2026 State of Inclusive Excellence
The Oregon Coastal Futures (OCF) Project has worked since 2018 to help rural and underserved communities along Oregon's seven coastal counties better understand and prepare for the hazards they face — from sea level rise and coastal erosion to Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes and tsunamis. By combining physical, social, and economic science with sustained community engagement, the project has produced actionable knowledge that is directly informing state and local policy, including Oregon's coastal armoring policy, sea level rise guidance for local governments, and emergency preparedness planning. Results from housing market analyses, probabilistic hazard modeling, and community asset mapping have given planners and legislators concrete tools to make more equitable and informed decisions about how to protect people and places.
The project's impact extends well beyond Oregon. The success of OCF directly led to a $19 million award from the National Science Foundation to establish the Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub (Cascadia CoPes Hub), a regional consortium of 11 institutions spanning Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. This ongoing work is expanding the community-engaged, transdisciplinary model pioneered by OCF to tribes, immigrant communities, LGBTQ+ populations, youth, and people with disabilities across the Pacific Northwest — a region facing one of the most significant acute hazard risks in the world.
A defining feature of the OCF project has been its deliberate effort to reach communities that are often left out of hazard planning and research. Latinx residents make up approximately 10% of Oregon's coastal population and are disproportionately vulnerable to coastal hazards due to their employment in exposed industries, lower adaptive capacity, language barriers, and systemic racism. The OCF team partnered with Consejo Hispano, the Arcoiris Cultural Center, Centro De Ayuda, and OSU Extension to conduct focus groups, surveys, and emergency preparedness workshops conducted in Spanish, with childcare and meals provided and participants compensated for their time and expertise. These efforts reached over 100 training participants and uncovered critical gaps — including that many Latinx residents would avoid seeking out police, fire stations, or other official emergency response centers due to safety concerns related to deportation or discrimination, preferring instead to seek help at familiar places that they trust and are part of their social networks such as churches and specific community-based organizations.
These findings directly reshaped the research. The Envision model was modified to evaluate hazard risks to community-defined assets rather than only government-designated critical facilities, and targeted adaptation strategies were co-developed to protect or relocate the assets most valued by marginalized communities. The project also extended its inclusion work to LGBTQ+ coastal residents, finding that this group has also safety concerns related to whom is distributing aid and help during or after a disaster. The project found that some LGBTQ+ coastal residents would rather stay in unsafe conditions rather than seeking out help or shelter in places where they may be discriminated against.
Community partnership was not an afterthought in the OCF project — it was the foundation. From the project's inception, the team co-designed the research framework with a Community Advisory Council comprising federal and state agency employees, county commissioners, planners, emergency managers, NGO representatives, and tribal partners. Over the life of the project, the Advisory Council met formally 11 times, with dozens of additional informal interactions, contributing to scenario co-design, shaping research priorities, and evaluating results. Most original Advisory Council members remained engaged throughout the project's entire duration, and several continue to serve on the Community Advisory Council for the Cascadia CoPes Hub and a related Sea Grant project— a testament to the genuine reciprocity of these relationships.
Beyond the Advisory Council, OCF researchers embedded themselves in coastal communities by getting to know coastal residents through community events and activities such as cooking classes, vaccine clinics, heritage celebrations, pride festivals, county fairs, and powwows to build trust before conducting research. Community-based organizations were and continue to be treated as equal partners — compensated for their time, included as authors on publications, and were instrumental in the co-development of research direction and study design such as development of interview protocols as well as participant recruitment. This approach produced research that was not only more accurate and relevant, but that communities were invested in using. As Meg Reed of Oregon's Coastal Management Program noted, “the personal relationships and trust built over years with the OCF team made their data products meaningfully more useful for real policy decisions.”
The Oregon Coastal Futures Project is a direct expression of OSU's Land Grant mission. It was initiated in response to a call from Oregon's coastal communities for better science to support planning decisions, and every aspect of the project was designed to ensure that the knowledge produced would be useful and accessible to the people who need it most. The team delivered more than 40 presentations to Oregon coastal lawmakers, public interest groups, state agencies, academic conferences, and informal community events including Science on Tap pub talks. Project researchers contributed directly to the Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment, testified before legislative committees, and worked alongside state agencies including DLCD, DOGAMI, ODOT, and the Oregon Office of Emergency Management to translate research findings into policy tools.
The education dimension of the Land Grant mission is equally reflected in the project's commitment to training the next generation of community-engaged scientists. Over the course of the project, more than a dozen graduate students and postdoctoral scholars received hands-on training in transdisciplinary, community-engaged research — and many have gone on to positions at federal agencies, state governments, and universities where they continue this type of work. The OCF project also extended this commitment through an undergraduate fellowship program prioritizing students from underrepresented backgrounds, giving them meaningful entry points into a field that will shape Oregon's coastal future.
Training the next generation of transdisciplinary scientists was a central objective of the OCF project from the start. Graduate students and postdocs were not peripheral to the work — they led research threads, co-presented findings to legislators and community partners, participated in Advisory Council meetings, and co-authored peer-reviewed publications. The project produced more than a dozen alumni who have gone on to impactful careers: students now hold positions at the EPA, NIST, Oregon Emergency Management, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, among others. This trajectory reflects an intentional investment in mentorship and in exposing early-career researchers to the full arc of community-engaged science.
For the communities the project served, the sense of belonging was cultivated through deliberate choices about how research was conducted. The message embedded in every interaction was that coastal residents — including those who are often made to feel invisible in formal planning processes — are essential, valued members of the team working toward a safer Oregon coast.
The OCF team developed and refined a set of engagement practices specifically designed to reach communities that are often excluded from research and planning processes. Rather than inviting community members to university settings or public meetings, the team went to where people already gathered — cooking classes, heritage celebrations, vaccine clinics, and other community events large and small. Interview and survey protocols were co-developed with community-based organization partners who understood the cultural context and had existing trust with residents. All materials were translated and culturally adapted, not just linguistically translated, with community partners reviewing and refining content for accuracy and resonance.
Compensation was treated as a matter of respect and equity, not an optional add-on. Community partners were paid for their time and expertise, participants received grocery store gift cards, and community-based organizations received direct or in-kind support. The team also learned to be flexible and responsive — when focus group findings revealed that Latinx residents would not go to police stations or fire stations in an emergency, the researchers changed the model rather than changing the message. This willingness to let community knowledge reshape scientific assumptions is perhaps the most important inclusive practice the team developed, and it is now being carried forward and expanded in the Cascadia CoPes Hub.
The OCF project has generated tangible impacts at multiple scales. At the policy level, project findings are directly informing Oregon's review of coastal armoring policy, have shaped sea level rise guidance distributed to local governments, and have been incorporated into the Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment. The former Oregon State Resilience Officer noted that OCF research was included in his transition paper to the next resilience officer, and agency partners from DLCD, DOGAMI, and ODOT have all described the project's outputs as filling critical gaps in their decision-making capacity. The Navigating Coastal Hazards Workshop convened by members OCF team over the last three years has drawn approximately 150 researchers, local, state, and federal agencies and consultants working on coastal issues in Oregon, Washington, California British Columbia.
At the community level, over 100 Latinx residents participated in emergency preparedness trainings, bilingual training videos featuring local community members as actors were produced and distributed via social media, and go-bags were distributed to workshop participants to support immediate preparedness actions. Within OSU, the project has demonstrated that community-engaged, transdisciplinary research can achieve both scientific excellence — more than 20 peer-reviewed publications and $19 million in follow-on NSF funding — and genuine community benefit. It has helped establish OSU as a national leader in convergent coastal hazards research and has strengthened partnerships with Sea Grant, NSF, and a wide range of community organizations that extend well beyond any single grant cycle.
The OCF project has received significant national recognition that reflects both the quality of the science and the integrity of the community engagement approach. In 2024, the project received the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Engagement Scholarship Award from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and the Engagement Scholarship Consortium — one of the most prestigious honors in the field of community-engaged university research. The project was also a finalist for the C. Peter Magrath Award, another national recognition for community-university partnerships. These honors recognize not just publications or funding, but the sustained, reciprocal relationships with communities and the genuine co-production of knowledge that the OCF team prioritized throughout the project.
Statewide, the project's influence on Oregon coastal policy and its integration into state assessment processes signal that the work has achieved the credibility and trust needed to shape real decisions. The fact that the original $881,000 Oregon Sea Grant investment catalyzed $19 million in NSF funding for a regional hub is itself a form of recognition — a validation that the OCF model of convergent, community-engaged science is worth scaling. Taken together, these recognitions affirm that addressing the needs of underserved coastal communities through rigorous, inclusive research is not only the right thing to do, but a highly effective approach that the broader scientific community has noticed.
What gives the OCF team the most hope is the people — both the community partners who have shown up year after year to share their knowledge and shape the research, and the students and early career scientists who have been trained through this project and are now carrying its values into new roles and new places. The relationships built through OCF are the kind that outlast individual grants, and watching former students now working at the EPA, NIST, and Oregon Emergency Management apply what they learned on the coast gives a real sense of continuity and impact. The expansion of this work through the Cascadia CoPes Hub to tribes, youth, LGBTQ+ communities, and people with disabilities across the Pacific Northwest represents a genuine opportunity to build on what was learned and reach communities that have been even further from the center of hazard planning conversations.
The greatest need going forward is sustained investment in the time and resources that authentic community engagement requires. The OCF experience demonstrated clearly that meaningful co-production cannot be rushed or compressed to fit grant timelines, and that building trust with communities — especially those that have been harmed by extractive research in the past — requires consistency, humility, and genuine reciprocity. OSU has a unique opportunity, as a Land Grant university with deep roots across Oregon, to institutionalize this kind of engagement as a core practice rather than a special project. The coast will continue to face chronic coastal erosion and flooding as well as Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake — the question is whether the most vulnerable communities will be ready, and the OCF project has shown that getting them ready requires bringing them fully into the process of preparing.
