Hello! We're excited to hear from you about our IMLS funded project.  Please leave a comment here with questions and input.

Thanks!

Liz Georgakopoulos

What a wonderful list of collaborators.  You mentioned that you developed a community of practice.  Did you create a community of practice among the collaborators, or your students, or both?  The students report that they learned a lot from their experiences.  How many students were engaged in the project? What activities and approaches did you use with them and what experiences did the student have that led to these outcomes? 

This seems like a great project - it's so important to get youth involved, especially around climate and environmental topics! The description mentions a community of practice that supports the work, but the video didn't describe how the organizations engage with that community. Could you please provide some more details about how these organizations engage with and support each other in this work? I'd also be interested to know a few ideas that may be shared in the civic engagement toolkit that you are developing. Thanks! Keep up the great work. 

Thanks Katie and Jamie for your comments and questions. The original idea for the grant came through conversations at a climate change summit in Utah a number of years ago, exploring the role of youth in our institutions and as changemakers. We wanted to have broad geographic partners that all had strong youth program with committed staff.  Building on Liz's comment above, our community of practice is made up of staff from each of the organizations. We have been meeting once a month on zoom pretty consistently over the last 2 1/2 years and have gotten together in person twice (at NeAQ and at MOTE Marine Lab). We worked hard to create a culture of sharing and learning at every meeting. Our leadership team - NeAQ, The Wild Center and the Alliance for Climate Education co-create the agendas, have shared facilitation and leadership responsibilities.  We generated topics we wanted to learn more about such as: civic engagement and advocacy, teaching climate justice, positive youth development etc and shared vocabulary so we had a common starting point. Last year, COVID was certainly a challenge as was the moral reckoning on racial and social justice - we created a space to talk about what was happening at our institutions and in our lives. The distributed leadership, co-generated and collaborative meetings, problem solving approach and co created content generation, recognizing our unique organizations and finding the strengths each brought to the project, relatively consistent meetings each month over the last 2.5 years have all contributed to creating this community of practice. 

In terms of civic engagement - we had A LOT of conversations and discussion around what that means and where our programs/institutions were on that continuum. One great resource that helped us find common ground/definitions was reaching out to CIRCLE - a program at Tufts College of Civic Life that has a lot of expertise on youth civic engagement and the environment. 

Awesome work. I love projects that involve true collaboration across contexts--it is so important to learn from one another and grow together.

What a great project! Did you use a certain DEIA framework to adapt tools and resources to fit the needs of your diverse audiences across the different sites? 

Wonderful to see a collaboration among so many museums that have so much to offer. Looking forward to seeing what you can accomplish once we move past pandemic!

The UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development are a great connection for youth to see the impact that can be made if we all work together to build a better future. Are you looking to scale the project to include new partners? What are your plans for sharing the blueprint for others to replicate?

Such a fun project! It is wonderful to see experts in so many parts of the country working together to think about ways to improve how children and young people connect with what museums have to offer! Thank you for this important work!!

Very interesting project. I'm wondering when the tool kit you discuss will be available for others?

Thank you for the wonderful video and the essential work you are doing!

The work of the Wild Center! is incredible in leading the development of youth summits on climate change. 

We can testify how valuable such Youth Summits are.  There are several annual events we have taken part in for years, specifically those in California and Washington DC.  Youth for Environmental Sustainability (YES) Conference, Environmental Youth Forum (San Rafael and Berkeley) and Anacostia Environmental Youth Summit in Washington DC. [Several appear in our video this year]

That you encourage summits connecting with each other and learning from each other makes such a positive difference.  So many great things take place in different regions of the country.

Question: Does it look like youth summits in the years ahead will be hybrid -- both in person and remote?

Hi Jim. Thanks so much for your comments. I do think in the future that youth climate summits will be hybrid. Right now, we have seen the engagement in all virtual summits declining a bit due to just overall digital/zoom fatigue. However the power of being able to convene remotely is definitely been realized so I think we will see some very creative iterations of the youth climate summit model. 

I love your approach to building civic engagement by forming communities.  The strong relationships between and team-building between staff at the different museums seem critical to impacting young people and promoting their civic engagement.   Would ever consider inviting school teachers to join your team?  It would be great to learn from your expertise in informal science learning while bringing classroom experience and many student connections to the work.  If you are interested in connecting with middle and high school teachers and students, I would be thrilled to work with you!