Environment

Engage STL Days are a way for WashU students to get off campus and get to know various neighborhoods throughout St. Louis. Each Engage STL Day is an immersive experience in which students get to hear from community partners and visit local businesses, landmarks, and organizations.

The Office of Innovation Summer Experience Program at WashU’s Bursky School of Public Health connects students with faculty and research mentors for two months of hands-on work addressing public health challenges, including food systems, health policy, global health and environmental health. St. Louis-area organizations and researchers can get involved by mentoring students or hosting research projects, creating opportunities to connect local expertise with emerging public health scholars and develop solutions to challenges affecting communities in the region and beyond.

WashU Public Exchange connects university researchers with local governments, nonprofits, community organizations and other partners to develop practical, research-informed solutions to pressing community challenges. Anchored in St. Louis, the initiative supports collaborative projects addressing issues such as disaster recovery, economic mobility and nutrition, helping partners translate research into actionable tools, policies and programs that improve lives. The Public Exchange is an interdisciplinary initiative housed in the Brown School and launched in partnership with the existing USC model.

The Pershing Fellowship in Non-Profit Leadership (Pershing Fellowship) is a paid summer internship program offered in St. Louis by the Washington University in St. Louis Center for Career Engagement, in partnership with the Pershing Charitable Trust. The program provides experience, programming, and financial support to rising undergraduate Junior & Senior students interested in nonprofit leadership. Pershing Fellows are matched with summer internship roles at nonprofit organizations focused on a range of activities, including social services, education, health care, and arts and culture in the St. Louis region.

The St. Louis Impact Fund supports student-led, mutually beneficial partnerships with St. Louis-area nonprofit and civic organizations. Through grants for new projects and expanded collaborations, the fund helps students and community partners co-design initiatives that address regional priorities and community-identified needs. Community partners help shape project goals and activities, ensuring their knowledge and priorities guide the work while strengthening long-term relationships between WashU and the St. Louis region.

The Gephardt Institute partners with academic departments to offer undergraduate Civic Action Lab courses: applied civic engagement classes that integrate academic, civic, and experiential learning. Civic Action Lab courses teach the practical civic knowledge, skills, responsibilities, and habits of citizen engagement in democracy. Each Civic Action Lab includes experiential learning, community leader guest speakers, opportunities to practice different civic skills, and more!

The Office of Public Scholarship helps WashU faculty, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers share their research and creative work with audiences beyond academia. Through consultations, workshops, funding opportunities, publishing support and media collaborations, the office helps scholars translate complex ideas for broader audiences, build public visibility and extend the reach and impact of their work. It also organizes free public events for the St. Louis community to enjoy on and off of campus.

The Confluence Collaborative for Community Engagement connects WashU scholars and St. Louis community partners to advance community-engaged research, education and practice.

It centers community-identified needs and supports reciprocal, long-term partnerships through research development, community-engaged teaching and learning, partner capacity building, networking, funding resources and recognition of collaborative work. Its goal is to strengthen existing efforts, connect people across disciplines and help ensure university-community partnerships produce meaningful benefits for the region.

The Frick Initiatives invest in ambitious ideas and the people working to put them into practice. They support projects centered on four core pillars: civil discourse, free speech, free and open markets, and personal responsibility. They seek promising projects that move ideas beyond discussion and into practice, whether through education, applied research, public engagement, community partnerships or new approaches not yet imagined.

In the months following the tornadoes that struck several St. Louis neighborhoods, Washington University researchers have been working alongside community partners to better understand the environmental health impacts facing residents. Through the Environmental Health Initiative, teams are conducting neighborhood walkthroughs, listening sessions, and field assessments to identify concerns such as mold, debris exposure, and air-quality […]