Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab:
Youth Collaborating with Adults in community for Future Generations
Local climate action and economic resilience starts with
Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab.
6 month Pilot Jan - July 2023
This program is open to teen residents between age 16 and 20 in Gray, Durham, New Gloucester and Raymond* and do not need to be enrolled in GNGHS.
Climate Action Planning
Youth engaged in this program are creating a Portrait of a Place to assess how we are overreaching ecologically and undeserving socially in the region. They are participating in an participatory action research project serving their towns, and the region as they seek to enroll in the Community Resilience Partnership.
Supporting their efforts are partners: The Royal River Conservation Trust, Cumberland and Androscoggin Soil and Water Conservation Districts, North Star Planning, rbouvier consulting, and Marsh Dunn Graphic Facilitation.
Find your Climate Action
- Co-create a personal and collective vision for a positive future
- Engage in climate action planning at town, region and state- level
- Find your voice and agency in the community to lead on climate
- Do real community planning and policy change in your home town
- Gain academic credit and letters of recommendation
- Weave a network of new relationships in your community
- Connect the dots between joy, skills and community needs
Ecology is having a moment
What is unraveling right now and what is renewing?
Communities need a positive image of the future now. Energy prices, climate chaos and inflation require a coordinated response locally. Hoe can we do that? We need to adapt to changes that are coming and we can not rely on the steep hierarchical structures and competitive practices of the past to do it. Doing nothing contributes to chronic anxiety and depression. It is too easy to feel hopeless.
The wicked problems of today require us to balance power, love and justice. We can find the leverage internally and collectively to ensure our future on the planet, in our bioregion when we practice social innovation because climate change is a social issue.
It has been 50+ years since the first research on climate change and the Limits of Growth of a fossil-fuel-dominate economy where released (The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind.) Since then we have seen globalization accelerate, corruption of democracy, terrorism, geopolitical wars, rising mass protest as well as increases in militarization, surveillance and polarization of people fueled by high-tech media that does harm to people.
That is the context we are in. At the same time we are at new heights of understanding around systems of oppression, the value of equity and diversity, emotional intelligence, genomics, soil, and the microbiome! In this program, it is all connected. Ecology is having a moment.
Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab aims to be a challenge to the status quo and a culture shift. This cohort will focus on the domain of complex adaptive challenges, under advisement of Rachel Lyn Rumson.
What will home and habitation will look like in the next 50 years? What if people are thriving and respecting the limits of the planet?
Contact us if you want to be get in on the action.
