Evanston climate education and outreach

Summary

To collaborate with community partners, the City of Evanston’s Office of Sustainability created the Experience Climate Change activity and curriculum and deployed it in 2018 during the development of the City’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan. The activity strives to communicate the local impacts of climate change in a way that all participants feel able to contribute. Participants, who were sixth-grade students in the public elementary school, learned about the ways climate change impacts various aspects of life in Evanston, such as the number of high temperature days, water quality, and waste management. Participants then stepped into the shoes of a policymaker by providing recommended actions the City could take to help the community become more resilient to climate risks. The activity presented an opportunity for participants to express concerns, suggest ideas, and deepen the conversation surrounding environmental resilience, equity, and justice.

In 2018, the City of Evanston released their Climate Action and Resilience Plan, which is a comprehensive community-wide plan to prepare the community for the impacts of the climate crisis and chart a path towards community carbon neutrality by 2050.  Additional goals include achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2030 and zero waste by 2050. While gathering public feedback during the climate action and resilience planning process, the Office of Sustainability noticed there was a lack of in-depth discussion during feedback sessions. To address this gap, the Office of Sustainability sought community partners who could provide a more immersive experience for young people and other community members to increase engagement by making people feel better equipped to discuss the impending impacts of climate change. The result was a partnership inspired by community organizations and local residents Clare Tallon Ruen (Watershed Collective) and Chris Essex (Y.O.U. and Quest4Earth). This partnership led to the development of a curriculum and an activity to help students discuss the look and feel of climate change, the decisions cities need to make to address climate change, and how residents can contribute to mitigating climate impacts.

As part of the plan, Evanston’s Office of Sustainability partnered with the Evanston/Skokie School District 65 to pilot a one-month climate change curriculum in the District’s three middle schools. The City of Evanston used local climatological data and reports developed through the City’s previous partnership with the Great Lake Climate Adaptation Network (GLCAN) and GLISA. This data was then converted into short local climate change scenarios relating to invasive species proliferation, flooding, extreme heat, and waste. The Office of Sustainability and its partners wrote the curriculum based on this data and vetted it with multiple community groups to ensure it was easy to understand, concise, and would be easy to deploy. The Office of Sustainability then trained community volunteers and local school district science teachers on the activity and curriculum so that they would be able to utilize it in their classrooms. Lastly, the City recorded a short introductory presentation that was used as an introduction for each class prior to the launch of the curriculum.

Part of the goal for the material was to get students to readily engage in the topics and understand why they were important. To accomplish that goal, the curriculum was designed to have the students discuss larger issues instead of being told about them. For instance, instead of stating, “air quality is worse because of emissions from cars,” the Office of Sustainability wanted students to discuss why clean air is important for human and ecosystem health. As a culmination of the project in its first year, all sixth-grade science students presented their climate change mitigation strategies at the school-wide science fair, resulting in hundreds of innovative youth-created local climate solutions.

Timeframe

This project is meant to be iterative and a “living” curriculum and activity, meaning it is updated throughout the year based on feedback from partners and participants. The first version took about four months to develop and deploy (June – September 2018). It then took another six months to turn it into a curriculum that could be used for school-aged participants (October 2018 – May 2019).  Since 2018, the curriculum has undergone significant revisions and upgrades in late 2019 and in mid-2020. The Office of Sustainability plans on continuing to evolve the activity in 2021.

Funding

The City of Evanston applied for and received a $10,000 grant from the National League of Cities, the sole funder of the project. The grant includes twelve months of technical assistance, staff support, and professional development opportunities for community leaders. The funding was used to pay community partners for their time and to pay a graphic designer to turn the initial material into a more visually appealing set of materials.

Equity was one of three guiding principles in Evanston’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan and was included in the Experience Climate Change program. The City found in conversations with partners and participants that participants wanted material that acknowledged and responded to systems of oppression including racism, historic disinvestment, and income inequality.

Experience Climate Change focused on human need and human impact, rather than purely technical information. Several elements of the activity wove in conversations about equity and justice, such as when participants were prompted to talk about using reusable items to reduce waste. During that portion of the activity, students discussed how everyone does not have the resources to decide between purchasing reusable items or single-use plastics. In the extreme heat section of the activity, students learned that the City wants to make sure everyone has a safe place when it is too hot, but some lack transportation to get to a cooling station. Highlighting these disparities illuminated how climate change can disproportionately impact vulnerable populations and helped students understand the complexities of policymaking.