Community Climate Conversations: Mapping our Common Ground
by Karen Barton
In April 2022, I had the honor of attending a U.S. Department of State Alumni TIES seminar entitled, Environmental Diplomacy and its Impact on American Society in Denver, Colorado. Our cohort of 35 ExchangeAlumni participants spanned a total of seventeen different programs, from Fulbright to Boren to the Professional Fellows program. The seminar was a rare opportunity for transdisciplinary exchange and cross-cultural collaboration, and one program outcome was the ability to apply for an Alumni TIES small grant, which provided a chance to implement some of our community-engaged climate work in Northern Colorado.
My Alumni TIES small grant focused on the creation of a set of Community Climate Conversations (CCC) that enabled us to bring local stakeholders to the table in order to address environmental concerns facing our Northern Colorado region. Our objective was to host a series of challenging and sometimes uncomfortable conversations with local partners in order to shift the narratives about our county’s biggest environmental challenges and their solutions- oil and gas development, big agriculture, climate change, deep adaptation, and resilience. Our long-range goal was to create an open dialogue that would allow locals to identify some of their concerns so we could not only collectively tackle the region’s most pressing problems, but also find ways to record and map those concerns for a broader audience. We hypothesized that these community climate conversations could potentially be scalable for other places around the globe that are grappling with similar environmental justice issues.
In 2023, we held most of our conversations at the LINC Innovation Center, a 62,000 square foot library in Greeley, Colorado that contains maker spaces, a television and podcast studio, and a variety of meeting places where residents can converge. While we originally planned to host our CCC events at the University of Northern Colorado, LINC served as a free, publicly accessible space and an ideal community connector. Our hallmark event was held in November, when we managed to gather over 50 people and nearly a dozen partners to host group dialogues, interview a dozen students for our “Geographies of Hope podcast,” and conduct a “Crafting a Resilient Earth” session- a hands-on felting activity that led to generative conversations about the issues facing our community. We also leveraged support from Drs. Lucinda Shellito, Chelsie Romulo, and Sharon Bywater-Reyes, three UNC professors who received a National Science Foundation funded planning grant entitled “Building a Community Learning Ecosystem for Climate Change Resilience in Northern Colorado.” Our partnership with these professors enabled us to scale up our Alumni TIES small grant and broaden our overall footprint across Northern Colorado, and I consider it to be one of the greatest success stories from this project. Because LINC library is open access, we were able to use our funding to hold a set of additional, smaller CCC discussions in the upstairs classroom with groups of 12 in the months that followed.
The original goals of our project were to create a public, inclusive space for dialogue focused on uncomfortable conversations surrounding climate change and environmental sustainability. We also wanted to find common ground and increase stakeholder engagement in the spirit of environmental diplomacy. What we realized is the importance of where and how you host community conversations. Embedding our event in the community provided access to different kinds of resources and allowed our stakeholders to be equal participants in the planning process. By deviating from traditional academic conference norms, we were able to facilitate a more fluid and fun participatory series of events where people felt included, and the energy and enthusiasm were palpable. Interestingly, one of our most successful sessions was a crafting breakout session held during the November CCC launch (pictured above). Dr. Shellito spoke about climate resilience during this felting session, and our participants were able to contribute to conversations while literally building their own crafts.
The next step in our project involves folding qualitative data from all six of our Community Climate Conversations into a Story Map that community members can access to better understand the environmental concerns of other local stakeholders. We are aware that Colorado maintains a reputation for being environmentally sustainable, yet our region struggles with how best to balance natural resource protection with energy development and livestock production- two of the central economies here in Weld County. This local narrative is strikingly similar to that of other “clean and green” regions around the globe. Building resilience in Colorado will require regular community conversations that focus on how best to manage existing natural resources in the face of climate change, and we plan to facilitate these conversations with our growing body of stakeholders and partners.
One other unintended outcome from the Alumni TIES small grant project is that we were able to submit our initial project results for inclusion in the Arctic Frontiers conference held in Tromsø, Norway in January 2024. Funding from Fulbright Norway and the U.S. Department of Education allowed me to also bring some of our student research assistants to Norway so they could participate in the European Union-funded Youth Forum cohort. I continue to be impressed by the domino effect of U.S. Exchange programs and their ability to support so many individuals and communities over the long term.
Karen Barton is a 2018–2019 alumna of the Fulbright Specialist program to Nepal. She participated in the April 2022 Alumni TIES seminar on “Environmental Diplomacy and its Impact on American Society” in Denver, Colorado.
Alumni TIES is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government and supported in its implementation by World Learning, in partnership with the Office of Alumni Affairs of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA).
