There are many different ways to engage a community with science. A few examples here at University of Michigan there are the Water Center, Climate Adaptation Initiatives for Indigenous Tribes, and Unearthing Michigan Ecological Data, while another school has integrated it directly into coursework. There are also Community-Engaged Academic Learning which will help create community learning opportunities and the Ginsberg Center which works to create internships the University of Michigan and local communities aimed at advancing social good.
When developing these types community science engagement projects there are many things you should think deeply about, including how to best connect with the community stakeholders and remembering to step out of science and looking at the project from the community's point of view. Thankfully the Union of Concerned Scientists has put together a toolkit for engaging with communities, which includes a worksheet for helping to set up community partnerships.
One quickly growing way of engaging communities is Citizen Science, which is the active involvement of the general public in the collection, analysis, and distribution of data and can range from helping to monitor butterfly populations to identifying the regions of the universe which give birth to stars to studying the distribution of carnivore and prey populations in Michigan. If you want to engage in citizen science while at University of Michigan, there is support available from many sources including the Shapiro Design Lab and the Museum of Natural History's Citizen Science Fellows program.
Local government is one of the highest impact ways a scientist can get involved with policy and advocacy. If this is something which is calling out to you here at the University of Michigan, this will likely mean attending meetings of committees and boards for the cities of Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners meetings, and public hearings of the Michigan State Legislature. The Union of Concerned Scientists has a video presentation about taking part in local and state hearings which covers what you can expect and contribute and the City of Ann Arbor put together a guide for effective citizen participation which outlines how to participate effectively in local government.
Once you have engaged with your local government you may want to take the next step and take part in the government at the federal scale. One of the easiest ways to do this is to reach out to your representative from the House or to your State's Senators. The Union of Concerned Scientists has some advice for meeting with your federal representatives, as well as how to build a relationship with them.
Of course the federal government does not exclusively consist of elected representatives, there are also thousands of staffers employed on Capitol Hill and they are often just as important to reach if you want to make real impact. COMPASS has put together a guide to help identify, prepare, and meet with the staffers relevant to your scientific area and AAAS has their top 10 rules for working with Congress.
One other option for starting your engagement with the federal government is what are known as Congressional Visits where an organization or society brings together scientists to visit the Congress for meetings and conversations with policy makers. Some examples are the American Astronomical Society, American Geophyical Union, and Association for Women in Mathematics. Be sure to check if your group has a Congressional Visit day, and if they don't maybe suggest they start one up.
Engaging with the federal government is about more than just meeting people too. There are two major ways experts can impact policy more directly, public comments and testimony. Public Comments are a process through which the public gets to provide comment about new regulations being implemented by governmental agencies. The Public Comment Project provides a platform for finding regulations and notices which are open for comment and information about how to make meaningful comments. Testimony is just that, providing witness about a topic under discussion at a live Congressional hearing. This may sound quite daunting, but thankfully many groups have put together guides for doing this over the years including University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and American College of Emergency Physicians, and COMPASS can help you dispel a couple of common myths about testifying.
Policy and advocacy are in many ways two sides of the same coin, one defining what should be be done and the other pushing for it to actually happen. For the former American University has developed a set of resources about how to communicate science to policymakers and the Union of Concerned Scientists discussed how to use your scientific expertise influence policy making. For the latter the Union of Concerned Scientists has also put together a guide about science advocacy with tips about increasing your impact, sparking local action, and more and AAAS has compiled a list of scientific organizations and their advocacy initiatives, as well as an advocacy workshop for students. For more formal education the University of Michigan offers undergraduate courses, a graduate certificate, and post-doctoral fellowships through the Science, Technology, & Public Policy program through its Ford School of Public Policy.
There are also a number of organizations focused on science policy and advocacy. Here at the University of Michigan there is ESPA (Engaging Scientists in Policy and Advocacy) and nationally there are the National Science and Policy Network, Union of Concerned Scientists, Engaging Scientists & Engineers in Policy Coalition, and March for Science to name a few. Multiple societies also sponsor policy focused Congressional Fellowship which place one of their members on the staff of a Congress person for a year to provide a scientific lens on policy, examples are AAAS, American Mathematical Society, and American Meteorological Society.