Summer interns create community resources for ACEP’s Railbelt Decarbonization project

November 27, 2024

ACEP summer interns Kemi Adediran and Arana Rodriguez worked under the mentorship of Emilia Sakai Hernandez on creating community resources for the Railbelt Decarbonization project through story mapping and zine making.

Story mapping is a technique for organizing features of a product or service from the perspective of the end user. A “zine,” short for magazine, is a self-published work of text and images devoted to specialized subject matter; it serves as a communication tool to empower movements and inform the public. Both of these techniques have a low barrier to entry and encourage creative, design-based thinking.

Creating community resources is helpful. It makes ACEP’s decarbonization work more accessible to people who might not have a background in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math — or renewable energy but who want to know more about how it works and what they can do to contribute.

For the first part of the project, Adediran and Rodriguez created a series of StoryMaps — blog pages that embed their ArcGIS-made maps into articles. Through learning this technology, they were able to teach its use to high school-aged Teaching Through Technologies students and the ACEP community to share information on topics important to individuals and their communities.

The second part of this project was creating two zines intended for children and young adult audiences. The interns created zines that focus on the importance of decarbonization while highlighting artistic creations from other interns. This project helped all of the interns connect their internship work to their personal motivations for pursuing an energy internship.

Hailing from Fayetteville, North Carolina, Adediran is a chemical engineering major and senior this fall at Howard University. Driven by a deep passion for social justice, she is one of the founding members of Table 33, a local North Carolina nonprofit organization dedicated to environmental and social justice.

Adediran combined her interests in renewable energy and passion for resilient environmental practices and community outreach for her internship work.

“I've discovered that there is a significant difference between educating and empowering communities versus coming in and dictating what's best for them without understanding every perspective,” she said. “This summer, I focused on mastering the former, and I now feel much more confident in my outreach skills.”

“Since I study in DC, slowing down and immersing myself in such a unique and stunning landscape [in Alaska] has only strengthened my desire to pursue a career in environmental protection,” she added.

Rodriguez is finishing her degree as a sustainability engineering major and ethnic studies minor at the University of San Diego. She is also interested in renewable energy, as well as Indigenous rights and climate work in unique environments.

Through her internship work, Rodriguez learned about renewable energy and the intersection of humanity, nature and engineering design.

“Being able to translate technical work to the communities it affects is arguably just as important as the work itself,” she said. “There is so much opportunity in creating the bridge between different disciplines to actualize needed change for our environments and communities. This is something I have very much learned from my mentors and peers here.”

This internship is funded by the National Science Foundation through ACEP’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. View the final presentation for this project on ACEP’s YouTube Channel. For more information on this project, please contact Emilia Sakai Hernandez at eshernandez2@alaska.edu.