ESIL Research Spotlighted by ASEE

The Environmental Stewardship of Indigenous Lands (ESIL) program, which trains students to liaise on environmental issues between tribal and non-tribal organizations, has just published its 2^nd and 3^rd refereed papers. ESIL’s first paper (Velez et al. 2022), which presented the group’s application of the Indigenous evaluation framework, was selected as Editor’s Choice by the journal Evaluation and Program Planning. Co-director David Mays explains, “That first paper was essentially a methods paper. We had to write it first because we knew we would cite it in our subsequent papers.” ESIL’s second paper (Mays et al. 2025a), which provides a high-level overview of the ESIL certificate program, was selected for a spotlight by the publisher American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) in their magazine Prism that is available to their 12,000+ members. And ESIL’s third paper (Mays et al. 2025b) documents the impact of ESIL’s workshops and internships offered starting in 2018/19. Mays continues, “We are proud to continue the work of ESIL, both here at CU Denver, and as a founding member of the Native Food, Energy, and Water System (FEWS) Alliance.” This work is gaining recognition, for example, at a ceremony in the Tivoli Turnhalle earlier this month, collaborator and coauthor Christine Velez won the campus-wide Brenda J. Allen Inclusive Leadership Award based on a portfolio of work including ESIL, ENNTICE, and Engineering HSI. Students interested in broadening their professional qualifications and expanding their professional network through ESIL are invited to sign up through the program website: https://clas.ucdenver.edu/esil/.

Emblem of the Environmental Stewardship of Indigenous Lands (ESIL) program