Five Things to Know About… New Haven PERL

Every year, Yale faculty and students fix their attention on various corners of New Haven and scrutinize critical social questions — including those related to the health of the city and its community.

For instance, what are the public health implications of evictions among New Haven renters? What areas of the city are subjected to the highest summertime heat stress and how can that be mitigated? How can community organizations improve residents’ access to energy efficiency retrofits in their homes?

These and many other research questions are meant to help inform public policy and shed light on the city’s past and present, but the many findings have never been catalogued in any one place and, as a result, haven’t been easily accessible, either to city residents or other researchers.

That’s now changing. The Yale Center for Environmental Justice (YCEJ) just unveiled the New Haven People and the Environment Research Library (PERL), a searchable digital library that houses a broad array of research at the intersection of people and the environment in New Haven. (YCEJ is a joint undertaking between the Yale School of the Environment and Yale Law School, in partnership with Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.)

“I have had many students over the years write terrific essays about New Haven’s environmental history,” said Paul Sabin, the Randolph W. Townsend Jr. Professor of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, faculty director of Yale Environmental Humanities, and a member of PERL’s advisory committee. “I would be thrilled if these could be more accessible to others who want to learn about the city’s transportation history, food systems, and other topics.”

Yale News spent some time digging into this trove of local scholarship. Here are five takeaways.

PERL was two years in the making.

The project grew out of conversations between YCEJ staff and clinical faculty at the Yale Center on Climate Change and Health (which is based at the Yale School of Public Health), said Kristin Barendregt-Ludwig, YCEJ’s program manager.

“We really saw it as a justice issue — we wanted to expand the access to and equity in research done in New Haven,” she said.

In 2021 YCEJ applied for and received a Yale Planetary Solutions seed grant for the project. They assembled an advisory committee and began looking for examples of what they wanted to accomplish, while also meeting with local stakeholders, including a group of five community consultants from across New Haven. Last year, they partnered with EliScholar, a publicly accessible digital platform for Yale scholarship, to create a pilot website. So far, there are about 200 studies and reports on the site and more features in the pipeline.

PERL is specific to people and the environment but covers more territory than you might think.

The library is not intended to house all the research conducted in New Haven. Rather, it’s exclusively for studies that explore the touch points between people and the environment. But the focus moves well beyond green spaces.

“The built environment is a really important part of it,” Barendregt-Ludwig said. “Housing, energy, transportation.”

In addition, there’s the lived experience of residents: public safety, gentrification, food security, the effect of pollution on public health.

And within each of these areas are studies that branch out in unexpected directions. Search PERL for research associated with public safety, for example, and the 17 results that appear pertain to topics as diverse as how greater tree canopy is associated with lower crime rates, the stress Black pregnant women feel about the potential for police brutality toward their children, and an exploration of non-traditional transitional housing models for New Haven.

The database is not limited to work conducted by researchers affiliated with Yale.

The PERL team is developing partnerships with other research institutions and organizations, as well as local groups, to encourage them to submit their New Haven-based research and reports. Those partnerships already include the University of Connecticut, Southern Connecticut State University, Albertus Magnus College, Quinnipiac University, and DataHaven, a nonprofit that helps collect and make accessible information that is useful to local communities.

“New Haven is a much-studied town,” Sabin said. “My hope is that the PERL project will help to build useful knowledge that can contribute to improving the city, while also avoiding duplication and repetition that can impose a burden on community members and waste limited resources, including research time.”

PERL is aimed at multiple audiences.

While a primary aim of PERL is to enable researchers to share their work with the New Haven community, it can also serve as a way for researchers to collaborate with other researchers or with organizations looking to embark on a project, Barendregt-Ludwig said.

“Community organizations that are interested in a research question — or in having some research done in an area that they’re working in — can find who’s doing research like that locally through this resource,” she said. “We’re hoping it can lead to more of a two-way conversation in terms of informing research questions.”

Students can use the platform to inform upcoming projects and research questions, and to identify existing research partnerships to build on.

Residents might also draw on PERL’s resources to support a case they might be making to the city, to find data to include in grant proposals, or to otherwise inform work being done in the city, she said.

PERL is a living resource.

The website has a portal for researchers to submit their work, which, in addition to academic studies, could include reports, datasets, videos, maps, or audio files. All work must have been produced within the last 10 years. The PERL team will consider work from academics and college students, community organizations, government entities, citizen scientists, and even high school students, with backing from a teacher.

“We know that there are some tremendous high school teachers out there that are doing field work with their students, and we think it would be great to highlight that,” Barendregt-Ludwig said.

Support from the Rosenkranz Award for Pedagogical Advancement through Yale’s Poorvu Center will help the PERL team maintain, promote, and build on the pilot website.

Over time, as the library’s collection becomes more comprehensive, it should not only make the research being done in New Haven more visible, but also make it clear where the gaps are, Barendregt-Ludwig said.

Learn more about New Haven PERL at the upcoming Yale Community Breakfast at 8 a.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5 at the Dixwell-Yale Community Learning Center, sponsored by the Yale Office of New Haven Affairs. Register here.