Maja Jeranko is an expert in helping communities respond to disaster
An interdisciplinary team with strong ties to community will help South Park, Seattle build its capacity for climate resilience
Maja Jeranko, a post-doctoral scholar with the National Science Foundation’s Cascadia Coastlines and Peoples Hazards Research Hub (Cascadia CoPes Hub) and the University of Washington (UW) Center for Disaster Resilient Communities, grew up in Slovenia, but it was in Ecuador where she got the training and experience that qualify her to help lead the new University of Washington (UW) Population Health Initiative-funded project titled “Living with Water: Co-developing strategies to protect health while adapting to sea level rise in the Duwamish Valley.”
Helping communities respond to disaster hadn’t been Jeranko’s plan when she started graduate school, but it quickly became a primary focus.
As a new master’s student with the University of Florida, Jeranko was scheduled to start field work in Ecuador in May of 2016. Unfortunately, just one month before her arrival, Ecuador was hit with a 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
“I got there planning to work with an organization that supported survivors of domestic abuse. Instead, I was asked to help with disaster response on the coast in the area that was most affected,” said Jeranko.
The experience was pivotal for her. “As I was staying in this coastal village, I saw all these researchers and government workers coming in asking questions and moving on, and people thinking ‘okay, I guess something will come out of it.’ But nothing ever came out of it, as I learned in the years to follow.” Maja determined never to do similar work, but to focus instead on trust-building and collaboration.
With encouragement from her collaborators in Ecuador, Jeranko went on to get her Ph.D. in anthropology, spending many years conducting community-engaged research in collaboration with A Mano Manaba, a local grassroots organization, based in a small fishing village. The relationships she built with community have been long-lasting and her work with A Mano Manaba is still ongoing.
After finishing her Ph.D., Maja was lured to UW to work with Nicole Errett, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, who serves on the leadership team of the Cascadia CoPes Hub and is both Director of Community Engagement for the UW Interdisciplinary Center for Exposures, Diseases, Genomics, & Environment (EDGE) and Director of the UW Center for Disaster Resilient Communities. Jeranko was excited by the opportunity to take an interdisciplinary approach to community-engaged applied disaster research.
Shortly after arriving in Seattle in the fall of 2023, Jeranko met with BJ Cummings, the Manager of Community Engagement for EDGE, who put Jeranko in touch with Paulina López, the Executive Director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition, who had grown up in Ecuador.
“There was an immediate connection,” said Jeranko. “It turns out she had been wanting to collaborate with researchers to help the community better understand what kind of flood adaptation solutions are possible above and beyond what is offered by the City of Seattle.”
Jeranko, Cummings, and López went on to develop what would ultimately become a successful proposal for the UW Population Health Initiative. While preparing their proposal, they engaged Bethany Gordon, Sameer Shah, and Celina Balderas Guzmán, assistant professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and Department of Landscape Architecture, respectively, and Amir Sheikh, a member of the Quaternary Research Center and Curatorial Associate with the Burke Museum—all of whom were interested in doing similar work.
The result is a highly interdisciplinary team with López and Cummings bringing deep ties to the Duwamish Valley communities, Jeranko bringing anthropological, qualitative, and ethnographic expertise, and Gordon, Shah, Balderas Guzmán, and Sheikh bringing expertise in the design of natural and built environments, hydrology, and engineering among other things. Under Errett’s leadership, the project is exemplar of the Center for Disaster Resilient Communities mission to bring “..together the University of Washington, government, and community partners to create and implement transformational hazard and disaster science, build workforce capacity, inform equitable disaster risk reduction policy and practice and contribute to more resilient communities.” The full project team also includes DRCC’s Robin Schwartz, DEOHS PhD student Katelin Tiegan, Research Coordinator Juliette Randazza, and Engineering PhD student Abigail Murray.
“Up until now my idea of interdisciplinary meant an anthropologist, a sociologist, and a geographer work together. And now here I am, surrounded by Earth scientists and urban planners and engineers,” said Jeranko. “It’s been a really good challenge to face.”
The project, known as Living With Water, received a $200,000 grant from the UW Population Health Initiative starting August 1st, 2024. Living With Water addresses three aims. The first is to identify potential flood adaptation strategies for the Duwamish Valley, and evaluate their alignment with community values and priorities. The second is to co-design conceptual strategies for flood adaptation that support the community’s values and well-being. The third is to evaluate impacts of the group’s approach on systemic equity to inform future climate adaptation research and planning efforts.
"It has been wonderful to collaborate with the UW team on this to make sure we are centering community voices in every single step of the planning for climate resilience," said López. "Community leadership and representation is indispensable to bring climate justice to the Duwamish Valley."
Living With Water builds on a study known as SASPER—the Seattle Assessment of Public Health Emergency Response—which included a systematic survey of households in the Duwamish Valley to assess the community’s priorities for building climate resilience. The study was led by Errett, López, Cummings, and a large team of collaborators in the fall of 2022.
In the month after the SASPER surveys finished, a combination of heavy rain and unusually high tides known as “king tides” caused the Duwamish River to top its banks and flood more than 40 homes in the South Park neighborhood.
Living With Water was developed to help inform efforts to build resilience against future flooding events. Rather than rely on surveys to assess community values and priorities, it will incorporate interviews, focus groups, and listening sessions expected to begin in the fall of 2024. There will also be an integrative literature review to identify strategies for flood adaptation, including those that are nature-based—incorporating natural ecosystems, urban green spaces, and naturalized water flow.
The final phase of the project will be to conduct participatory visioning workshops called design charrettes in which community members will work in small groups to draw maps and images of what future solutions might look like, guided by Balderas Guzmán.
As Jeranko put it “The overarching aim of this project is to help the South Park community build its capacity for climate resilience.” Along the way, the team will also document their approach and evaluate their outcomes in order to help inform future attempts at similar community-led efforts.
The Living With Water research team includes:
Nicole Errett Associate Professor, Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS) / EDGE Center / Center for Disaster Resilient Communities
Maja Jeranko Postdoctoral Researcher, DEOHS / Cascadia CoPes Hub / Center for Disaster Resilient Communities
BJ Cummings Community Engagement Manager, DEOHS / EDGE Center
Katelin Teigen Doctoral Student, DEOHS
Juliette Randazza Research Coordinator, DEOHS / EDGE Center / Center for Disaster Resilient Communities
Paulina López Executive Director, Duwamish River Community Coalition
Robin Schwartz Development and Community Advocacy, Duwamish River Community Coalition
Celina Balderas Guzman Assistant Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture
Bethany Gordon Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering / PLACE(E) Lab
Abigail Murray Research Fellow, Civil and Environmental Engineering / PLACE(E) Lab
Sameer H. Shah Assistant Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences
Amir Sheikh The Burke Museum / Quaternary Research Center
Funding for the Living With Water Project has come from the UW Population Health Initiative, the Cascadia CoPes (NSF Award #2103713) and the EDGE Center (NIEHS Award #P30ES007033).