Senior Lecturer Kelly Hamshaw’s office is everything you’d expect a busy PhD candidate and professor’s office to embody. The big window lets in the late afternoon light between shelves filled with books and a desk with organized piles of papers.

Hamshaw teaches in the Department of Community Development and Applied Economics (CDAE) and is a researcher at the UVM Center for Rural Studies, where she focuses on projects related to affordable housing in rural areas, community planning, disaster resilience, and environmental education. Her expertise in these fields, while previously important, became invaluable when Vermont flooded in July of 2023.

When asked about how she became an integral person working towards efforts to better the disaster preparedness and recovery in manufactured housing communities, or MHC’s, she says that it began in her undergraduate years.

Her mentor was Dan Baker, an Associate Professor Emeritus in CDAE, who at the time was looking into zoning and planning issues that impact people’s quality of life, especially those in MHC’s.

Hamshaw found this work with rural communities to be rewarding, particularly when she and Baker visited “communities that have struggled for a long time with being stigmatized and bearing a disproportionate burden from these climate-related hazards.” 

Working in partnership with the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity's (CVOEO) Mobile Home Program, Hamshaw and Baker began exploring key questions about the vulnerability and resilience of these rural communities across the state of Vermont, especially to flood hazards.

She references a map in her office surrounded by numerous thank you and holiday cards from students and friends. This map was created by the pair as “one of the first maps ... using digital data of all mobile home parks in the state of Vermont.”

Hamshaw also points to another detail on the board highlighting a survey from 2011. This survey involved thirty CDAE students who traveled across VT one fall semester and “went door to door and to parks all the way up to Derby Line and all the way down to Bennington and Brattleboro, and everywhere in between,” she explained. Opportunities such as these allowed students to learn more about working with communities and gives them practical skills in communicating difficult information about sensitive topics such as the ability of people to prepare for emergencies and their housing concerns.

Involving students in real-world research is a big asset in Hamshaw’s teaching. It was a powerful experience, she said, “particularly for students who maybe didn’t grow up in more rural areas, to actually see a different part of Vermont.”

Since then, Hamshaw has continued to mentor several students who, under her guidance, have graduated and moved into professional roles within the Mobile Home Program at the CVEO.

Community and International Development (CID) major Miranda Degreenia worked with Hamshaw on this research over the summer through the Simon Family Public Research Fellowship Program. “Having the opportunity to work with such a talented project team on research that is so impactful was a truly life-changing experience,” Degreenia said. “Part of the reason why I chose to pursue a major within CDAE (CID) was to have this kind of research opportunity and to make tangible change in Vermont communities.”

“I am from Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom and grew up myself low-income in a flood-prone area, which particularly fueled my desire to pursue this research opportunity with Kelly,” Degreenia continued. “When we entered recovery mode, the act of physically doing the fieldwork, surveying of the communities, and some of the clean-up was the most powerful part of the experience for me. Being able to be there for the residents affected by flooding in any way possible, whether by helping them sort through their belongings or lending an ear was a life-changing and eye-opening experience that I will never forget.”

Lately, following the July 2023 flooding, Hamshaw’s involvement in the community has transitioned from pure research to applying her research to response and recovery efforts. Hamshaw explains that the data she’s collected in the past was tied to the CDAE mission to “empower decision makers and community members around how to think about these big issues that are impacting people’s quality of life on the ground.”

In UVM’s Spring 2024 semester, Hamshaw led a project planning and development course (CDAE 3730: Project Development and Planning) where students got involved in assessing the flooding experiences through qualitative interviews with stakeholders engaged in the response and ongoing recovery efforts throughout Vermont. These conversations created opportunities for these stakeholders to reflect on their experiences over the past nine months.

The students focused their questions on “what’s been helpful, (or) what's been challenging?” regarding the recovery from the floods. One of these students continued his involvement in the recovery effort professionally at CVOEO following his graduation in the winter of 2023.

Connecting on this level is important to Hamshaw because there's no better way to get to know the needs of the community than talking with those who live within it. Listening to people in these times of destruction and repair is one of the most important parts of Hamshaw's response and recovery work. Community members often felt uncertain about the next steps to take after the floods. Listening to their concerns and questions helped Hamshaw understand the needs of the homeowners to connect them with specific disaster resources.  

“My experience with this kind of fieldwork-oriented research made me want to continue doing work on the ground and helping communities in the state I love,” CID student Degreenia explained. “Overall, this research experience was the ultimate application of everything I have learned in my CDAE classes – from the community capitals to economics, everything that I learned in the classroom could somehow be seen or used in different parts of my research.”

This ethical and participatory approach to engaged research helps put the most impacted people at the heart of the development of resilient solutions to natural disasters related to climate change.

It is critical to Hamshaw to have “those conversations in a way where people feel comfortable,” she explains, because “you’re talking about these sorts of challenging topics.”

In the future, Hamshaw looks forward to starting a new project with the Vermont Rivers Program that will build on the previous statewide assessment work and focus on identifying mitigation efforts to reduce flood vulnerability in selected communities. For the future, she and her research colleagues are planning to be “back on the ground in many of these similar communities to do more specific work in terms of – let’s look at the maps, let's get some more imagery, (and do) more data collection. What is actually possible to help make our park a safer place to live and more resilient to flooding?”

Hamshaw teaches classes with a variety of focuses and welcomes students to her research if interested. “If we can help identify where it’s possible to do things, do them wisely, and understand the downstream impacts,” she says, “That’s a really good role for us to play as researchers and community advocates.”