SBIR Phase I: A Stakeholder Management Platform for Environmental Justice

The broader impact/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project is to break the negative feedback loop of multi-generation, multi-sector cascading impacts of environmental and social injustices by providing effective tools for engagement of underserved communities. The tide is turning as Environmental Justice policies are increasingly being adopted by governments at the federal, state, county, and regional levels - to explicitly and meaningfully engage underserved communities early and often in all regulatory and planning phases.

This project addresses the initial challenges around automating the process of identifying, building trust with, and elevating community-based organizations and underserved communities with the goal of accelerating the implementation of equitable climate-smart infrastructure projects. The proposed innovation will help agencies scale up their reach, accuracy, and efficiency of community engagement, establish and build trust with underserved communities, and accelerate community participation in planning and infrastructure projects throughout the United States.

The project helps community leaders raise their voice and visibility with agencies, gain access to timely information across different agencies, and gain access to funding opportunities. Successfully implementing this project has the potential to reduce cost burdens on communities, while also supporting economic empowerment in communities where the project is deployed.

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will demonstrate feasibility of using TextAI (Natural Language Processing using Artificial Intelligence (AI)) and GeoAI (Geographic Information Systems using AI) to perform location-based stakeholder discovery of Community Based Organizations (CBOs). This goal poses technical challenges: high variation in unstructured data; quality of manual annotations; complexity and diversity of attributes; and disambiguation of location identification and social challenges.

The communities of interest have low trust in the government and technology and need transparent data sharing and ethics. The key innovation is a workflow that combines deep technology development with participatory and inclusive co-design with community-based organizations and government. If the project succeeds, it will have substantial payback for underserved communities.

The first use case is with the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which has the right size and scope of jurisdiction to capture variations in data type, stakeholders, and users - and includes a highly diverse set of demographics across urban and rural communities - while also being small enough to manage its data.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.