A new report from NOAA’s Office of Education shares lessons learned from NOAA Environmental Literacy Program grantees. These grantees are working to help their communities build the environmental literacy necessary for resilience to extreme weather events and climate change.
An illustration of a group of people sharing community resilience ideas from NOAA's Community Resilience Education Theory of Change. (Image credit: NOAA Office of Education & Jessica B. Bartram, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
The report captures findings from the NOAA Environmental Literacy Program (ELP) 2021 Resilience Education Grantee Workshop and helps advance the growing field of community resilience education.
NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Program convened community resilience education grantees virtually for the first time from May 25-27, 2021. One hundred ten participants attended the event, most of whom had received funding from NOAA for community resilience education from 2015-2021.
The Community Resilience Education Grantee Workshop provided a venue for collaboration among grantees and NOAA scientists and experts. Participants applied NOAA’s Community Resilience Education Theory of Change to their own projects and discussed relevant themes such as building a future workforce; diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice; and the evolving impacts of COVID-19. The grantees left the workshop with more resources, strengthened relationships, and new ideas about how to address their projects’ challenges and measure their impacts.
This workshop was built on the findings from the first and second Community Resilience Education Grantee Workshops, which were held in 2017 at the Museum of Science in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2019 at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland.
NOAA will continue to build upon the themes highlighted in the workshop, both through the current projects and in future funding opportunities. Reports from the 2017, 2019, and 2021 workshops, as well as information on past competitions and NOAA resilience assets, are available on the Environmental Literacy Program’s resilience hub.
A new grant competition for the Environmental Literacy Program will be issued in September 2021. Pre-applications will be due in late fall 2021. Visit the Environmental Literacy Program’s apply webpage to learn more.
