Community Connections Committee: How the Joint Safety Team of the University of Minnesota Innovates Promoting Vertical Safety Engagement

The Joint Safety Team (JST) of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities is a well-established researcher-led safety team that recently developed a new Community Connections Committee (CCC) to build on its history of collaboration with other student-led Lab Safety Teams (LSTs) around the country. The CCC aims to engage with the larger scientific community by connecting with high school science instructors, early stage researchers at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs), and local chemical industries. As part of its early work, the CCC developed a safety workshop for high school chemistry teachers to help them identify and address common safety issues. Participants are introduced to fundamental safety concepts and new tools to understand and address safety concerns through classroom lectures and hands-on laboratories, all aimed at improving safety in their classrooms. Through an ongoing exchange of experiences and resources with PUIs, the CCC helped undergraduate students and faculty create an independent and resourceful student safety team that has engaged students in safety accountability, fostered leadership, and influenced safety practices at the PUI. Finally, this work discusses the collaboration between the CCC and industry partners that focuses on informing University of Minnesota graduate students of the safety standards of the industry so that they can best prepare themselves to be desirable hires and therefore benefit industries. Overall, the CCC is a powerful tool to expand the JST’s positive impacts to the broader chemistry community, helping pass on the JST’s safety practices to PUIs and high schools while also learning of industrial safety standards.