Liz Crocker: “Our failures are on there too” — lessons from AGU’s Thriving Earth Exchange

On this first episode of Season 8 of Questions of the Day, I sat down with Dr. Liz Crocker, Director of the Thriving Earth Exchange at the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC, to better understand how the program actually works and how they are tracking impact. When Dr. Crocker describes the Exchange, she starts with its core goal: “to help people build healthier, stronger, more resilient communities using science,” but she is clear that the work begins with listening. “We start with communities,” she told me, explaining that the program focuses first on “what they care about, what’s important to them, what they need,” before bringing in scientific expertise. Over the course of the conversation, it became clear that the Exchange is intentionally designed as a connective structure—what I describe as “the glue in the middle”—that helps communities and scientists find each other, build trust, and work together over 12–18 month projects.

The interview took place at AGU’s headquarters in Washington DC.

Crocker walked me through how the Exchange operates in practice. Communities apply to the program and are paired with trained community science fellows who help build relationships, refine ideas, and co-develop projects. Scientists are brought in later, and importantly, “the community always gets the final say in which experts get brought on.” She emphasized that this structure emerged from years of trial and error, noting that early on AGU heard repeatedly about “that lack of ability to have a structure, that glue in the middle.” Scientists, she said, often knew their work had real-world applications but “didn’t necessarily know how to do that work with communities,” while communities struggled to translate lived experience into researchable questions. The Exchange exists to prepare both sides and support them when they “run into barriers.”

Looking ahead, she outlined priorities that include expanding Spanish-speaking and Indigenous community partnerships, building case studies and videos, and creating resources so communities can eventually “do this on their own” without depending on the AGU.

Questions for thought: What types of connective infrastructure are required to sustainably bring scientists and communities together? Who gets to define impact when outcomes are local, diverse, and difficult to quantify? How should lessons be documented and disseminated when projects stall, pause, or fail? How ready do communities and scientists need to be before collaboration begins, and who decides that readiness? And how should programs like Thriving Earth Exchange balance scaling themselves vs enabling others to adapt their model locally?

Fanuel Muindi

Fanuel Muindi is a former neuroscientist turned civic science ethnographer. He is a professor of the practice in the Department of Communication Studies within the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University, where he leads the Civic Science Media Lab. Dr. Muindi received his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and PhD in Organismal Biology from Morehouse College and Stanford University, respectively. He completed his postdoctoral training at MIT.