Climate Resilience & Justice Lab

Using participatory research methods we provide frontline communities with technical assistance to create resilient infrastructure.

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Climate Resilience and Justice Lab

The Community-Led Climate Resilience & Justice Lab is a place-based technical assistance, leadership, and planning program that supports frontline communities to define, design, and implement their own climate solutions. Rooted in environmental justice, organizing traditions, and cultural knowledge, the Lab brings together community members, youth leaders, grassroots organizations, and public-sector partners to move from story → strategy → action.
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Across the United States, many communities are asked to participate in climate planning without the time, staffing, funding, or technical support needed to meaningfully lead or follow through. This program responds directly to that gap. Rather than top-down planning, the Lab provides deep engagement, sustained accompaniment, and grant-aligned technical assistance that centers community priorities while navigating real-world constraints.

The Process

The Lab works with communities over 6–12 months (flexible by context) and can be adapted for neighborhoods, coalitions, youth cohorts, or faith- and community-based organizations. Across each phase, the program is designed to build local capacity, strengthen self-determination, and move from vision to implementation.
1. Community-Led Assessment & Visioning
We support communities to document climate impacts and priorities through interviews, site visits, participatory research, and storytelling. This work integrates lived experience with climate, health, and environmental data to build a shared understanding of risk, assets, and opportunity—strengthening communities’ ability to evaluate and respond to environmental and climate injustices on their own terms.
2. Leadership Development & Political Education
The program invests in youth and community leadership through political education, organizing skills, and climate justice frameworks. Drawing from Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and popular education models, participants develop the skills to analyze systems, build campaigns, and engage decision-makers—expanding meaningful participation in local and regional climate decision-making.
3. Participatory Storytelling & Narrative Power
Storytelling is treated as infrastructure, not an add-on. Communities use PhotoVoice, oral history, visual media, and story maps to document conditions, shift narratives, and strengthen advocacy, funding, and long-term organizing. This approach elevates community-authored knowledge as evidence and ensures local stories shape policy, planning, and investment.
4. Technical Assistance & Project Pathways
We help translate community priorities into implementable, fundable, place-based projects, including resilience hubs, heat mitigation, green infrastructure, healthy housing, food security, and workforce development. Support includes facilitation of charrettes, site assessments, cost considerations, partnership development, and grant readiness positioning communities to pursue state, federal, and philanthropic investment.
5. Implementation Support & Follow-Through
The Lab emphasizes moving beyond plans. We support communities in building realistic timelines, identifying funding pathways, navigating public systems, and sustaining work beyond a single project or grant. By accounting for real-world constraints—time, staffing, funding—the program strengthens long-term capacity and ensures climate resilience efforts are community-owned, durable, and scalable.

Experience & Foundation

This program builds on over a decade of applied work, including:

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  • Community-led climate planning and equity tools with municipal partners
  • Youth leadership and green workforce programs across Austin and San Antonio
  • Regional climate resilience technical assistance through the South Central Impacts Planning Program (SCIPP)
  • EPA Community Change Grant technical assistance in St. Thomas, USVI and Northwest Roanoke, VA
  • Neighborhood-scale heat resilience planning and implementation in South San Antonio

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The Lab brings together lessons learned from working inside public systems while remaining accountable to community realities, recognizing where institutions fall short and designing processes that are credible, unconventional, and grounded.

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Land justice is built through relationship, care, and collective action. Stay connected to frontline organizing, youth leadership, and community-led systems shaping a more just future.
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