COMMUNITY

While climate change is global, its impacts are seen and felt locally. Historically, response to challenges in our communities has been addressed as a response to a single issue. Today science, technology, and the expanding field of regenerative design is giving us new tools, knowledge, and resources to help us see our communities as an “integrated system”.

For example, when people think of health, they still tend to see it as a single issue unrelated to the many impacts of climate change. Citizens’ good-health however, is connected to the quality of food available to them, the health of their homes and their neighborhoods; the latter often determined by the heat, air pollution, and flooding they may suffer from climate impacts.

Communities are strongest when their members are civically engaged in issues of shared public concern and work together to solve them. When they participate in the process of crafting a vision for their communities and then co-develop a plan to realize it, they invest themselves in achieving goals together.

We are planning a “proof-of-concept” community, university co-design initiative using a systems approach to integrating solutions for these interrelated issues with facilitator training resources that can serve as a model to be shared with community-based organizations as work progresses and the Imagine Forward Campaign is launched.