Apply Today! Science Justice Summer School

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Update | February 22, 2024: The application deadline has been extended to Monday, March 11.

Update | February 15, 2024: This post has been updated to clarify that only graduate students and postdoctoral researchers from the University of Washington, Seattle University and Seattle Pacific University are eligible to apply for the Science Justice Summer School. We apologize for any confusion. 

Are you a grad student or postdoc at the University of Washington, Seattle University or Seattle Pacific University who is interested in applying climate and environmental justice frameworks in your work? Consider applying to the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative’s first-ever Science Justice Summer School! This two-week program will dive into a range of justice-related topics through lectures, discussion groups and more. Applications close Monday, March 11 at 11:59 p.m. 

The Science Justice Summer School will run from July 10-24, 2024, on the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The Summer School is open to second-year master’s students, Ph.D. students, recent graduates of master’s or Ph.D. programs (as of Winter or Spring Quarter 2024) and postdoctoral fellows. We welcome students from all disciplines (sciences, social sciences, humanities). The Resilience Collaborative will provide 10-15 stipends of $2,000 to qualified applicants. Students should be living within daily commuting distance of the UW Seattle campus as no housing stipends are available for this year’s program.

APPLY TODAY!

Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative Announces Community Grant Awardees

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The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative is thrilled to announce the five awardees of the Community Grants Program. Community Grants fund justice-focused, environmental and climate projects that advance community-centered resilience priorities. These one-year grants support nonprofits, community organizations and Tribes from Washington, Idaho and Oregon. 

More than 40 organizations submitted letters of intent and nearly 20 organizations were invited to submit full applications. Applications were reviewed by a group of UW faculty and community experts independent of the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. They were evaluated based on their relevance to climate and environmental justice and impact on frontline communities. Learn more about the organizations and their projects: 

Black Star Farmers 

Location: Seattle, Wash.

Black Star Farmers (BSF) is a coalition of people with diverse identities working towards the radical reclamation of land and food sovereignty for all beings. We achieve this through land stewardship, mutual aid, education, and direct action. Black Star Farmers reclaims Black and Indigenous relationships with the land, improving BIPOC communities’ food sovereignty, and guides difficult discussions about racial inequality.

This project will support regular public gatherings on the second and fourth Sunday of the month at Black Lives Memorial Garden in Cal Anderson Park and other gardens around Seattle. Activities include garden stewarding, community engagement, education, and mutual aid food distribution. These events bring communities together in gardens throughout Seattle to reflect on the importance of collective liberation, and how to imagine, make, and maintain local, sustainable, seed-to-seed gardens.

blackstarfarmers.org 

 

United Territories Of Pacific Islanders Alliance – UTOPIA 

Location: Kent, Wash. 

UTOPIA Washington is a queer and trans people of color-led, grassroots organization born out of the struggles, challenges, strength and resilience of the queer and trans Pacific Islander community in the South King County area. Our Mission: We are actively replacing systems of oppression with ecosystems of care and safety for all our communities through Black and Brown organizing, prioritizing land and bodily autonomy, and reclaiming our cultural narratives. We envision a world of abundance, autonomy and harmony, where all forms of supremacy cease to exist for all life.

Through our SPEAC Change program (Systems, Policies, Environmental, and Cultural Change), we are committed to the establishment and execution of a Climate Justice Cohort comprising of QTPI (Queer and Transgender Pacific Islanders) and 2SLBTQIA+. This initiative aims to cultivate community leadership, community-driven advocacy, and a deepened understanding of our current positioning and significance within the Climate and Environmental Justice movement. With this endeavor, participants will engage in structured training, forge meaningful relationships, allocate deliberate periods of collaboration, partake in community-based participatory research and leverage a diverse array of organizational tools. The overarching objective of the cohort program is to provide a solid foundation that empowers QTPI and 2SLGBTQI+ members to occupy the forefront of climate resilience and advocacy with unwavering confidence and unapologetic determination.

utopiawa.org 

 

Oregon Rural Action 

Location: La Grande, Ore. 

Oregon Rural Action is a grassroots and culturally diverse community-led organization in Eastern Oregon. Our mission is to promote social justice, agricultural and economic sustainability, and stewardship of the region’s land, air, and water. Through community organizing, public conversations, and policy advocacy, Oregon Rural Action is building a rural movement for the well-being of all people and our environment. 

Our project aims to build water security and resiliency in the Lower Umatilla Basin by ensuring access to safe drinking water in the short term and building towards improved water supply solutions in the long term. Building on the partnership with the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative, we will engage and build new leaders, expand our geographic reach and build collective power and influence to access sources of clean drinking water permanently. The goal of this work is to help the community authentically contribute to decision-making on mitigating nitrate in groundwater and ensuring access to safe drinking water. 

www.oregonrural.org 

 

Greater Hells Canyon Council 

Location: Northeast Oregon, Southeast Washington, West Idaho 

Greater Hells Canyon Council (GHCC) is a place-based conservation organization that serves Northeast Oregon, Southeast Washington and West Idaho. We work with many collaborators and allies to connect, protect, and restore the wild lands, waters, native species and habitats of the Greater Hells Canyon Region, ensuring a legacy of healthy ecosystems for generations. Greater Hells Canyon Council is also a founding member of the Tribally-convened Camas to Condors Partnership, which weaves the values, priorities and traditional stewardship practices of the Nez Perce Tribe into regional climate adaptation work. 

With support from the community grant, we will support three areas of work with the Camas to Condors Partnership. First, the funding will resource traditional Nez Perce gatherers’ work on the Seasonal Round Trail, which establishes a living lab across the elevational gradient in Nimiipuu homelands to track climate impacts to culturally important species and places. Second, this funding will help maintain Greater Hells Canyon Council’s facilitative role in the Camas to Condors Partnership; third, it will support the broader Tribal community’s participation in two events: a camas pit bake on the Nez Perce Reservation in fall 2023 and a roots and/or berries gathering outing in Wallowa County, Oregon in spring or summer 2024. 

hellscanyon.org

 

Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation 

Location: The Burns Paiute Tribe in Burns Oregon; the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe in McDermitt in Nevada and Oregon; the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in Idaho; the Shoshone-Paiute Tribes in Owyhee Idaho and Oregon

The Upper Snake River Tribes (USRT) Foundation is an intertribal consortia comprised of four member tribes: the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Tribe, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribe, and the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe. The Upper Snake River Tribes Foundation works to ensure the protection, enhancement, and restoration of natural and cultural resources, activities, and rights of the tribes. The Foundation’s tribes experience disproportionate impacts from climate change while also being some of the most under-resourced tribes in the nation. 

The Foundation will use community grant funding to continue to build and strengthen its Community and Youth Climate Education program through 2024. Building off of a Tribal Youth Climate Camp held in August 2022, this program will include a two-week summer camp and four climate field trips. The goals of this program are to 1) educate tribal youth on climate change and how it impacts their community, 2) encourage youth to pursue higher education in climate-related fields, and 3) empower tribal youth to engage with climate science within their communities. This program gives the tribal youth a sense of stability, making the camps and activities something they can look forward to every year. 

uppersnakerivertribes.org 

UW Undergrads: Join our team with a paid internship!

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The Climate Impacts Group is seeking an intern to support several interrelated projects as part of the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. The intern will join EarthLab’s Summer Internship Program, a robust, cohort-based internship program for UW undergraduate students.

The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative Intern will help to create a month-long summer program that builds cohorts and networks of early career researchers passionate about climate justice. This program will focus on capacity-building work with programs that connect students with frontline organizations to build capacity for justice-centered climate resilience; supporting frontline organizations to build a matching program that will provide staffing support to increase capacity of organizations to self-organize on climate resilience; conducting research to understand the knowledge and practice of community-driven adaptation for frontline communities and organizations; and co-producing curriculum and workshops with student groups to aid in the development of educational modules for the summer school. Familiarity with one or more of the following bodies of literature is a plus: transdisciplinary science, climate and environmental justice, climate adaptation, social science methods, and participatory action research.

EarthLab’s Summer Internship Program supports professional development in interdisciplinary and community-engaged work at the intersection of climate change and social justice. The internship will run for nine weeks, with a time commitment of 35 hours per week. The Resilience Collaborative Intern will receive a weekly stipend of $770. Interns will also receive a weekly stipend plus a one-time $180 commuting stipend which can be used to activate a UPass for summer quarter. The professional internship experience will be enhanced by the cohort model and the mentorship provided by the site supervisor.

Students from a range of disciplines and all UW campuses are encouraged to apply.

APPLY

Welcoming two new team members to support NW Climate Resilience Collaborative

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We are excited to share progress on the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative, including two new hires to support the program and a newly-launched web presence! The Resilience Collaborative is a program housed at the Climate Impacts Group that brings together 10 community and academic partners and is funded by a grant from NOAA.

Drs. Rishi Sugla and Zackery Thill joined the Climate Impacts Group earlier this month, and will be primarily focused on supporting the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative. Sugla will bring thought leadership and coordination to the Resilience Collaborative as he advances the theory and practice of climate services provision to frontline communities. Thill will help to manage the overall operations of the Resilience Collaborative, while supporting collaborative teams of researchers, decision makers and frontline communities to achieve more than the sum of their individual efforts. You can learn more about our latest team members below.

A new webpage describing the work of the Resilience Collaborative is live! Here, you can learn more about the program, our partners and our plans for the Collaborative. You’ll also find a link to a recent webinar, led by Jason Vogel and Jennifer Allen, providing an overview of the Collaborative to our NOAA RISA partners. We will continue to build out a web presence for the Resilience Collaborative over the coming months.

There will be more exciting news coming out of the Collaborative in the coming months –  stay tuned!

Rishi Sugla is the frontline community climate resilience scientist at the UW Climate Impacts Group. Rishi’s professional mission is to build justice-centered climate adaptation plans co-created with frontline communities. Rishi has a deep interest in working at the intersection of science, storytelling, social justice, and technology. Rishi received his Ph.D. in Earth Science from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Email: rsugla@uw.edu

Website page: Rishi Sugla

Zackery Thill is the program integration specialist at the UW Climate Impacts Group. Zack’s professional mission is to help researchers, communities, and decision-makers address complex societal and environmental problems by co-producing knowledge that will contribute to a more equitable and resilient future. Zack received his master’s degree in Human Ecology from Lund University, Sweden and his Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Oregon.

Email: zthill@uw.edu

Website page: Zackery Thill

 

 

 

 

UW Climate Impacts Group and partner organizations launch the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative 

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The UW Climate Impacts Group, along with nine community, nonprofit, and university partners, is launching a program of community-led, justice-oriented climate adaptation work across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative will be founded with a five-year, $5.6 million grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The program will be one of eleven across the country funded through NOAA’s Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments program.

The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative will advance efforts to adapt to climate change in frontline communities — communities that have been excluded from spaces of power and who are disproportionately facing the impacts of climate change.

The program will be led by Climate Impacts Group Director Amy Snover, with several community members and university partners steering the direction of the Collaborative as members of the Leadership Team. The Leadership Team will include Snover along with Aurora Martin, co-executive director of Front and Centered; Don Sampson, climate change program director of the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians; Jennifer Allen, associate professor and senior fellow of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University and Russell Callender, director of Washington Sea Grant.

“Many incredible organizations across Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington are joining with the UW Climate Impacts Group to work toward a future where all people and communities can thrive,” Snover said. “It is my hope that the Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative will push the climate adaptation field toward equity and justice. I am proud that the Climate Impacts Group is helping to steward this shift, guided by the leadership of frontline communities, and I am honored by the trust and collaboration from these community partners.”

Projects led by the Collaborative will build climate resilience in rural communities and coastal tribal communities, while leveraging the successes from these projects to inform policy and work in other regions. The Collaborative is innovative in the climate adaptation sciences and services fields for its community engagement model; explicit focus on community priorities, equity and justice; and for centering the voices of frontline communities in its effort.

“This Collaborative aligns with Front and Centered’s approach which is data driven and follows the leadership, knowledge, and expertise of frontline communities disproportionately impacted by climate and environmental change,” Aurora Martin said. “We are excited to work with our partners to center equity — reducing uneven barriers to participation and climate preparedness and resilience — so that our communities and future generations can thrive.”

In the first year of the Resilience Collaborative, leadership and partners working in coastal tribal communities will focus on assessing the state of climate readiness among Northwest coastal tribes. From there, they will identify steps to accelerate tribal adaptation efforts. Members of the Collaborative will also convene large-group discussions focused on implementation.

“The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians is excited to join the UW and the other Resilience Collaborative partners on this effort,” Don Sampson said. “We understand the importance of working together to increase our impact and this project has the potential for improving tribal climate resilience, which is a priority for ATNI’s Climate Change program.”

Leaders and partners working in rural communities will study how rural values are reflected in climate adaptation priorities, the potential consequences of climate change for rural communities in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, and economic strategies for implementing climate action. Collaborative members will work with farmworkers in the specialty fruit and vegetable crop industry to identify opportunities to prepare for the changing climate.

“American Farmland Trust is looking forward to collaborating with this amazing group of partners to work to further resiliency and climate justice in rural communities in Oregon, Washington and Idaho,” Gabrielle Roesch-McNally, American Farmland Trust’s Women for the Land Director, said. “As an implementation partner, American Farmland Trust will utilize our peer-to-peer networking model to reach women, underserved audiences and other natural resource managers to better engage populations who have yet to be adequately included in this work and who are likely to experience very severe disruptions from climate change.”

In addition to working with specific rural and coastal tribal communities, the Collaborative is designed to accelerate climate adaptation in the Northwest, across the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments network and in state and federal climate resilience programs and policies. This will be accomplished through a variety of initiatives that transfer successful community-based innovations to similar communities; that influence the state and federal entities shaping the laws, policies and investment strategies that will determine future community resilience; and that invest in community capacity to help them reduce their vulnerability to a changing climate while pursuing their own community values.

The Resilience Collaborative is “breaking the mold of traditional climate adaptation efforts,” Snover said, “which, while important and necessary, will not be sufficient for preparing for the impacts of climate change. As the climate continues to change, impacting our economies, ecosystems and communities in ways that are varied and inequitable, this work has never been more urgent.”

The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative will consist of the following partners:

Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians: Mr. Don Sampson; Dr. Chas Jones

American Farmland Trust: Ms. Addie Candib; Dr. Gabrielle Roesch-McNally

Front and Centered: Ms. Aurora Martin; Dr. Esther Min

Headwaters Economics: Dr. Megan Lawson; Ms. Patricia Hernandez

Idaho State University: Dr. Katrina Running

Portland State University: Dr. Jennifer Allen; Dr. Liliana Caughman; Dr. Vivek Shandas

UW Climate Impacts Group: Dr. Amy Snover; Dr. Meade Krosby; Dr. Guillaume Mauger; Dr. Crystal Raymond; Dr. Jason Vogel

Washington Sea Grant: Dr. Russell Callender; Mr. Jackson Blalock; Dr. Melissa Poe

Washington State University: Mr. Chad Kruger; Dr. Sonia Hall; Dr. Georgine Yorgey; Dr. Bernadita Sallato

Western Washington University: Dr. Marco Hatch