from federal agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (20 participants), with the remaining representing state and local governments. Other practitioners were from nonprofit or community organizations (11%), including an interfaith organization, a professional organization promoting diversity and inclusion, a community foundation, an environmental nonprofit, and a sustainability nonprofit. (Our funding for the workshop included compensation for participants representing under-resourced nonprofit and community organizations. We included information about compensation in the workshop invitation and recruitment materials. We recognize that invitation-based recruitment through existing networks can reinforce elite capture. To overcome this concern, we specifically targeted nonprofit, community, and faith-based organizations in our workshop recruitment efforts. While we were able to recruit some representatives of nonprofit and community organizations, none of them indicated they were interested in compensation. Thus, none of our workshop attendees were compensated for their participation.)

When accounting for all reported professional roles, we recorded 140 total affiliations across the cohort, reflecting a high degree of cross-sector affiliation. In the context of equitable coastal resilience, this multi-positionality ensured that theoretical equity frameworks were immediately vetted against jurisdictional constraints and community-level feasibility. Participants were primarily from coastal locations along the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. Practitioners’ roles and responsibilities in equity and resilience were also diverse, including positions such as environmental justice coordinator, resilience officer, resilience specialist, mitigation and climate adaptation coordinator, hazards extension specialist, justice organizer, and resilience liaison. Many participants reported multiple sectoral affiliations. For example, one participant, a research fellow at a federal agency, also self-identified as affiliated with an academic institution.

The workshop included two sets of breakout sessions focused on identifying lessons learned and developing recommendations for research-practice collaborations in engaged and applied projects. During each set of breakout sessions, workshop participants were randomly assigned to smaller discussion groups with at least one facilitator and one note-taker. Small group discussions included both researchers and practitioners. Five small discussion groups were held for each of the two breakout sessions, with each group comprising 11 to 16 participants. Each breakout session lasted 50 min, and the same participants were involved in both sets of discussion. The discussion questions from the two breakout sessions are listed in

Table 1. Discussion questions.

Lessons learned What are the major issues and challenges in connecting research to practice and practice to research? How can we ensure the value to communities of on-the-ground projects? How can we establish and sustain on-the-ground projects or programs with a focus on social equity concerns? What can be included as the best practices for research-practice collaborations? Recommendations for research-practice collaborations Are there specific topics or issues for which collaborations between research and practice would be particularly beneficial to address equity in coastal resilience? How and why? Are there examples of research-practice collaborations that could be used as models to move our efforts forward? In what ways could we learn from these examples? What resources are needed to successfully collaborate across research and practice for on-the-ground projects? How can these resources be developed or provided? What recommendations would you offer, based on your experiences or expertise, for undertaking on-the-ground projects to effectively address equity in coastal resilience?

. All small group discussions addressed the same questions. The workshop design was intended to generate synthesized cross-sector perspectives and convergent themes related to equity and coastal resilience, rather than individual accounts or causal explanations. The workshop sought to develop a research agenda for equitable coastal resilience, and identify challenges, lessons learned, and actionable practices for applied and engaged projects that address equity and coastal resilience.

The workshop included two plenary presentations that introduced key equity and resilience concepts and provided insights into equitable disaster recovery from a community perspective. Two project presentations illustrated the research-practice connection and were intended to prepare workshop participants for the small-group discussion on lessons learned and recommendations for research-practice collaborations. Additionally, the presentations introduced and defined the key concepts and issues that were the focus of the workshop, helped familiarize workshop participants with the concepts raised in the breakout discussions, and provided a grounding and baseline for discussion.

2.2. Data Collection

In qualitative data collection, such as through a workshop, the interactions between and among the facilitator and participants can shape the resulting data. Professional norms can create an environment where participants provide socially acceptable answers (social desirability bias). Additionally, in the context of a workshop where participants primarily represented the perspectives of academia, research, and government, these may dominate the discussion and introduce power imbalances among researchers, government representatives, and other participants. The small group discussion were intended to facilitate more open dialogue that could reduce such imbalances.

To reduce bias and power differentials in deliberative group dynamics, the workshop used trained facilitators, structured discussion questions, and assigned note-takers. Each breakout session followed the same question set and flow (listed in Table 1), to reduce facilitator-driven variability. Facilitators were drawn from faculty and graduate students trained in qualitative research and experienced in conducting applied and engaged research. Facilitators participated in an hour-long training session ahead of the workshop and were provided with a Facilitator’s Guide that included facilitation best practices and a standardized script. Note takers, drawn from the same pool of faculty and graduate students, also participated in an hour-long training session in which they were provided with a structured note-taking template. Trained facilitators encouraged participation by all members of the session, regardless of their sector or background. The workshop structure and the approach to discussion placed community representatives at the center of discussion and specifically solicited their input and perspectives. Various mechanisms were provided to participants to participate in discussion, including verbal response, typing in the chat, and typing in the shared Google Document available to all participants. We note, however, that the workshop structure does not eliminate power hierarchies, and that caution should be taken in interpreting our findings given those who participated and whose perspectives may be more prominent in the discussion. Because this composition shapes whose experiences inform our findings, we acknowledge the sample as a limitation, particularly for an equity-focused study.

Invitations to participate in the workshops included information about the workshop’s purpose of identifying key questions, challenges, and recommendations for equitable coastal resilience that would be disseminated as information sheets, a workshop report, and research publications. Participants were informed at the beginning of the workshop that breakout sessions would be recorded and transcribed. They were reminded again at the start of each breakout session. Participants were also told that discussion points would not be attributed to specific individuals or organizations. We applied the same protections to the quotations used as we did to direct identifiers and assessed deductive disclosure risk at the quotation level, not just the transcript level.

2.3. Analysis

The breakout session transcripts did not include any attribution to specific participants, and there was no identifying information. There were five transcripts for the breakout discussion on lessons learned from research-practice collaborations and on-the-ground projects. There were five transcripts for the breakout discussion focused on identifying recommendations for research-practice collaborations. The ten transcripts were pooled for analysis.

The analysis of the breakout session transcripts followed a systematic, inductive approach, allowing themes to emerge directly from participants’ lived experiences and professional insights. Because the transcripts did not identify specific workshop participants, the analysis was blind to the sectoral affiliations of the various participants. In this sense, the analysis did not note any differences by sector or role.

A bottom-up process was conducted in three phases to ensure qualitative rigor and internal validity. We started with open coding and with the transcripts read by multiple researchers to identify similar recurring codes. To mitigate individual bias and enhance the reliability of the findings, four researchers independently reviewed all transcripts and organized the data into preliminary codes/themes. Through repeated comparison, we grouped the initial codes into broader categories. This involved iterative discussions among the research team to refine code definitions and ensure we captured the nuances of the discussion. Finally, we conducted thematic synthesis to arrive at the final consensus themes. The process of reaching consensus involved separating or combining codes, but there were no disagreements among the researchers. We extracted representative verbatim quotes to provide thick description and ground the analysis in the authentic voices of the workshop participants.

3. Results

Results showcased four specific themes regarding how universities can partner with communities to advance resilience and equity through engaged and applied projects.

• Projects must align with community resilience and equity needs, which requires developing an authentic understanding of and relationships with the community and community partners.
• University partners must be welcomed into and trusted by the community to conduct projects, but trust- and relationship-building efforts take time and are not considered within the project, funding, or academic tenure timelines.
• The project must engage community partners across all phases, which requires flexible funding to support community involvement and long-term commitment of resources. (In the context of these findings, we refer to funding and research support to broadly include research grants and other funding such as product development, commercialization, and other activities.)
• Project teams should include multiple functions and disciplines, but multifunctional and interdisciplinary work requires institutional and administrative support.

3.1. Four Primary Themes

First, analysis of the transcripts revealed a primary focus on the intentionality of community selection and problem-framing. Workshop participants agreed that resilience projects should prioritize equity and address the needs of low-income communities, people of color, and other groups disproportionately affected by hazards. Participants frequently questioned the “who” and “why” of engagement, noting that “there needs to be more discussion about who [community] are you working with” and for understanding “who you’re doing this [project] for.” This sub-theme of problem-framing suggests that communities should not merely be subjects of research but should help operationalize and conceptualize problems within project constraints. Workshop participants emphasized the need to pay attention to the community’s history and to recognize and respect the “culture and history of a community.” Discussions regarding power surfaced as a critical code when participants addressed historical mistreatment and the determination of metrics. This was highlighted by one participant who pointed to “equity as a concept that’s highly contextualized and unique to different communities and is founded in the conceptualization of power locally.”

There was consensus that research teams should analyze and address existing disparities in access to resources and opportunities to ensure the project aligns with community needs and priorities. Resilience projects must be inclusive and consider the diverse needs and perspectives of residents, particularly those historically excluded and underserved. Research teams working with local stakeholders need to identify feasible projects that can be implemented within existing constraints and resources and fit within the community’s priorities. This reflects a broader participant concern that projects failing to accommodate community structures become extractive and perpetuate historical injustices. There should be early recognition of mutual goal alignment between the research team and the community. As one participant put it: “If it doesn’t look like the structure of the grant is going to allow for the type of deep work that you think needs to happen to actually serve community, then the project should not take place.” Engaged and applied resilience projects must meet the needs of their community partners. This underscores the need for university partners to develop an authentic understanding of and relationship with the community and its needs.

The salience of community needs emerged again in the discussion of how faculty and researchers balance potential demands for uniformity (and generalizability and transferability) in academic research, since “if we’re co-producing the metrics with the communities, then they would be slightly different depending on the project.” On the other hand, in recognizing the importance of community voices in research projects, “If we go out into the community and ask them for these definitions and ask them for the metrics that they want to use, then it makes our science more difficult.” Balancing these different demands requires researchers to learn from community partners, and vice versa, but participants recognize that this is not easy.

A second recurring theme was trust-based engagement. Workshop participants agreed that being welcomed and trusted by the community is an essential first step for any collaborative community-university resilience project. One participant noted, “One of the rules that I had working with communities was I did not work in a community that I was not invited to work in.” However, participants frequently cited time and tenure as systemic barriers. Building trust takes time, which is not always accounted for in the tenure-track process in academia or in the funded research timeline, as several participants emphasized.

Participants agreed that prioritizing relationship-building is important in community-based research projects addressing equitable resilience. One participant described their role as an extension agent as “relationship building” but that “it is not recognized really how time intensive and resource intensive that process is.” This role involves activities such as educating and advocating for universities to value community-based research, and providing support through structures, guidelines, staff, and other administrative and management functions for engaged and applied research. Another participant shared the sentiment that “because relationship building is really hard to measure…it’s often underappreciated and undervalued.” Faculty are challenged to fit relationship- and trust-building activities into the tenure process and/or project funding and duration.

The third theme emerged around engaged and applied projects being embedded in and developed with communities and community partners. Participants agreed that communities and their considerations should be included from the beginning to the end of a project to ensure equitable resilience through shared definitions, co-development of project metrics, and monitoring and evaluation. This approach yields more equitable and realistic solutions and guides project implementation to increase community buy-in and ownership.

A significant sub-theme focused on how community participants are selected and involved in engaged and applied projects. Specifically, one workshop participant noted, “You have to be consistently conscientious of the fact that you can have inequitable aspects of a process that is meant to help increase equity.” Another emphasized the importance of equity in participation and of ensuring that the voices of those beyond the “usual suspects who show up” are valued. To facilitate this, participants emphasized the need for funding flexibility and long-term commitment of resources since these projects require both additional time and resources, such as for compensating individuals or groups in the community to participate in the research, long-term monitoring, or checking back on communities.

Fourth, the data highlighted the necessity of cross-disciplinary teams and boundary spanners. Resilience projects that incorporate equity must draw from multiple functions and disciplines. This can be challenging. Community resilience is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted approach. Given the complexity of the community issues researchers aim to address, interdisciplinary teams were identified as essential to the project’s success. Additionally, having project team members with established relationships in the community was identified as important. One workshop participant referred to investing in “community liaisons and boundary spanners,” defined as individuals with “relationships in the community and … developing those relationships in the community over a long time, but also able to work with professors.”

Workshop participants emphasized the need for institutional and administrative support, including staff who can work across research teams and understand the demands of engaged and applied projects, and the resources required to carry them out effectively to benefit communities. One respondent echoed this by suggesting “to do it in a way that can become institutionalized at that university so that it becomes its own interdisciplinary effort.” This could also include community engagement staff who can advocate for communities and educate community stakeholders on how to promote their needs. However, participants noted that institutionalization and administrative resources are lacking. One participant also suggested institutionalizing the relationship between academic researchers and government agencies doing similar work, “connecting the research to the practitioners that are housed in an agency setting, making sure that research is not only useful for the communities but useful for those of us that are housed in agencies.”

These findings align with resilience scholarship, underscoring the importance of transdisciplinary collaboration and the integration of diverse knowledge systems to develop equitable and actionable resilience strategies.

3.2. Equitable Resilience and the Three Dimensions of Justice

Across the workshop discussions, participants repeatedly emphasized that equity in coastal resilience calls for a constellation of justice-related considerations that shape how applied and engaged projects are defined, implemented, and sustained. Equity concerns raised in the discussion map closely onto the three interrelated dimensions of recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice. Understanding the themes across the lens of justice highlights the specific mechanisms through which inequities emerge and how universities can help address them.

Recognitional justice concerns whether the identities, histories, lived experiences, or forms of knowledge held by communities are acknowledged and respected. Participants emphasized that projects must begin with an authentic understanding of the community, including its history of vulnerability, prior experiences with outside researchers, cultural practices, and local power dynamics. Recognizing these contextual realities was described as essential to avoid extractive or misaligned projects and to ensure that project goals integrate community-defined resilience and equity needs, rather than the researchers’ assumptions. At the heart of recognitional justice is the acknowledgement of communities as holders of expertise, validation of their historical and place-based knowledge, and respect for how they conceptualize problems and solutions.

Trust and relationship building are also rooted in recognitional justice. Workshop participants noted that mistrust can stem from long histories of extractive research, uneven distributions of risk and resources, the marginalization of certain groups during previous projects, and repeated instances where community input was solicited but not acted upon. Recognizing and validating these histories is essential to initiating university–community collaboration. Trust is built not just through process, but through acknowledging the structural and historical conditions that shape community experiences.

Procedural justice centers on how decisions are made, including whose voices are included, who has influence throughout the process, and how participation is inclusive, transparent, and meaningful. All four themes connect to procedural justice. Procedural justice requires that communities have real influence in decision-making about equitable resilience. Trust is the mechanism that makes this possible, as equitable processes are impossible without trust. Participants described entering a community only when invited, working through boundary-spanning entities, and investing time in building relationships before the project begins. These practices strengthen procedural equity by reducing power asymmetries and enabling communities to shape project definitions, research design, and application and implementation.

Our results echo the literature’s emphasis on procedural and recognitional justice as prerequisites for equitable resilience, particularly in communities with histories of extractive or exclusionary research [8,9]. Resilience processes are strengthened when practitioners acknowledge past harms, build trust over time, and engage in co-production relationships that share power across institutional boundaries. Our findings, therefore, support the argument that trust building is foundational to equitable adaptation, not an ancillary activity [36].

Recognizing community histories and lived experiences opens the door to co-production, including shared agenda setting, co-defining the problems, and co-creating knowledge. These early, up-front procedural steps shape downstream decisions throughout a project. Not surprisingly, participants described procedural justice as requiring community involvement not only at the beginning of a project but throughout its entire life cycle, from defining problems to developing metrics, making decisions, implementing solutions, and evaluating outcomes. Sustained engagement promotes transparency, reduces extractive dynamics, and ensures that procedural inclusion is continuous rather than symbolic.

Our findings reinforce that equitable resilience cannot be achieved without centering community-defined needs and lived experiences in project scoping and problem framing. Research on equitable coastal resilience emphasizes that meaningful co-production requires grounding adaptation decisions in the perspectives of marginalized communities and recognizing that equity is highly contextual and shaped by local histories. This aligns with broader resilience scholarship, demonstrating that participatory problem definition is essential for ensuring just and context-appropriate outcomes [37].

Procedural justice is also about who is at the table. Participants emphasized the need for interdisciplinary and multifunctional teams that can bridge institutional gaps and expand the range of perspectives included in the project. These roles help mediate power differences between universities and communities, and can create more inclusive procedural structures.

Distributive justice is about the allocation of resources, benefits, and burdens across communities and within partnerships. Aligning projects with community priorities ensures that benefits flow to those who need them the most, and that resources are allocated in ways that address historic disparities, rather than reinforce them. Participants identified funding structures as central to distributive justice. Communities cannot participate meaningfully if they lack the resources to do so. Flexible, long-term funding that can provide compensation for community members, time for relationship building, and administrative support is necessary to avoid disproportionately burdening historically under-resourced communities. Participants noted that without such support, projects can risk reproducing the very inequities they seek to address, because of the expectation for communities to participate without compensation or sufficient capacity.

Finally, participants described the inequitable distribution in and burden of community-engaged research, where faculty and staff doing relational work often carry heavy and often unrewarded workloads, while community partners shoulder uncompensated responsibilities. Providing institutional support helps distribute labor, funding, and responsibility more equitably across partners and across the university system itself.

Taken together, the themes demonstrate that recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice are deeply intertwined in equitable coastal resilience work. Recognitional justice provides the foundation by demanding respect for community histories, identities, and forms of expertise. Procedural justice ensures fair, sustained, and meaningful participation in all phases of a project. Distributive justice ensures that communities and university partners have the material resources, time, and institutional support necessary for equitable collaboration. The workshop discussions made clear that these dimensions reinforce one another. Recognition enables procedural fairness; procedural fairness enables equitable distribution of resources and benefits; and distributive support strengthens both recognition and procedural inclusion. Together, they define what equitable resilience practice requires from universities and their community partners.

4. Discussion

The themes point to equity not merely as a value but as a set of practices that shape how resilience problems are framed, who participates, and how benefits and burdens are shared. To operationalize equity in community-engaged resilience, it is essential to attend to the power dynamics that can distort participatory processes, even when engagement appears inclusive. Research on equitable coastal resilience shows that inequitable adaptation outcomes often stem from structural inequities that shape who participates in planning and whose knowledge is deemed legitimate. Equitable resilience requires attention to distributive, procedural, and recognitional justice, noting that marginalized populations frequently lack influence over adaptation decisions even when engagement processes appear participatory on the surface [8,9].

While existing models of equitable coastal resilience articulate the importance of these justice dimensions and highlight promising examples of co-production practices, they often fall short of specifying how these concepts should be operationalized in the day-to-day work of university–community collaboration. Fox et al. [8] identify justice-centered adaptation as a guiding principle but note the need for clearer pathways to embed these principles in practice. Raub et al. [38] similarly find that despite broad recognition of the importance of equity, many coastal resilience plans lack mechanisms to ensure meaningful participation and shared decision-making. Transdisciplinary, community-informed approaches can generate socially relevant insights but also emphasize the need for structures that support ongoing collaboration [14]. The guiding approach that follows builds on these contributions by identifying the concrete relational practices, institutional support, and engagement structures necessary to embed equity into resilience work. It thus bridges the gap between high-level justice principles and the operational realities of designing and sustaining equitable university–community partnerships in coastal resilience.

4.1. A Framework for University Partnerships with Community Stakeholders

The framework developed in this study is grounded directly in the workshop findings and is designed to translate established equity and resilience theory into practical steps that university partners can implement across diverse community contexts. Whereas existing models of equitable resilience emphasize broad principles such as co-production, shared decision-making, and justice-oriented adaptation, this guiding approach outlines how those principles can be enacted through specific practices, structures, and institutional commitments that emerged from the workshop discussions. In this way, the approach operationalizes insights from justice-centered adaptation frameworks, addresses the procedural equity gaps identified in coastal resilience planning research, and incorporates transdisciplinary engagement strategies shown to enhance the social relevance and legitimacy of resilience initiatives.

Drawing on workshop findings, we offer a framework for university partnerships with community stakeholders through engaged and applied research on equitable resilience. The framework provides a guide for university engagement with communities, with a focus on research and practice in equitable coastal resilience. It is organized around three goals related to supporting academic researchers in pursuing collaborative projects that address the four challenges identified by workshop participants (at the center of Figure 2). For each goal, two or three action items are provided as starting points for universities to become effective partners in applied or engaged research projects that build equitable resilience in coastal communities.

4.1.1. Goal A: Emphasize Community Engagement Before, During, and After Projects

• Engage early with the community and key members in the community to establish trust and build relationships.
• Engage communities at all phases of the project, such as through regular community check-ins.
• Build long-term focus and requisite resources into projects to account for the time to build relationships, compensate individuals or groups in the community participating in the project, and undertake long-term monitoring or checking back on communities.

This goal addresses all four challenges identified by workshop participants. For example, engaged and applied research should feature meaningful, long-term relationships with and understanding of the community, to be community-based and inclusive of historically underserved and excluded groups. Trust must be built, and lasting partnerships formed. Researchers from outside the community cannot expect to be welcomed immediately. They should be mindful of prior interactions between the community and researchers that were not perceived positively by the community. The history and resulting operating environment of underserved communities must be understood and respected, requiring early and continuous engagement by researchers. Early engagement should also elicit the community’s expectations for the research, including the definition of partners’ roles, to foster accountability. To sustain long-term focus beyond entry into and operation in underserved communities, resources are needed for community participant compensation and for long-term monitoring and follow-up in those communities. Without appropriate commitments from researchers to early, sustained, and long-term engagement with communities, engaged and applied research will likely not be effective.

4.1.2. Goal B: Build Relationships and Collaborations

• Collaborate with extension services and allied groups already working in communities that can help facilitate a whole-of-community approach spanning multiple disciplines, functions, and sectors.
• Establish mechanisms for creating connections between universities, communities, government and nonprofit agencies, funding programs, and industry.

Extensive and sustained engagement hinges on strong relationships and collaboration between university researchers and the community, emphasizing the importance of activities that build these relationships and lead to collaborative engaged and applied projects. Universities can establish collaborations or partnerships with extension services and allied groups already working in communities, such as Sea Grant programs, agricultural extension teams, healthcare groups, resilience hubs, and others, to help academic researchers build connections within communities and establish relationships with them. Relationship- and collaboration-building activities can also be supported by developing university-based mechanisms to create connections among universities, communities, government and nonprofit agencies, funding programs, and industry, such as through regularly scheduled networking events, information-sharing sites, or matching services.

4.1.3. Goal C: Provide Supportive Institutional Infrastructure and Resources

• Provide and fund infrastructure to support engaged and applied research, such as funding for staff positions to support community engagement activities that underpin successful engaged and applied research (examples: extension or engagement specialists, community liaisons, community coordinators).
• Educate university leaders and administrators on the importance of community-based engaged and applied research, and the need to provide institutional support and resources.
• Create incentive structures that recognize and reward community engagement efforts, value engaged and applied research, foster the creation of interdisciplinary research teams, and prioritize relationship building as an important outcome.

Engaged and applied research may be perceived as less valuable when assessed against traditional academic research criteria. Similarly, external funding may not be as widely available for this type of community-based work. To encourage academic researchers to pursue engaged and applied research, university administrators should provide institutional and administrative support as part of a facilitative infrastructure. Administrators should also provide guidelines for assessing engaged and applied research outcomes in ways equivalent to a publication record. Just as faculty in the arts have specific scholarship guidelines that match their foci, engaged and applied research should also contribute to a research record for promotion and tenure for researchers working with communities.

Resources are also necessary to support projects involving a broad range of research partners and participants from across the community, representing multiple functions and disciplines, and that include historically excluded and underserved populations. Interdisciplinary research teams are better positioned to engage diverse partners and community members and to address community needs, but disciplinary silos can make interdisciplinary work challenging. Interdisciplinarity should be promoted and incentivized to foster comprehensive relationship-building within and across communities, engage the whole community, and encourage equitable outcomes by addressing components of resilience holistically.

Conducting community-engaged and applied projects requires extensive use of engagement and participatory activities, and universities can support such projects by funding an infrastructure that includes staff, such as extension or engagement specialists, community liaisons, or community coordinators, and accompanying resources to support engagement activities. The commitment of resources and investment in creating a supportive institutional infrastructure requires educating university leaders and administrators on the importance of community-based engaged and applied research, as well as the needed resource types (e.g., training, seed funding, community meetings) for different participants (e.g., faculty, students, staff, and community participants). Community-based applied and engaged research also requires improved professional recognition within universities by modifying tenure and other promotion expectations to value and reward engagement efforts.

4.1.4. From Goals to Indicators

To make the framework more actionable for universities, community partners, and funders, we identify a set of quantifiable success indicators aligned with each of the three framework goals. As workshop participants cautioned against a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to measurement, these indicators are not intended to impose uniform metrics across diverse community contexts, but instead to provide universities with practical ways to track progress towards deeper, more equitable engagement for resilience. By focusing on measures such as pre-project engagement activities, diverse partnerships, multidisciplinary team composition, and investments in engagement infrastructure, these indicators offer concrete signals that universities are strengthening their capacity to pursue equitable coastal resilience.

Table 2. Quantifiable success indicators for each framework goal.

Goal and Indicator	Measurement
Goal A. Emphasize community engagement before, during, and after projects
Pre-project engagement activities	Count of pre-grant or pre-proposal meetings with community partners.
Compensation practices for community participation	Percentage of projects that budget for and provide compensation (e.g., stipends, honoraria, food, childcare, travel support).
Post-project follow-up	Percentage of projects that conduct follow-up activities within 6–12 months after project completion.
Goal B. Build relationships and collaborations
Active agency and community partnerships	Annual count of formalized partnerships or MOUs with government agencies, nonprofits, community groups, tribal entities, extension services, etc., and year-over-year growth.
Diversity of agency and community partnerships	Percentage distribution of partners by sector (e.g., nonprofit, community-based, government, academic).
Interdisciplinary and multi-functional research teams	Annual count of projects involving multiple disciplines or functional roles, and year-over-year growth.
Collaborative spaces	Annual count of networking events, workshops, information sharing sessions, or similar cross-sector engagement activities.
Goal C. Provide supportive institutional infrastructure and resources
Dedicated funding lines or internal grant programs	Total amount of seed grants, engagement funds, or administrative support budgets allocated to community-engaged or applied resilience projects.
Staffing for engagement infrastructure	Count of institutional staff positions supporting applied and engaged resilience projects (e.g., engagement specialists, community coordinators, project managers).
Tenure and promotion criteria that reward engagement	Percentage of faculty whose tenure/promotion portfolios include engaged or applied research components.

summarizes these indicators and provides guidance for how institutions can monitor their efforts over time.

Together, these indicators provide tangible ways for universities to assess their progress toward recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice, translating the justice-oriented principles of equitable resilience into measurable institutional practices that can strengthen community-centered coastal resilience efforts.

4.1.5. Linking Themes, Justice Dimensions, Framework Goals, and Indicators

The four themes that emerged from the workshop point to an interconnected set of recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice practices. The themes corresponded to specific justice needs and, in turn, to the framework’s three institutional goals and their measurable indicators.

First, the emphasis on aligning projects with community priorities reflects recognitional justice, which in turn supports Goal A of the framework that emphasizes community engagement before, during, and after projects. The related indicators offer concrete ways to assess whether early recognition of community knowledge translates into long-term, reciprocal engagement.

Second, the importance of trust and relationship building speaks directly to procedural justice and Goal B’s focus on building relationships and collaborations. The success indicators capture whether universities are broadening who participates and how power is shared across sectors.

Third, the call for engagement across all project phases and the need for flexible, sustained resources bridge procedural and distributive justice. Equitable participation depends not only on invitations to contribute but also on the material support that makes participation possible. These underlie Goals A and C, with indicators including compensation practices, dedicated funding lines, and staff who support coordinated, long-term engagement.

Finally, the need for interdisciplinary and multifunctional teams and institutional support reflects both procedural and distributive justice. This theme reinforces Goals B and C, captured through indicators such as the count of interdisciplinary teams, staffing levels for engagement infrastructure, and the percentage of faculty whose promotion dossiers include engaged research.

Taken together, the themes demonstrate that recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice must operate simultaneously for equitable resilience to work. By linking each theme to framework goals and quantifiable indicators, the study provides universities with practical ways to assess progress and strengthen their capacity for community-centered coastal resilience.

4.2. Recommendations for Practice

This section offers recommendations for implementing the framework to support universities partnering with communities to pursue engaged and applied research that addresses resilience equitably. First, from the university’s perspective, specific recommendations include aligning tenure and promotion incentives with research that builds on meaningful, long-term community engagement, particularly in underserved or under-resourced areas. Increased recognition of the value of engaged and applied research arising from multi-year community projects and partnerships can encourage faculty to invest time in building relationships and trust with communities and to focus on research that yields tangible outcomes for them.

When academic researchers receive institutional recognition and support for community-engaged scholarship, they are better equipped to secure potential grants and launch impactful projects, fostering a sustainable relationship with communities [39]. This arrangement benefits communities by ensuring consistent support, reducing turnover among academic collaborators, and increasing access to resources, expertise, and networks that help build local capacity. By valuing community-centered research in promotion criteria, academic institutions encourage partnerships that contribute to shared outcomes and reinforce the commitment to community impact and academic excellence.

Second, to help overcome some of the challenges faculty face in research projects involving community collaborations, universities can provide administrative support, such as project management staff and graduate student support. Universities can also outsource face-to-face data collection to facilitators with expertise in community engagement and storytelling, particularly those who intentionally create equitable spaces for participation. This ensures that communities are engaged by those equipped to do so and facilitates information exchange in ways that level the playing field and mitigate power imbalances. This may also allow faculty to focus on other aspects of the research and reinforce the university’s commitment to advancing community-engaged and applied research. Furthermore, creating and widely disseminating lessons learned, guidelines, and templates, as well as conducting training on conducting community-engaged and applied research, would strengthen and streamline research procedures and ensure that best practices are followed across the university.

Turner and Piso [40] emphasize that different motivations guide different communities, with some preferring transactional approaches in which universities provide expertise and knowledge to address highly specialized issues, such as ecosystem restoration. Others may prefer a more relational arrangement where “the most critical knowledge was already held within the community, and the primary role of university partners was to elevate this knowledge and render it more influential in collective decision-making” (p. 130). Institutional policies that promote best practices should distinguish between these types of partnerships and align with norms suited to sustain each form independently.

Individual faculty can use our findings and framework to champion changes that better support engaged and applied equitable resilience projects. For example, they can advocate for increased funding and financial support at the department, college, and university levels to sustain focus on such projects. Educating university administrators about the value of engaged and applied research can help shift the university research culture that emphasizes the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals rather than the benefits to local communities of equitable resilience. Engaging with other faculty across disciplines can amplify their voice and consolidate shared knowledge to underpin these efforts. Additionally, because navigating the requirements and reporting structures of funded projects can be challenging, faculty can seek support by connecting with grantors and established community groups that can guide them through the processes and essential steps to help avoid pitfalls and common mistakes.

While our findings and framework primarily focus on faculty researchers and universities, we can also offer recommendations for communities and community organizations to partner more effectively. For example, the findings provide community partners with insights into institutional barriers that impede faculty participation in engaged and applied research. Recognition of these barriers can enable community partners to anticipate and navigate them as a project unfolds.

Sanchez-Youngman et al. [41] propose the creation of champion teams for equity-centered community-based participatory research that can include academic and community leaders, research faculty, and advocates. These teams participate in coaching workshops, conduct institutional assessments to identify barriers to community-engaged research, and develop action plans to address them. This champion team approach produced improved health equity results. These champion teams also highlight the importance of the leadership skills of both community and academic participants. Expanding these teams to include more members would enable shared responsibilities, offset some costs, and leverage the network for information exchange, organizational learning, and future boundary-spanning opportunities and collaborations.

In addition, communities can advocate for changes that will help them become better partners with faculty and universities in engaged and applied research addressing equitable coastal resilience. For example, community organizations could lobby for more funding and emphasize the need for projects that build capacity for further equitable coastal resilience work. They could encourage funders and grantors to require university–community partnerships as a part of their grant award or to simplify and streamline their grant process application so a broader range of under-resourced communities can leverage partnerships with faculty and universities.

In a tribal–university partnership between the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, two universities and several governmental agencies, an iterative trust-building approach to community-engaged research was intentionally focused on local capacity building [42]. By intentionally engaging tribal citizens and stakeholders, the partnership raised awareness of adaptation planning in the community and catalyzed further collaboration with other tribes.

Funders and grantors can also use our findings and framework to improve their programs and processes, thereby encouraging and building upon community-university partnerships that pursue engaged and applied research. For example, they can provide grant-writing support or reduce administrative burdens to increase the number of recipients from under-resourced communities or to address the needs of underserved populations. Including metrics that account for more equitable grant-giving practices is one way to measure grant-giving success over time and across different geographies.

Tailored seed-funding programs that provide infrastructure and resources can help incentivize and sustain community-engaged research. Sheikhattari et al. [43] evaluated 14 small grants to new community-university research partnerships and found that most partnerships continued beyond the grant program. Their findings also emphasized the importance of a positive partnership experience, which assumes relationship and trust building and shared decision-making.

Finally, a focus on long-term funding commitments could be another strategy for prioritizing community-university projects with the strategic goal of long-term community resilience. Funders and grantors can ensure sustained impact and meaningful change within communities by prioritizing projects with long-term resilience goals. This approach can facilitate lasting partnerships between the university and local stakeholders, fostering mutual growth and development.

Taken together, these recommendations provide guidance for university, community, and funder/grantor stakeholders on how to collaboratively mitigate systemic barriers, facilitate learning exchanges, and co-create knowledge and research that stem from meaningful, long-term community engagement. By emphasizing sustained community engagement, university stakeholders can foster mutually beneficial partnerships and promote more relevant, impactful, and sustainable research. This approach not only enhances the university’s reputation as a socially responsible institution but also strengthens its relationships with communities, leading to positive long-term outcomes for both the university and the communities it serves. Funders and grantors can use our research findings to improve their programs by fostering community-university partnerships for engaged and applied research. Prioritizing long-term funding commitments ensures sustained impact and fosters enduring partnerships between universities and communities.

4.3. Limitations

There are several limitations to this study. The first results from the composition and representation of workshop participants. The invitation-based recruitment through existing professional networks likely excluded grassroots and community groups that are disconnected from university-led resilience efforts. Additionally, the virtual format, while appropriate given the COVID-19 pandemic environment and helpful for increasing geographic reach, may have inadvertently excluded those with limited technological literacy or internet access. The composition of workshop participants, which was dominated by academic and government perspectives, shaped the resulting framework in a way that emphasizes institutional barriers. We recognize that the relatively small under-representation of community organizations may under-represent the street-level, on-the-ground operational realities of frontline coastal communities. This can be a potential source of bias, as the missing voices of the most resource-constrained organizations might have offered more radical critiques of university engagement. While this is a limitation, we note that it does not strongly impact our framework which focuses on the university as a partner in equitable coastal resilience work. Our findings and framework, focused on university engagement, should be received as being defined by those most involved in the formalized, academic- and government-focused approaches to coastal resilience landscape. Future research and practice should prioritize more balanced representation and diverse participants to ensure that the community-defined priorities are not filtered through institutional—academic or government—lenses.

This workshop structure was designed to facilitate group sense-making across multiple sectors, but likely also shaped the content and focus of discussion. By providing shared vocabulary, definitions, and examples of equity and resilience challenges, the presentations helped orient participants but may have primed certain topics to surface more prominently in the breakout discussion. Similarly, the predefined discussion questions, while providing consistency across the breakout sessions, may have influenced the direction of the dialogue. Accordingly, the themes identified should be interpreted as co-produced outcomes of participant expertise and perspectives and the structured dialogic and deliberative environment established by the plenaries, spotlights, and breakout session discussion questions.

5. Conclusions

In this study, we describe a university partner perspective on engaged and applied projects in equitable community resilience, based on the results of a workshop that brought together university faculty and researchers, government staff, and nonprofit representatives. Findings showed that engaged and applied research embedded within communities can contribute to equitable resilience, but academic researchers face challenges in conducting such work. We developed a framework and recommendations for building and sustaining community relationships through engaged and applied research. The framework addresses four main challenges identified by workshop participants.

Despite these challenges, academic researchers and community partners must collaborate to pursue projects that advance equitable resilience. To facilitate and sustain this important work, we offered a framework to guide universities in encouraging, supporting, and investing in partnerships with communities for engaged, applied projects that address equity and community resilience. Universities that follow this blueprint can utilize a three-pronged goal approach built around (1) ensuring early, sustained, and long-term engagement with the community; (2) building relationships and collaborations that underpin engagement and on-the-groundwork in communities; and (3) providing a supportive institutional infrastructure and concomitant resources for faculty to effectively conduct applied and engaged research. Based on our findings and blueprint, we offered specific recommendations as starting points for academic researchers to champion greater support for community-partnered projects, for universities to encourage and facilitate these projects, and for communities to become more effective partners in pursuing such projects.

Beyond explaining the four themes surfaced in the workshop, this study makes several important contributions to the literature on equitable resilience, community–university partnerships, and engaged scholarship. First, whereas existing equitable resilience frameworks broadly identify justice principles, our study specifies the institutional mechanisms through which universities can enact recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice in practice. By tracing participant-identified challenges to concrete university levers (such as incentive structures, staffing models, administrative support, and compensation practices), we translate justice-oriented theory into operational guidance that is often absent in the extant scholarship. Second, the framework offers a set of quantifiable success indicators that universities can use to assess progress over time without imposing prescriptive metrics on communities. This responds directly to workshop participants’ concerns about measurement and supports institutions in monitoring equity-centered engagement in ways that respect local context. Third, the study illuminates the often-overlooked institutional constraints (such as tenure timelines, administrative burdens, and fragmented engagement infrastructure) that shape the feasibility of community-centered equitable resilience work.

In doing so, this study also bridges the long-standing gap between high-level justice principles and the operational realities of designing and sustaining equitable university–community partnerships in coastal resilience. While existing engaged scholarship emphasizes co-production, trust building, and shared authority, they rarely specify the institutional structures, resource commitments, and day-to-day practices required to enact those principles in coastal contexts. Our analysis moves beyond broad calls for equity by identifying practical levers that universities can directly influence but that have received limited attention in prior resilience or sustainability scholarship. By coupling these institutional levers with measurable indicators, the study demonstrates how recognitional, procedural, and distributive justice can be strengthened through routine institutional decisions rather than aspirational statements alone.

Moreover, our findings are grounded in the specific constraints and opportunities of the coastal resilience domain, where communities must navigate compounding hazards, high planning burdens, and structurally uneven access to resources. This yields a framework that does not merely reaffirm established best practices but advances the equity conversation by articulating what justice requires from universities operating in coastal environments: long-term relational commitments, distributed labor and compensation, boundary-spanning, and institutionalized support infrastructure calibrated to the realities of risks and vulnerabilities of coastal communities. As such, the framework provides both conceptual clarity and pragmatic direction for institutions seeking to shift from episodic outreach to sustained, justice-centered coastal resilience partnerships.