Changing the World from The Corridor

From a young age, Dr. Tamara Marcus wanted nothing more than to leave Cedar Rapids in her rear view mirror. Like so many youth transitioning to adulthood, she found her first opportunity to experience life beyond the City of Five Seasons by way of education. After graduating from Kennedy, she embarked on an undergraduate program at the University of Minnesota followed by graduate school at the University of New Hampshire that provided more than just a trip to the north and east United States, as she explained to me in an interview in early March.

“My first opportunity to do research was as a Rotary Fellow; I took a year off between sophomore and junior year, and was a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow doing research in the Indian Himalayas. I was putting myself through university, it was the only way I could study abroad. It was very traditional climate research; we have a climate crisis we need to do something about together.”

After graduation, Dr. Marcus returned to India as a Fulbright Fellow to study Hindi with an additional three month fellowship to continue her climate work. During this trip, she had a realization that much of the work being done to address issues in places around the world was not inclusive of the ideas, desires, information, and human capital of the people indigenous to the area.

“The people who live in these regions have questions of their own, environmental problems they want to solve. I was connecting with local nonprofits, local schools, local government to try to figure out what skill sets I had that might provide assistance and answers to their questions and problems they wanted to address. That shift was very informative for my PhD. The entire third chapter of my dissertation was looking at why non Indigenous researchers who worked in the Swedish Arctic weren’t collaborating with the Indigenous communities that lived there every day for generations.”

It feels very colonial, no?

“Super colonial, super extractive. There was only one class in my entire program that was actually training me to think about the implications of our research, and it was new - my advisor wrote the grant to do it. Now I am developing a training program for non Indigenous scientists that is informed and led by Indigenous people to teach cultural competencies and figure out how we can build better relationships and partnerships to solve problems together.”

Did you always know you were going to grow up and be a scientist? Was travel a catalyst?

“It’s a both/and. I spent a year of undergrad thinking I was going to be premed, and realized ‘I don't actually like this but I do like research - what else can I do?’ It was the result of genuinely wanting to help people. Not to save people, but to empower people to be changemakers of their own lives and realities.”

To that point, one of the things I’ve noticed is once you leave this very insular environment, you start to realize that these boundaries that exist between Black and Indigenous People of Color and STEM fields aren’t real…. That there have been BIPOC people leading the work, people who founded these fields of study, and it’s just unusual to see racial representation, specifically Black representation, in leadership positions in these fields in the place that we are from.

Did you think about that when you returned to Iowa and took on the work of Sustainability Director for Linn County? You’re building out a department that never existed before, in a leadership position, and challenging the status quo just by showing up who you are.

“It definitely did. It took a whole global pandemic to bring me back to Iowa, and I’m glad I returned. I think (these experiences) helped me to understand that the change I wanted to see in the world and the change I wanted to be a part of was something that I could probably do the best in my hometown.

I know why non Indigenous researchers are not collaborating with the Indigenous population… because it’s work, and it's work that is not valued in the same way that publications, grants, all of these other metrics within academia are valued. The people who are doing it are doing it at the cost of these other things. I know that because I've experienced it, but you have to have data for people who run on data. My work is definitely something meant to be subversive. It’s not a lack of funding that’s the barrier, it’s not lack of interest, it’s literally lack of training and lack of support. If you build it, they will come.”

Today, Dr. Marcus and her business partner Sarah Blais are building an organization to further collaborative solutions to community environmental and social justice challenges faced by our community.

I’m thinking about you now building this organization, and what that representation means for girls who look like us in Iowa… their thoughts about what they are capable of and what they might want to pursue. Does that cross your mind?

“The Empowered Solutions Collective is the culmination of my life's work so far. Taking the strengths of each of these spheres - nonprofit, local government, small business - and putting them together in a way that accounts for the weaknesses of each of those spheres as well. Its not just about one type of marginalized person, it's every identity - every marginalized identity that exists in Iowa that I want to feel supported by this work. I think about my 18 year old self that wanted to leave Iowa so badly - what opportunities did I have where I felt like I could give my gifts? There wasn't an opportunity for me to serve the way I wanted to at that time. It's getting better in some ways, I definitely see more of those opportunities, but there's certainly not enough. That’s the collective part of our business model, finding ways for young people, queer people, Black people, Indigenous people, people with disabilities - finding ways for all people to engage in this work.”

So far, the Collective has taken on several contracts including projects with the City of Iowa City, Linn Clean Energy District, and the Academy SPS. Their firm offers sustainability and resiliency planning, fundraising for capacity limited nonprofits and small business, and project development and management.

For more information on the Empowered Solutions Collective and its founders, please visit: https://www.empoweredsolutionscollective.com/

Sofia DeMartino is a Gazette editorial fellow. sofia.demartino@thegazette.com