Collaborative Research as Action: Advancing Rural Environmental Justice,Water Equity,and Well-Being in Eastern NC

Abstract

The environmental quality in Sampson County, North Carolina (NC), is degraded by numerous polluting facilities. These facilities pose a contamination threat to groundwater quality, which poses a public health concern in a county where over half of its residents rely on private wells. This case study describes the work of a community–university partnership to understand private well water quality and water-related inequities across Sampson County. From March 2021 to March 2023, a local environmental advocacy organization, partnered with faculty and students from two public universities in NC, established a water quality testing (WQT) team. The team tested approximately 180 samples for metals, ions, fecal coliform, and/or perfluoroalkyl substance and conducted surveys and semi-structured interviews with residents to learn more about their sensory experience of their water. The team’s applied research presented unique opportunities for residents to actively learn about their water quality and factors that may impact it. This work also encouraged community mobilizing, organizing, and advocacy to local and state officials for infrastructure investments and more well testing in the county. These opportunities were due, in large part, to the strong local leaders within the WQT team, the team’s ongoing efforts to establish a strong and equitable partnership, the team’s interdisciplinary approach to the work, and our adaptability to change. Residents, community partners, and university-based researchers were transformed through the research process, underscoring potential for community-driven research to serve as an important action in and of itself.

INTRODUCTION

Sampson County, North Carolina (NC; United States), boasts a multi-billion-dollar agricultural-based economy, in addition to a robust recreational wildlife and fishing enterprise. The County also experiences severe degradation of its surface, air, and water quality due to hog and poultry concentrated animal feeding operations, meat-processing plants, the state’s largest landfill, and a wood pellet mill^1,2,3 and is located within the Cape Fear River basin—the subject of recent concerns over perfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) contamination. Residents have reported health challenges and/or loss of quality of life due to poor air quality, contaminated surface water and private wells, and depreciated land and home values due to nuisances (like odors and truck traffic noise).^4,5,6 Thus, for years, Sampson County residents and others from communities across Eastern NC have demanded information, meaningful action, and accountability by regulatory agencies to address environmental hazards in the region.

Over the last two decades, collaborative research in environmental justice (EJ) communities in eastern NC has been effective in uncovering human health impacts of pollution sources.^7,8,9 Building from that work, this case study describes and reflects upon ongoing applied research to assess water quality for private well users in Sampson County via a partnership (the origins of which are described in a subsequent section) between a local environmental advocacy organization and two public universities. Within a 2-year period starting in 2021, our water quality testing (WQT) team conducted approximately 180 well tests paired with surveys via meaningful engagement with residents. Our team’s progress has been slow, and we have much to learn from residents and one another; however, we have achieved some measure of “success” (in quotes because successes are hard in this work, and we do not mean to overstate). Preliminary findings from our WQT have prompted involvement by the NC Department of Environmental Quality to perform testing of private wells in the county^10,11 and provide alternative water sources for many of the county residents. ¹² Furthermore, the community partner’s advocacy (along with that of many other Sampson County leaders) has helped bring investment in public water infrastructure,^13,14 state-supported well testing, ¹⁵ and water treatment ¹⁶ to the county as well as increased public engagement in environmental education and governance.

The call for this special issue commenced with the provocation: “Action research, community science, and participatory approaches may deliver on the environmental side of environmental justice (EJ), but do they deliver on the justice?” We hear this critique, but we also want to trouble it a bit as we meaningfully address it. Rather than keeping the research on one side, for the sake of objectivity^17,18,19 and the action on the other, our team approaches collaborative research as action—one of the many types of action that needs to be undertaken to, indeed, deliver on justice. We suggest this not to let researchers (namely, ourselves!) off the hook in the struggle for doing research that matters. Instead, we mean to hold ourselves accountable for generating research as a mechanism for advancing environmental equity and justice. In this work, we invite a new framing: Can research be a part of the action? The goal would be two-fold: 1) to support impacted communities in mounting an “evidence-base” to use for their community-led efforts and advocacy to public officials and, 2) to improve the relevance and accountability of university-based research to impacted communities.

IMPETUS AND DESCRIPTION OF OUR WQT APPROACH

Private wells are an unregulated source of drinking water for 15% of U.S. residents, ²⁰ and NC has the highest number of well users in the country, totaling 2.4 million residents. ²¹ A majority of private well users live in “rural” (inclusive of black, brown, indigenous, traditional, mixed heritage, and some settler) communities that lack financial or physical access to public water services. In some cases, this stems from racially discriminatory underbounding, which draws communities of color out of municipal boundaries, and thus excludes them from basic services as well as municipal voting rights.^22,23 The consequent self-reliance on well drilling, testing, and maintenance, along with inadequate maintenance of on-site sanitation systems, often results in increased exposure to waterborne contaminants relative to urban counterparts.^24,25

The WQT team consists of community leaders with diverse expertise including in environmental policy and law, and sociology and social movements, and university-based teachers and researchers with expertise in environmental and public health; anthropology and sustainable development, environmental chemistry, and ecotoxicology. Undergraduate and graduate students also joined the team, some of whom went on to conduct internships and write theses in direct conversation with this work. Our work was submitted to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of Appalachian State University (#21-0188) and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (#23-1474). The study was determined to involve no more than minimal risk and was exempt from further review under Category 2. Survey, interview, public observation.

We completed five water sampling campaigns between March 2021 and March 2023, and, as we write, we are undertaking our sixth (March 2024). Because university partners live up to 5 hours away from Sampson County, we scheduled the research weekends, typically starting on Friday, collecting most of the day Saturday into Sunday morning. Residents registered for water testing by calling or emailing the community partner’s office or by completing an online WQT survey and interest form. Residents were contacted to schedule a testing time, or we would receive permission to obtain a sample from an outdoor tap or from the well directly, if the resident would not be home. Staff and volunteers with the community partner organization recruited WQT participants primarily in areas near industrialized polluting facilities, primarily the landfill and hog and poultry operations.

The team traveled in at least two vehicles, to maximize sampling. A community leader either accompanied a university-based researcher and their students or called the resident on the sampling day to let them know that members of the WQT team would be arriving soon. This allowed for WQT team members to meet residents and hear their experiences firsthand and for residents to learn more about the local community organization. En route, we built rapport. Staff and volunteers from the community organization shared multi-generational stories about growing up in their hometowns, while showing key sites (e.g., ranging from places of worship and natural beauty to places of animal enclosure and former enslavement).

At residents’ homes, we introduced ourselves and the research. We provided verbal and written information about who we are, how to reach us, what to expect next, and about our ethical responsibilities to research participants. While one team member collected the water sample, another conducted a brief survey and/or semi-structured interview. The social scientists on the WQT team designed the survey and interview guide to learn about residents’ observations and concerns about their water, their experiences with potential polluting industries, years of residency in the home, how they used and sensed their water, and details about the well and related water infrastructure.

About half of the participants completed a survey online during WQT sign up, and the other half completed it when the team visited their home to collect the water samples. In the latter context, the interviews were semi-structured in the sense that team members used the survey questions as a basis for conversation, but also ensured space for topics driven by residents’ own questions, observations, and expertise. We introduced follow-up questions, and most importantly, engaged in active listening and observation. The opportunity to visit residents’ homes door-to-door was an invaluable foundation for relationship building that also enabled the team to see, smell, and hear a slice of residents’ daily lives. As we were welcomed into residents’ homes, we got to see framed photos of family members lining living room walls and meet and hear about grandchildren while sampling water over kitchen sinks. We were also shown stained sinks, dog dishes, and laundry; damaged water infrastructure; and stacks of bottled water stored in kitchen corners. We smelled sulfur and feces emanating from the pipes; and we heard about residents’ concerns for their health and for their dignity.

The water samples were stored on ice until they were returned to the university partners’ labs, where they were refrigerated until analysis. Total coliform and E. coli analyses were performed using Colilert/Quantity 2000, and results were communicated to the community partner the day after the samples were tested. In most cases, positive bacteriological results prompted a second sample collection to confirm results. Because of the time-sensitive nature of this assay, which was challenging to adhere to during multi-day sampling campaigns, one of the university researchers worked with the community partner to establish a testing lab in their office space so that samples could be analyzed locally within the recommended hold time.

The timeline for conducting chemical analysis depended on student availability to run the samples, instrument availability, and availability of the university researchers to conduct a thorough analysis of the results with their students, and to lead the write-up of the WQT results for returning. Due to these time constraints, which reflected the clear need for a team learning curve, results from the first sampling campaign were not returned for 10 months. The timeline for returning results from subsequent campaigns was slightly shorter, but still far less than ideal.

We returned results in the form of individualized letters that begin with a “Big Picture” message explaining whether the team has concerns about the water quality and whether action needs to be taken. In addition to the water quality report, we included the state’s recommended timeline for well testing, information on local well technicians, and pamphlets developed by the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS) describing different water treatment technologies for a given contaminant. One of the university researchers and community leader also spoke by phone to residents who had concerning results to ensure that they understood their results and to discuss various treatment options in real-time.

Analysis of the survey and semi-structured interviews is ongoing and involves, firstly, the timely process of integrating and organizing the results—from online results, to various hand-written iterations—into a master spreadsheet. We are then summarizing descriptive statistics (e.g., % of residents on well water versus public sources; # reporting sensory concerns) and identifying themes that emerged from the responses; for example, where residents point to concerns about personal safety; basic dignity; a collective sense of degradation in community health or where they share their own interpretation of what constitutes structural injustice.

Beyond reporting results to individual households, the university-based partners presented water quality results at a monthly meeting hosted by the community partner, where information about upcoming decisions on permitting processes and new initiatives for industrialized bioenergy development were also discussed.

We believe the components most critical to the success of our sampling campaigns and more broadly to our collaboration have been (1) the strong local leadership, (2) our work to develop an equitable partnership, (3) the interdisciplinarity of the team, and (4) our willingness to embrace the change that undoubtedly comes as a part of a collaborative endeavor for social and ecological justice.

PROMOTING STRONG LOCAL ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP

In 2018, one of our community partners, a native of the county, returned home. She quickly learned about ongoing research and community organizing centered on the county landfill.^26,27 She began organizing frequent meetings of Sampson Co. residents to discuss a range of environmental health concerns in the county, and engaged with key local and state officials to learn how public resources and decisions could be leveraged to improve living conditions for Sampson Co. residents. Two years later, she co-founded an environmental advocacy organization with the mission of improving the environments where Sampson Co. residents live, work, and play by providing scientific, educational, and planning resources and working at the intersections of environmental health and civil rights.

Another of the community leaders on the WQT team, also a native of Sampson County, was recruited to the Board of Directors of the advocacy organization to further ground the organization in local knowledge. During the pandemic, she returned home to complete her graduate studies remotely. Originally focusing on social movements in the rural south, the community leader narrowed her dissertation topic to environmental justice in Black rural communities as she became more involved in local organizing and research. Like so many other residents in the county, she had lived with the threat of environmental hazards exposure. For example, her parents, ministers of an African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in the county, received “DO NOT DRINK” notices due to elevated nitrates in their church’s well, which is adjacent to an agricultural field where hog manure is sprayed.

The range of career experiences of the community leaders on the WQT team is an asset to this university–community partnership, and more importantly, to the community organizing in the county and beyond. Their career experiences inform their understanding of processes and structures associated with federal and state environmental regulations and compliance. Furthermore, having community leaders on the team with strong qualitative research background and a strong orientation toward community-driven inquiry and community accountability is another significant asset to this work. As Sampson County natives and engaged residents, both community leaders on the team understand the local culture and geopolitical landscape and have well-established social and professional networks. Our experience is consistent with previous studies that emphasize the importance of community leadership for improving the research by making it more accessible and relevant to impacted communities, ²⁸ supporting creative methods of educating others about the issue, ²⁹ employing media advocacy and for identifying key levers that can drive structural change. ³⁰ The WQT team’s success and other positive actions that Sampson Co. residents have experienced in a relatively short time span are attributed to strong community leadership.

Ensuring the sustainment of the community partner organization’s work beyond this specific partnership, is also important to the university-based researchers. To that end, they have provided technical assistance on other activities beyond the research, including garnering resources to enhance local tour-based storytelling, writing grants for general operating funds, developing documents to support grants management, among other activities. Interestingly, resource development and technical assistance ³¹ are important strategies for community capacity building that are not widely reported in the literature on community-engaged EJ research partnerships. ³²

DEVELOPING AN AUTHENTIC AND EQUITABLE PARTNERSHIP

Our team has navigated our work across many differences, including differences in epistemologies (see next section on interdisciplinarity), orientations toward community-engaged EJ and theories of change. Privilege and power differences are also evident. For example, the university-based researchers have their effort on the project paid/accounted for, they have access to students and administrative personnel and grants management support, along with opportunities for rapid funding through university grants, and they may receive recognition for their work via awards and media coverage. Many other community–university partnerships highlight inequities in financial, human, and material resources.^33,34,35 The university partners attempted to ameliorate these differences by applying for university grants on behalf of the community partner such that 50%–100% of funding went to the community partner. They also provided pre-award support in drafting grant materials and post-grant support with reporting. Students were encouraged to use practicum, capstone, or independent study requirements to work on activities relevant to the community partner that benefited the organization. The university partners have also nominated the community leaders for awards and recommended them for paid participation in workshops, conference panels, and other activities that would enhance the visibility of issues in Sampson County and the work of community partner organization and other key leaders.

Another layer of privilege that has encouraged humility among team members is the fact that most of them are not facing immediate threats to their water quality. When water tests are conducted, the university partners are further buffered by the fact that they do not live in the county and endure inquiries from residents about the results of their water tests or when action will be taken to address their concerning water quality results. Such distance and delays in returning water quality results from our first sampling campaign and in providing water treatment to those with concerning results underscored the need for the team to rethink its approach to sample analysis and report back to include local testing capacity, online data report back, and reliance on free water testing by state agencies. Other studies have echoed a difference in the tolerance for long project timelines and the urgency for change that impacted community members express compared to researchers. ³⁶

NAVIGATING INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTER-INSTITUTIONAL COLLABORATION

The WQT team is interdisciplinary by design, and that disciplinary diversity has led to rich and transformative partnership development, and the evolution of our research questions and process. Diversity in approach has also been hard; it forces us to ensure transparency given that we each approach EJ differently. We have also had to reckon with very different institutional cultures that team members are accountable to and for—in addition to being accountable to one another and to communities. Too often accountability to research participants comes last, and it has been a real struggle not to repeat that trend (see our discussion on results returning).

As a diverse team of action-oriented researchers, our interest in water quality exceeds what we might find (or not) in our lab-based analysis of the samples. We also want and need to understand residents’ experiences. We are deeply interested in and committed to improving understandings of how multiple social and environmental harms accumulate. Thus, we understand, for example, that the matter of disparate exposure might also be a matter of strategic exclusion from county-level democratic decision-making processes.

It has been challenging to make interdisciplinarity a meaningful reality. Take the example whereby when most members of the team (university and community-based) refer to “the data,” they by default mean the quantitative results of the lab tested water samples rather than the survey or interview results (quantitative or qualitative). This trend is not just a matter of syntax; the former data has been elevated in descriptions of the project; in invitations to collaborate on expansions of the project; and in the funding that sustains the project now and into the future. As a related point there is a lack of time, space, and funding devoted to ensure that we integrate the lab tested and qualitative survey data to ensure a convergent approach. To the extent that integration does happen, it has fallen on the underfunded social scientists among us to ensure it. At the same time, we contend with the fact that residents asked for WQT; they did not ask for surveys and interviews. This further underscores, not only the need to ensure informed consent, to make it clear that we will test participants’ water regardless of their participation in the survey, but also the duty to show why the social science components matter within and beyond the team. It is worth noting that other researchers conducting mixed methods research to understand the cumulative impacts of environmental and other types of stressors on communities are primarily using convergent approaches, with varied success in having qualitative and quantitative results “share the stage.” ³⁷

Thus, we actively reflect as a team on how community engagement improves and enables the research by informing (and directly forming) the research foci, questions, and approaches. For example, in those cases where we did not find contamination exceedances in the water based on lab analysis, we did not accept this as “research is over, nothing to see here.” We listened to residents’ concerns, and we are now working to analyze these concerns according to themes and patterns. The social sciences provide a foundation for ensuring the research is driven by relations, not just a search for a “smoking gun” of environmental fact.

EMBRACING CHANGE

“All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.” Octavia Butler, from Parable of the Sower.

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s most frequently quoted phrase about the inevitability of change is evident in many facets of our work. In the case of the WQT team members, we are all continually changed as we hear residents’ stories about their experiences with poor water quality and as we review the results of their WQT. With each interview, home visit or summary of “concerning test results,” we recommit to finding sustainable improvements to water quality for the residents who trust us with their water samples, and we recommit to uncovering and dismantling the structural barriers that contribute to water quality disparities in the county. Our team’s outreach will soon expand to reach Spanish-speaking populations who have expressed concerns about their water quality and described discriminatory exclusion from county services. Our scheduled door-to-door water collection approach has changed to also include drop-off of self-collected water samples. The team is also working on developing an online reporting system for returning water quality results.

Beyond these changes in our recruitment, sampling and report back, the team has embraced the involvement of new “players” in Sampson County. The community partner organization now has approximately eight other ongoing research projects with a range of partners from other universities (in-state and out of state), non-profit and legal organizations. Some university partners might have an inclination to become territorial, especially given the time required to develop trusted relationships with community partners and the real possibility (perhaps already realized) that residents will experience research fatigue without the requisite benefits. Nonetheless, the university-based researchers on the WQT team have welcomed, and in some cases, initiated the involvement and potential for collaboration with other researchers as an important part of understanding the cumulative impacts of the various environmental, social, and economic threats facing Sampson County residents. To enable this, the community partner organization has convened meetings of its research partners to maintain clear communication, transparency, and potential for collaboration (or at least conversation) across the efforts.

The landscape of EJ organizing in Sampson County is also shifting, with new grassroots organizers/organizations leading the charge on opposing specific pollution sources in the county, including the landfill and the wood pellet facility. The community partner organization views the involvement of new leaders, with different approaches to seeking change, as generally positive and aims to support their efforts by helping the new leaders connect with organizations, funders, researchers, and other resources that may be useful for their efforts. The leaders are also invited to monthly meetings so that they can engender communication about what each group/leader is working on.

Finally, the landscape of EJ research and organizing nationally is changing. Environmental and climate justice have become “hot topics” with federal funding through the Justice40 Initiative and with private funders encouraging research that involves community collaboration. We hope the enthusiasm for EJ does not wane with changes in state and federal administration and with shifts in funding priorities and that the focus does not become watered down to technological fixes at the expense of addressing power. Our team encourages researchers and funders to think critically about how they define EJ research and authentic community collaboration. Simply studying environmental exposure or disparate health outcomes in communities of color or low-income populations does not in and of itself constitute EJ research. EJ research that will change the status quo is community-driven, action-oriented, and aims to dismantle structural discrimination and systems that give rise to environmental health inequities. EJ researchers who aim to change the status quo will advocate for community power building, democratic decision making, targeted and reparative investment, and other system-level changes that move communities closer to justice.

CONCLUSION

As environmental and climate threats in rural areas persist, a community-university research partnership to investigate residents’ exposure and experience is one action (among many) to generate new knowledge and meaningful change. We believe that partnerships that center equity and community needs can be especially transformative. They can support residents in making sense and meaning of their experiences, generate new qualitative and/or quantitative data about environmental quality and public health for residents and local and state officials to use for decision making, and support community education and mobilization toward shared goals. For those facilitating the research, the process of learning across difference from one another and from impacted residents involved in the research can be meaningful and requires humility, direction from strong local leadership, a resolve to remain accountable to the community, and an ability to adapt to change.

AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS

C.G.W.: investigation, resources, data curation, writing—original draft, review and editing, project administration, supervision, funding acquisition; R.C.W.: conceptualization, investigation, resources, data curation, review and editing, project administration, supervision, funding acquisition; S.W.W.: conceptualization, investigation, resources, project administration, supervision, funding acquisition; D.K.: investigation, data curation, review and editing; C.M.B.: investigation, resources, data curation, review and editing, supervision, resources; S.R.T.: investigation, resources, supervision, funding acquisition.