Field Inclusive: A Small Nonprofit Aims to Make Fieldwork Safe for All

From the Autumn 2024 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

In spring 2020, Covid-19 restrictions forced then-PhD student Murry Burgess to conduct her field research entirely alone. Driving to the rural North Carolina barn where she was studying the effects of light on Barn Swallow chicks, Burgess, who is Black, passed Confederate flags and endured suspicious glares when she stopped at a local gas station.

During that uneasy time, protests swept the globe following the death of George Floyd, and Burgess prepared for her fieldwork by tucking a knife into her bra each morning and bringing along her dog (a pit bull mix).

“[I was] just in this rural Southern town by myself, and that’s when it was really emphasized to me that, wow, I am vulnerable here,” she says. “It could be a little bit scary.”

Eventually her advisor created car magnets identifying her as an official North Carolina State University researcher, which helped her feel more secure. But as it turns out, Burgess wasn’t alone in the anxiety she felt as a minority scientist working alone in the field.

A January 2021 article titled Safe Fieldwork Strategies for At-Risk Individuals, Their Supervisors, and Institutions spotlighted the issue in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Coauthored by Amelia-Juliette Demery and Monique Pipkin, a pair of Black women pursuing their PhDs in the Cornell University Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, the article outlined the unique risks of conflict and violence faced by minorities (including LGBTQ people and people with disabilities) who conduct field research and presented best practices for mitigating those risks.

In a story published by the Cornell Chronicle, Pipkin described how inequality in fieldwork experiences can affect research: “If you have two graduate students, one may not perform as highly as another simply because they can’t collect as much data, because they are trying to mediate issues of being a woman in the field alone, being a person of color in the field alone, and having to always look over their shoulder.”

Another study published in the journal Social Psychology of Education in 2020 found that Black students in ecology and evolutionary biology reported a significantly lower sense of belonging in the field than white students.

Motivated by the sense of unease she felt as a Black PhD student checking swallow nests by herself, Burgess wanted to create a support network for the next wave of minority scientists coming up behind her. In August 2022 she and Lauren Pharr, a fellow Black grad student at N.C. State, established a nonprofit group named Field Inclusive. Over the past two years, the startup has taken off and flourished as a career-building community for grad students across the country who come from historically underrepresented groups in science.

More Than Tick Bites and First Aid

Burgess and Pharr met as new graduate students in N.C. State’s Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology in fall 2019. Previously as undergrads, they were always in a class group when heading out into the field. But now they would each be doing fieldwork on their own, and that’s when they first realized their field experiences might differ from those of their white peers.

Burgess recalls attending a university training on fieldwork safety for new graduate students that covered potential issues like tick bites and first aid. When a fellow Black female student asked what to do if someone harassed her, the trainer’s advice was to call the police—advice that felt tone deaf to Burgess. Around that time, a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found that nearly half of Black Americans had “very little to no confidence at all” they would be treated fairly by local police.

In May of 2020, the issue of Black people’s safety while birding blew up in an incident that went viral on social media. A white woman in New York City’s Central Park called the police and falsely accused Black birder Christian Cooper of threatening violence (he only asked her to leash her dog, in accordance with park rules). Cooper’s smartphone video of the incident was posted on Facebook, where it gained national media attention. In the aftermath, a group of Black birders from around the country organized the first Black Birders Week as a social media and livestreaming event to highlight the presence of Black people in the birding community. Inspired, Burgess and Pharr began discussing what they could do to improve the field-research experience for Black scientists and others.

“We saw that there was this gap, this need for amplifying [the fact] that individuals who are deemed as marginalized or historically excluded [need] extra support,” says Pharr, whose own fieldwork focuses on federally endangered Red-cockaded Woodpeckers. “We wanted to provide resources and trainings and all these other things,” says Burgess. “So that’s where Field Inclusive was born. Like, let’s just make it a nonprofit … and try our best to make a change in some type of way.”

Because neither of them had much experience with nonprofits, they scrapped together what they could and learned by Googling things, making sure along the way that “we had our paperwork in place,” says Burgess, “so we didn’t get in trouble with the IRS.”

Once Launched, Demand Grew Quickly

In an August 2022 Instagram post, Pharr and Burgess announced Field Inclusive’s existence to the world, describing it as a nonprofit with a three-pronged mission to recognize and celebrate diverse scientists, provide scholarships to field biologists in the natural sciences, and partner with other organizations to create safety policies for field biologists.

“We quickly found ourselves trying to catch up with the demand,” says Burgess, who says they were immediately inundated with messages of interest. “As soon as we announced that we were doing Field Inclusive, everybody was super excited.”

To fund the programs they hoped to offer, Pharr and Burgess began by soliciting sponsorships from natural resources organizations. Their list of sponsors to date includes the Wilson Ornithological Society and Salt Lake City’s Tracy Aviary, and they have also received grants from the Animal Behavior Society and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

“Both of us being birders, we were really connected to ornithological societies, so we started by reaching out to them,” says Pharr.

Funding in hand, they expanded their offerings quickly. Field Inclusive now provides small research grants, travel grants, and fellowship experiences for students in natural resources fields; holds “Beginning Birders” programs to bring more people from historically excluded and underrepresented groups into birding; and provides loans of birdwatching gear to groups and individuals in North Carolina’s Raleigh–Durham area, where the organization is based. In January 2024, they launched a paid membership program, offering members opportunities to participate in a virtual monthly book club and access to free donated gear from Field Inclusive’s “field gear closet.”

Their fundraising has enabled Field Inclusive to award nine research grants, travel grants, and fellowships to up-and-coming minority researchers from New York to Texas and Colorado. One of their 2023 grant recipients was Derek McFarland, Jr., a Black PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying how the changes people make to landscapes can affect the spread of tickborne diseases. He learned about Field Inclusive’s grant program after a friend saw the information on X (formerly Twitter) and forwarded it to him.

“So I clicked on it,” he says, “and I read all about their mission and everything, and I was like, wow, this is such a cool program. Even if I don’t get the grant, I want to be involved in some way.”

McFarland received a $500 grant that he used to purchase supplies for his fieldwork, including reflective vests to wear in the field. The vests “give you some [appearance] of authority when you’re walking around in the woods, so folks won’t bother you as much,” he explains. He emphasizes how helpful it was as a cash-strapped graduate student to receive the funding up front, instead of buying supplies out-of-pocket and then applying for reimbursement from his university.

“Everything [Field Inclusive] stands for is so dope,” says McFarland, adding that the nonprofit provides “a great space to help me contextualize my being inside of environmental sciences.”

Social Dimensions of Field Safety: Recognizing Harassment as an Issue

Recently Field Inclusive has been offering “social field safety” workshops that focus on navigating the specific risks that minority individuals face while doing fieldwork—not venomous snakes, dehydration, or flat tires, but harassment and other threatening behavior from the people they may encounter. Pharr and Burgess have traveled to 10 universities and conferences over the past year to present workshops, and they are also developing an on-demand online training module.

“It’s a two-hour workshop right now,” says Burgess, “and a lot of the feedback we get is that people wish it could be even longer!”

Burgess and Pharr are both keenly aware that as Field Inclusive grows from a scrappy startup into a mature organization, they won’t be able to manage all its offerings on their own. In February 2024, they announced the addition of four new board members, all women working in natural science fields, to help manage the organization’s growth. And in April, Pharr made a difficult announcement via an Instagram post.

Under a photo of herself laughing in the field with the text “What if I told you I hadn’t been okay these last few months, would you believe me?” superimposed across it, Pharr wrote that she had been struggling with balancing her many obligations as she worked toward finishing her PhD. She was making the decision to step back temporarily from her work with Field Inclusive.

“That was a really tough moment for me,” she admits. “Ultimately Field Inclusive is—I hate calling it a side project. But my primary thing is being a researcher.”

Burgess remains active in Field Inclusive, but she feels similarly about how she wants her relationship with the organization to evolve.

“Field Inclusive is my baby, and I never want to give it up,” she says, “but on the other hand, I know that my main passion lies in research and being a professor.”

After finishing her PhD in summer 2023, she began a position as an Assistant Professor in Mississippi State University’s Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Aquaculture.

Burgess and Pharr hope that when the time is right, they can hand Field Inclusive over to someone who will handle the day-to-day administrative tasks and continue to build the organization long-term.

“I think the biggest struggle that we encounter right now is just people not being aware that these are even issues,” says Burgess. “We’re hoping to continue to build that awareness and eventually move it into actionable steps to improve the field.”