Greetings Community!

I hope this message reaches you in positive spirits! Fall is here and we’ve been reflecting together as a team, and with our amazing partners, about what this seasonal shift brings up for us. Pumpkin spice, leaves changing color, soup making, familial imprints rooted in cultural tradition, and, well–what seems to be the unpredictable fall chill amidst some of our uncharacteristic hot days and hurricanes due to climate disruption. These unpredictable patterns and changes to our climate are the daily reminders, in real time, of how critical our work is and how we must remain steadfast in our commitment to community-driven solutions. 

So how are we navigating the reminders that “transition is inevitable, justice is not,” from our comrades and fellow Climate Justice Alliance members?

Aside from settling into our new fiscal home at Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE), we’re continuing to challenge ourselves and others to deepen our practice of leading with liberatory power. For us, this starts at home, from the inside out, as we grow our team and work to build a culture of care that will better equip us to make our meaningful contribution toward shifting, subverting, and ultimately transforming top-down, white supremacist systems.

People’s Climate Innovation Center and Facilitating Power recently launched the second Vision | Power | Solutions workshop series centering community-driven planning for racial and climate justice. This four-part seasonal series hosted by the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners builds facilitative leadership capacity among facilitators, organizers, leaders, and educators from (and accountable to) Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and Pacific Islander communities. 

We are thankful to all the participants who joined us for the inaugural session in September and shared such powerful reflections about what culture means to them. We are also incredibly grateful to Wyking Garrett, a third- generation community builder, social entrepreneur, and current President and CEO of AfricaTown Community Land Trust who shared many examples of why culturally rooted approaches to planning are critical to community ownership. 

As an offering from the first session, we share the following affirmation that Wyking reminded us of: “We should all be embracing our agency to shape the world, the communities, the neighborhoods, the places where we live--and those places should reflect what is necessary for us to grow and thrive and be our best selves. That is really the root of our work!”  

If you are interested in participating in future VPS sessions, please register and join us for our next workshop happening on February 21, 2023 - Facilitating Alignment Around Community Priorities, where we’ll discuss identifying a set of community priorities around which to organize and generate resources key to community power and change. To learn more about the series click here or reach out Iris Verduzco, NACRP Coordinator at iris@climateinnovation.net.

Those who participate in three or more VPS workshops will be eligible to join the NACRP and access a community of practice and additional offerings, such as the upcoming NACRP Facilitator Certification 2023 cohort. 

From August 26-28, our CURRENTS project place-based pilot partners, Southwest Workers Union, hosted the project team (which includes us, Facilitating Power and Kapwa Consulting) for a Just Transition Summit. This gathering brought together staff, members, and partners from the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) to build deeper alignment around a shared vision and strategy to advance a Just Transition in Yanawana (San Antonio, TX). Our time together focused on building a shared understanding of CJA’s Just Transition framework, looking at the distinctions between an extractive economy and a regenerative economy, and what the shift to a regenerative economy entails for the community. In addition, we developed a shared, three-year Just Transition strategy, assessing collective strengths and gaps across the six Just Transition strategies, identifying several strategic focuses, and developing a three-year timeline of coordinated actions. Over the coming months, we will continue to support and learn from the advancement of this work as we move toward our goal to convene and facilitate a national collaborative effort that aims to develop place-based pilot projects to ultimately transform economic, cultural and political power to accelerate the transformation required to act on and create racially just climate action.

When the National BPS Coalition was launched in early 2022, there was an agreement for cities to create equitable BPS policies by 2024. However, with no system in place to move it forward and no funds for community efforts to ensure that equitable policy making is the focus, People’s Climate Innovation Center, in partnership with Institute for Market Transformation (IMT), has stepped up to support movement of this critical course transition through the Community Climate Shift initiative.

Policy making, particularly around building performance standards and other decarbonization efforts, continue to under-resource and push communities of color and low-income communities to the margins. Across the U.S. and its territories, barriers to climate justice continue to be deeply interconnected with systemic challenges that do not allow for sufficient investment in the capacity of frontline communities as solution-makers. Accelerating the support and funding of community-driven and community-led approaches remains the critical change we need to make at this crucial political and social moment. PCIC and IMT have been working alongside community-based partners and technical assistance providers across the country to build out the plan for driving Community Climate Shift. We have now raised $1.5 million in support of communities, and there’s much further to go!

Buildings are more than bricks and walls: they’re where we live, work, learn and play. They shape and define our cities and inform the energy and water usage of constituents and visitors. Decades of policy and business practices have separated us by race and income into unequally resourced communities and buildings, creating a cycle where some have benefited greatly and others, mostly people of color, have been greatly harmed. Those already bearing the brunt of these systems now also bear the increasing burden of higher energy bills, dirtier air, increased vulnerability to power outages, flooding, and other climate-related disasters, to which poorly planned and operated buildings contribute disproportionately. Through Community Climate Shift, we will see those who are most impacted leading the charge for creating community change. 

The first cohort of the Young Black Climate Leaders (YBCL) Youth Futures Fund was awarded in August 2022! The fund is supporting 11 projects (12 young leaders) in their climate justice efforts that uplift climate resilience and regenerative practices. Awards were made ranging from $1,500 - $6,500 and a total of $42,000 was distributed to support the efforts of these young Black leaders. Projects cross the spectrum of the climate field from sustainable fashion to content creation, and from growing food to access to greenspace & parks. The new cohort awardees are:

Devoni Whitehead -Seattle, WA
Lauren David - Bradenton, FL
J.Nyla “ink” McNeill - Long Beach, CA
Jasmin Graham - Bradenton, FL
Justina Thompson - Philadelphia, PA
Marian "Mars" Mwenja - Birmingham/Muscogee land, AL
Sarah Martin - St. Louis, MO
Andrew Chambers - Oakland, CA
Nicole Sutton - Bay Area, CA
Dillon Bernard - Brooklyn, NY
Kieshaun White - Fresno, CA
Dominique Pearson - Los Angeles, CA