SciOut18 Flash Talk: Jeanne Garbarino
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-jeanne-garbarino/

I think Allison touched on a lot of points as to why it would be beneficial for graduate students and people on certain career trajectories to think about science outreach and education and science communication but I also want to point out that doing this as an institution is not charity. There is an amazing return on investment if an institution were to invest in science outreach and I'm living, breathing proof of that. So when I think about my story I really want to tell it in a way that's useful and so I was really Disan and I were walking down the street to the story Collider last night and I was sort of throwing all of my ideas at her and she sort of helped me find clarity and a single word to describe what I think really describes my experience in science outreach and that's reciprocity. So here's how my story started: So I was a postdoc here. I spent a lot of time in the lab and I also spent a lot of time doing scicomm stuff, doing outreach stuff. I volunteered for the bio bus, Lou and I and another couple of colleagues we would do this discussion series called spot on NYC. It was science on NYC and then they were like oh you can't use that word so we went to spot on NYC and we were just engaging with communities in ways that brought people together on this campus in really unique and creative ways. One of the beauties of Rockefeller is that they kind of like let you do what you want to do as long as you're not interfering with anybody else's dream of doing what they want to do so it's pretty great. So I knew I wanted to continue my career inside common outreach because those experiences were really transformative for me and I also knew I wanted to stay at Rockefeller so I made a hail-mary pitch to Marc Tessier-Lavigne who was the then president and I laid out all of these initiatives around science science communication and outreach and I said and I would like to be the person that does this, wink wink, right? And he was like oh sounds good we have an open position right now for science outreach program you should apply for it. I was like oh my god what timing. It was amazing! So I within like three days I was now the director of science outreach at Rockefeller. I was like oh my god what do I do with this. But I wasn't the first person. So we actually had an outreach program it was started in 1992 by this awesome lady Bonnie Kaiser, many of the West Coasters maybe know her. Right so and she ran something called a summer science research program for high school students. This is where we take a small portion of high school students that are top of their class and bring them in for seven weeks and they do some sort of research with one of the labs here all over Rockefeller and I thought that was a really great start but I knew that those kids that were already science interested they were already being coached by parents that were really invested in their time and invested in their futures where maybe not the kids that could really use the science outreach. I knew that from my own experience how hard it was for me to sort of break out of my culture in my sort of home life where my parents are you know I'm a product of a teenage pregnancy. My parents you know they have a salary job or an hourly job and you know they're like why don't you just go to work. This is what you do, you graduate college, you go to work, right? They didn't understand this whole thing so I knew the uphill battle and so I wanted to help more kids like that. So I knew the first thing I had to do was beg for space. So I went to the person who's in charge of space here at Rockefeller and every day I went to his office for six months and I said I would like some space now. And he's like okay I'll think about it. I would like to some space now. Okay I'll think about it. And finally he was like fine. Okay so first lesson is be super annoying because squeaky squeaky wheels get the oil right? But what I haven't mentioned yet is the vision of the development office. Okay so the development office for me was absolutely key. There's a woman who runs the development office her name is Marni Inhofe. She is basically she doesn't know this but like I bow to her. She is my mentor. She is the smartest person I've ever met in my life and she sees the potential that no one else sees and with her support it really give gave me a path to building RockEDU and so once I got this space Marni sees this potential and then allows her team to start helping me in coaching me better understand the institutional infrastructure. I came in as a scientist. I had the backing of the science community already. I got I know the lingo, I've been in meetings, you know I sort of have that support but what I didn't understand is how to integrate a program into the infrastructure and the Development Office provided me that clarity. They have been mentoring me for many many years and without them I wouldn't be here and so Marni helped me get a my first bit of funding from a foundation and with that I was able to hire a full-time administrator and another scientist to help run a program called Lab Experiences. She even coined this thing called LAB initiative: learning at the bench and I like she's a genius. I just love her. So we have this thing called lab initiative and it allowed me to start building up some hands-on programming to recruit people from the communities that I really wanted to serve and so I started working with teachers and I started asking them to bring their kids into the lab and doing some stuff and while and we did what we knew right and as the teachers would come in we would host these classrooms of students. We would stop the teachers and say tell us what we did wrong. Tell us how we can do better. What do you actually need? And over the course of time we started building up this program and iterating failing and iterating and failing and iterating until we're sort of getting it right now I think. Odaelys gets much more credit than I do. She runs the lab experiences. So she so Marni sees this and we are deciding that you know what this is a really successful situation let's do more. Right so we started thinking about ways that we can synergize and we know that science outreach is something that donors really can connect with. So I started doing these things with the development office where I would attend some of these really high-end development events and talk to the people there and sort of get them interested in the way we are approaching science outreach at Rockefeller and that allowed them to sort of have a better insight into how they or if they might want to add support to the science here. And so we started doing this thing called Science Saturday, which is a festival for families around the the New York area. You know it's just a one-day thing but it's a really big endeavor and it allows us to recruit new donors to the campus. They see the campus. They see the scientists. We have about 35 to 40 different science stations run by actual scientists. And by the way what happened with Science Saturday is that it created a sense of community on this campus that was never really fully realized prior. So people are coming out of like the labs the woodwork of the labs to do this thing and they're saying to themselves I've never interacted with my colleagues the way I interact with them you know when I interact with them in a lecture setting it's really you know this very dry situation but what I'm doing this as part of science outreach what I'm doing feels so fulfilling. It feels so great, I feel so inspired and I feel so energized and it creates this happiness which i think is really important so the reciprocity is there for the scientists in giving them that that happiness that they might be craving even though they're like killing it on nature papers and science papers and faculty positions. This place is intense with science but there's still that sort of emptiness and science outreach really helps them to fulfill it and so so we started really building out more and more and more. So working with a development team we're you know we're using science outreach to bring in donors. We're using science outreach to train graduate students on how to teach, how to mentor, how do we have this whole thing on mentoring we we train graduate students on science communication skills. We're helping them get jobs, right. So this is the reciprocity. They come and they volunteer and they do stuff for us and then we in turn help them along their career trajectories. We are helping faculty. They now see the value that we can give them in terms of you know how they can approach their science. We are allowing them to write really rigorous broader impact statements. We are allowing them to contribute to other types of community engagement and outreach where they're actually fulfilling something. Not just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts but they're meeting some criteria that they had to meet that they didn't necessarily have a mechanism for. I also want to point out that the reciprocity doesn't just stop with you know working with development. It doesn't just stop with graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. It also the reciprocity is also really important here with our support staff. I don't know if you've noticed me like high-fiving our custodians. I don't know if you've noticed me hugging you know the people doing our catering. It's because they see also science outreach as a mechanism for their families to be involved and I am always inviting them to participate and supporting the students or their children or their families in some way and because of that and because we are an organization that sort of operates with a really small budget and kind of under the radar of a lot of things I need a lot of favors to make this stuff what it is, right. And so when I do these things for the custodial staff or the catering staff or the teams that are working behind the scenes and I'm like oh my god I need like XYZ setup like tomorrow I'm sorry you know they're like we got you right and that helps us run really smoothly too. So I think it's really important to recognize that and so lastly one of the other ROIs that I think the institution has experienced through the work that we're doing in science outreach is this sort of community relationship with with the New York City like government and and policy positions. So I don't know if you've noticed but we have this new building being built which is like a segment of 19 giant things that got sort of it's like a twenty floor skyscraper but instead of being like this it's like on top of the FDR. It was actually really incredible. They like lifted it from a barge in nineteen seconds and like dropped it on top of the FDR on these like little lego segment. But in order to get the permit for that, that is a capital improvement for this university, in order to get the permit for that they had to prove to the New York City offices that they did community engagement and that they were serving the community and guess who provided the numbers for them. Me, right. So this is a really important aspect that we're not necessarily always talking about. We always want to frame science outreach as what how we can help the community, how we can help graduate students, how we can help postdocs. We're never really thinking about it, at least in my conversations with others, we're not always thinking about it in terms of like how can we leverage this to help the university or the institution that you're working in. Right and so I just wanted to point out that the ROIs for the university are many and can be leveraged in really smart ways and I think we need to add these to the conversations. I'm gonna just end in one second and say that my amazing colleagues from the development office are here, so Ainsley, Emma, Pam, and Lisa right here in the front row. They're gonna hang out. No, these people are amazing! They've taught me if you think that this event went smoothly it's because they taught me how to do it. You know they're amazing and they're hanging out for this morning so if anybody wants wants to talk about how to leverage development or how to think about development in your context they're gonna be hanging out ready to brain dump on you if that is something that you want to talk about. So I'm gonna leave it at that. Grant how are we with time? Great, so if anybody wants to hand over some questions I'm happy to take them. So I just wanted to say Jeanne, thanks for those remarks. You really made a lot of sense and I also would like to offer the services of the communications and public affairs offices of your institutions. I don't know how the universities work but I'm at an independent research institution and run the communications function. We are looking for content. We are looking for scientists who want to share their stories and to the point of it's not just about oral communication being able to stand up in front of an audience, there are so many ways and so many products that we're thinking about now, especially in this digital world, that allow scientists to communicate and using the communications office can help train, can help provide opportunities so please reach out to your communications folks too. I was gonna ask how have you leveraged leadership of the institution to talk about outreach as an important component of what the university does? So I'm just in full transparency I'm still really working on that but I don't know if you saw but my boss gave the opening remarks yesterday and guess what I didn't ask him. He was like I would like to give the opening remarks, is that okay? And then I went and I cried you know. I was like no no it's you know I guess I guess it's fine sure. So but we're getting there and another thing that I learned is that scientists are really competitive right? So I also leverage that and with Science Saturday the lab heads are now coming out and they're like I want to because we offer rooms and we offer stations and everybody's like I want a room. No I want a room. What is what is Lieberman doing because I want to know? You know and or you know Paulie and I she's like who's doing what what is Jarvis doing because we need to we need to make sure we top that right and so so there there's a so I almost feel like nervous about what's gonna happen in the future. There it's been a slow oh there was one thing that I wanted to you bring up point up so I'm going to quote Anna Maria Sheila. I'm kind of gonna reveal my politics because I was listening to pod save America and she was on there and she said for her activism that how we really come together as a community is building people one at a time and for me I think that's how has been successful here at Rockefeller. We've been building, I've been building people one at a time. I've been talking having coffee with everybody I could have coffee with. You know figuring out ways we can synergize and it's been a long haul. I've been doing this for six years and we're finally on the radar of people and I think it's important to recognize that it will not happen overnight. It takes a lot of investment in the people Hey Sara Kobilka from the University of Arizona STEM Learning Center and I really liked your idea about the custodians and talking about bringing their families to your Saturday events and when I talked about backwards design and who's at the table at the beginning maybe that's a way to get your audience and maybe you don't have a custodian sitting at your planning meeting but what a great opportunity to bounce ideas off of somebody to see what that desired audience how they might respond. Do you ever do that? So have them sit at the table and help me plan the events? Yeah so I mean sometimes so one of the things that I'm really trying to work on is bringing some, so one of the major languages spoken here is Spanish and I'm really trying to figure out how can we do a spanish-speaking outreach. I'm not fluent. I can understand when Edwin was like clap once I like okay I know that one. Right you know but I will not answer anybody and you know so it's it's it's and I think Kyle sort of mentioned that just because you know though you you know somebody is fluent in a language doesn't mean that you understand the culture right and so I will also just want to acknowledge that. They're not necessarily at the table in the planning but I do talk to them about like what are the challenges that your student is facing? Like tell me about William. Does he like science? What does he like? And then I might do something like oh I know William likes to build things so I have this little kit in my lab that I'm like you know what it doesn't matter if it's missing. Here give this to William, you know and so those small things is what I do but I'm not necessarily saying come here and let's brainstorm about how I should plan an outreach event but maybe this is something I should do. Okay one maybe quick hold on Lisa wants to say something. Hi, my name is Lisa Crestbock and I'm in the Development Office and we want to thank Jeannie for the nice shout out. But I have to tell you obviously if you've seen her in action for us it's a major mutual appreciation society between science outreach the whole science outreach staff and the development office and it's an absolute pleasure working together but I think one of the things I just like to point out when you were talking about the president coming and other people getting involved one of the great things in terms of our office and other people being involved is that the engagement and the communication really happens and I think often you're when one's focused in education it's on how to communicate to your students and how to communicate to your boss or to different people but Jeannie really reaches out and communicates what happening here. She enables us to be her ambassadors to both to her donors and to other departments the university. It's a wonderful partnership so I think if you can communicate what you're doing as was pointed out, our donors, the people on campus, people love a great story one that they can really relate to and you all have those stories to share so I encourage you to do so. So I'm gonna I'm gonna be done okay Nikki this is like how I tell my mom that I want to be off the phone with her. I want to be done now. Okay.