Are you concerned about climate change? Would you like to learn how to address and respond to this challenge? If so, this course is for you. Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community, and Political Action is intended to help learners understand, address and respond to climate change as individuals and in partnership with their communities and political leaders. The course focuses on how to translate learning into action on climate change in the areas of food, energy, transportation and the built environment (cities). This course was co-developed and taught by Michaela Zint, Professor of Environmental Education and Communication, and University of Michigan Students. A range of academic climate change experts and professional leaders are featured. As a result of completing this course, you will be able to: 1) Identify individual, community, and political actions you can engage in to effectively address and respond to climate change. 2) Describe how insights from the social sciences can be employed to create change at the individual, community, and political levels. 3) Feel empowered to continue to influence how you, your community, and political leaders address and respond to climate change. Use #UMichActonClimate on social media to share what you're doing and connect with other learners.
Meet the expert - Dr. Jennifer Hirsch
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From the course by University of Michigan
Act on Climate: Steps to Individual, Community, and Political Action
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University of Michigan
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From the lesson
Climate Action Plan
This week, you will apply ideas you learned in this course, learn about another relevant social change theory, and develop your own Personal Climate Action Plan. As part of this plan you will identify individual and community-related actions that you can take to mitigate the impact of increased greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change after completing this course.
Meet the Instructors
Michaela ZintProfessor of Environmental Education and Communication
Hello. My name is Devin,
and I'm a graduate student at the University of Michigan.
I'm here today with Dr. Jennifer Hirsch.
Dr. Hirsch is an applied cultural anthropologist and
the director of the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain,
at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Dr. Hirsch played an important role with helping the city of Chicago to implement
a climate change action plan with a focus on community initiatives for engagement.
So before we talk a little bit about your work in Chicago Dr. Hirsh,
I was hoping that you could first explain to us,
what is the climate action plan?
A climate action plan can be created by any entity, really.
A lot of times cities create their own climate action plans.
And so, when I was in Chicago,
Chicago had created the Chicago Climate Action Plan which
they launched in 2008 under Mayor Daley,
and became internationally known for its aggressive and creative plan.
Mayor Daley was very much known for green initiatives in the community, or in the city.
And so, it's a plan that a municipality generally will create to
help lower greenhouse gas emissions through taking a variety of different actions.
And in the case of Chicago,
it included actions that the city itself could take,
but it was really focused on the whole city taking initiative,
not just through the municipality itself but everybody who lived there.
So they were very determined to get
neighborhoods engaged in implementing the climate action plan,
otherwise, the plan would not be a success.
Okay. And why do you think that the plans are useful or
an important tool to address climate change and greenhouse gases?
Well, I think if there is no centralized plans,
we're not going to be able to meet the goals of
reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a way
that's really going to move the needle and
avoid the most drastic consequences of climate change.
So if everybody is, if it's all decentralized and everybody is doing their own thing,
first of all, a lot of people,
a lot of communities,
a lot of all different stakeholders, I mean,
a smaller municipalities, corporations,
aren't very aware of what's happening,
or if they are aware of what's happening,
they don't understand the role that they can play
in helping them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
So, leadership often times has to come from the municipality.
Okay. And you used an asset-based approach
to engage Chicago residents to act on climate change.
Can you explain to us what is an asset-based approach?
Sure. An asset-based approach comes out of a field that's emerged over the past 15 years,
or so called, Asset-based Community Development.
Within those circles, it's often referred to as ABCD,
and it was developed largely by an institute at Northwestern University in Evanston,
just north of Chicago,
by the Asset-Based Community Development Institute,
which was founded by two visionary men,
named John McKnight and Jody Kretzmann.
Who had a lot of experience working in government,
working in community organizing,
and noticed that it's really a challenge,
this approach, to the social services model of working with communities.
The social services model tends to look at
communities that are struggling in terms of their deficits,
meaning they see problems in those communities and
they look for solutions that come from the outside.
What Asset-based Community Development or ABCD does it says,
a lot of that, it turns out,
has not solved the problems in those communities largely because it
hasn't taken advantage of all the assets or
the strengths that exist in those communities,
and then tailored solutions based on those strengths.
So Asset-based Community Development goes into a community saying,
"Let's find what's amazing in this community and is already working,
and let's build from there,
from the inside out as opposed to the outside in."
So, I'd like to talk more about this approach with,
in the context of the Bronzeville Community Project.
So, what was it that the Bronzeville Community decided to do to act on climate change?
If you could explain that a little bit for us.
Sure. Well, it might be helpful first to explain a little bit about what it means
to take an asset-based approach to sustainability or climate change work.
Sustainability and climate change are two issues that are really,
tend to be worked on from the top-down as opposed to the bottom-up.
And that is largely because,
they aren't necessarily issues that people
are thinking about on a daily basis in their lives.
Even if they care about them,
they don't tend to be as front and center as something like hunger,
or difficult, or challenging education systems,
or poverty, or affordable housing or things like that.
And so the people who are thinking
about them and the people who are coming up with the solutions,
tend to be policymakers, government,
sometimes the corporate sector,
which is seeing the impact of climate change on a daily basis.
And so the problem and the solutions are very much thought of in
a top-down way and they're very much thought of in terms of technology and policy,
and not so much in terms of what can happen at the community level.
So, taking an ABCD approach to sustainability and climate change,
is a pretty radical thing to do in those particular fields,
whereas it's been around more,
and it's being used more by communities and by funders who kind of
push particular approaches in with a lot of other social issues,
not as much with environmental issues or with climate and sustainability issues.
So, in Bronzeville which is often thought about as the Harlem of the Midwest,
it's a very well known,
largely African-American community on Chicago's south side,
very close to the University of Chicago.
It is a place that has been studied and researched to
death often times by researchers at the University of Chicago.
It is the place where during the Great Migration in the early to mid-1900s,
African-Americans, when they migrated from the south to the north,
they could only live in certain places,
and they lived in Bronzeville.
It was a very thriving black community that had everything that you needed,
but it also forced people to live there.
So, it was that kind of juxtaposition.
But it was very much in many ways a thriving community,
and many famous people,
as our work in Bronzeville demonstrates,
came out of that community.
So, when I was working at the Field Museum which is where this work came out of,
we had a history of working in the Bronzeville area.
We had partners we worked with the Bronzeville area.
So when we started working on engaging communities in the Chicago Climate Action Plan,
we went to some of our partners there who we knew were interested in issues like,
healthy community building and sustainability.
And we asked them if they wanted to partner with us, and they said yes.
And the reason they said yes,
was because we were taking
an asset-based approach as opposed to a deficit-based approach.
So what we were able to do,
was go in there and identify
different things that were already going on that we could build
from to tie in to the different strategies of the Chicago Climate Action Plan.
And some of the things that were going on there were some serious efforts
to do economic development from a sustainability and climate change basis.
So, really looking at things like green jobs,
really looking at things like community gardens,
and looking at things like public art,
many of which were trying to teach younger generations through older generations.
So also reteach older generations but use knowledge that was in
the community about traditions that used to be
very popular in African traditions and in African-American traditions like farming,
like stewardship of the land,
like black history, which is displayed all over Bronzeville,
an amazing public art.
And tie that stuff to things like green jobs and great economic development.
So, the project that you pursued it was a community garden, correct?
Within Bronzeville.
The project that we pursued had a bunch of different components,
and some of those were community gardens which were tied
into really developing a different kind of food culture.
That is, a healthier food culture that goes back to
more African traditions of healthy eating,
some of which have been lost in
the African and African-American trajectory in this country.
So the gardens were tied.
They were a means of working on building
a healthy community that had people growing food,
people teaching people nutrition that was based in African and African-American culture,
and also looking at green economic development,
and in public art.
So really, a person who would be really fantastic for you guys
to interview as part of this course,
are some of the people that were the leaders in that.
I'd be happy to connect you with,
but they had a vision for their community that Bronzeville
would become a destination community for African food and culture,
much in the way that Chinatown is in Chicago or that the Devon Avenue area is,
which is very strong in Indian and Pakistani cuisine and culture.
So that was their vision that we were helping
tie into the climate action plan to make that happen.
And that's what it means to take an asset-based approach,
is that we help build on what they are already doing and move it forward by
connecting it into other things that will
also move a larger plan for the city and a region forward.
Wonderful. Thank you.
So, based on your experiences,
what advice do you have for learners who are looking to engage with
community residents on climate action?
Like either in the contacts, go ahead.
My advice is to go into the community and find out what they're already doing,
and see where there is excitement,
and see what their visions are,
and where their action is, that's already happening,
and figure out what pieces of that tie into your sustainability or climate change agenda.
To find those areas where you can collaborate,
so that you're advancing a community's vision for itself and
the sustainability of the natural systems and the people of that area,
at the same time that you're advancing
a broader goal for climate change reducing greenhouse gases.
And that, what that means is that you'll take things that are out there like, you know,
improving transportation options, or retrofitting homes,
or a green economic development,
or whatever the different goals are of a broader plan.
And you'll really tailor those in
some very specific ways based on a particular community's culture and assets,
as opposed to just trying to get people to do what we think we want them to do.
Great. So kind of a similar question but, as we wrap up,
if you could only recommend one action for
an individual who is interested in engaging residents within the community,
what is that one specific action that you would recommend they take?
I would suggest finding an active community organization that excites you,
and going to some of their meetings and getting to know some of those people,
and really listening, and then talking to them about your interests,
and going from there.
So, it's about really starting with building relationships.
Wonderful.
Well, thank you so much for your time today Dr. Hirsch.
I really appreciated your insights on community engagement and the asset-based approach.
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