Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab:
Youth Collaborating with Elders for Future Generations
What if we co-created a positive vision of the future and decided together what projects will expand our wellbeing as a community? What if the adults helped us make it happen?
Local climate action and economic resilience starts with
Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab.
6 months | 1 cohort
Gray | New Gloucester | Durham | Raymond
2022 -2023
You will play with doughnut economics and action research then engage with your community for conversations that matter about social and ecological boundaries. Data in hand, we will meet with community elders to envision a future we want for our hometowns and we are going to shape the priorities together with them that are locally relevant and grounded in global responsibility.
Join the Co-Lab
This program is in the pilot year, sponsored by MSAD15, and run by 207permaculture. 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 and contributing to an interdisciplinary and intergenerational participatory action research project. Students that apply for Alt Pathways have a variety of service learning projects to choose from that fit into a large community action. That action is designing Community Resilience in Partnership with The Town’s of Gray, New Gloucester, Durham, and Raymond, with support form The Royal River Conservation Trust, Cumberland and Androscoggin Soil and Water Conservation Districts, Town Planners at North Star Planning, Environmental Economists at rbouvier consulting, and graphic facilitator Marsh Dunn. 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.
What you will Do
- Co-create a vision for local climate action
- Engage in climate-smart community and economic development
- Learn about dialogic approaches to change
- Assist your town in joining the State of Maine's Community Resilience Partnership
- Find your agency to co-create change for your future and generations to come
- 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 with nature
MOre INformation
Raison d'etre
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. We need both information and imagination.
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 understanding of systems of oppression, valuing equity and diversity, emotional intelligence, the genome and both the soil and body microbiome has never been more widely accepted or understood. In this program, it is all connected. Climate change is a social issue.
This is not a simulation. Youth Leadership Resilience Co-Lab will be a challenge and a culture shift. Using social innovations, and the Doughnut, this cohort will focus on the domain of complex adaptive challenges, under advisement of Rachel Lyn Rumson. This cohort is going to learn what can be done to transform our communities awareness and expectation of the future.
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?
This program is beginning in November 2022 and running until April 2023.
Program Outline
Qualifications:
Residents of Durham, Gray, New Gloucester or Raymond* that are either public or private school students in their 11th or 12th year or homeschooled or those that have a High School diploma or GED from 2020 or 2021, or college students younger than 20 years of age.
High School Students:
Participants enrolled in High School will need to comply with their school’s rules for co-curricular activities and/or maintain passing grades. This program is accredited by MSAD15. Students that want to achieve credit for this experience must complete that alternative learning paperwork with their guidance counselor in advance. (Groups of students may do this at once. )
Completion:
Certificates of Completion and letters of recommendation are available in April 2023 for all participants that complete the program with 75% attendance and demonstrated participation in community conversations, visioning, resilience planning, and team development and project work.
Format:
This program coincides with a project of 207permaculture to help the Towns of Durham, Gray and New Gloucester, with support from The Community Resilience Partnership (CRP), a program of the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future (GOPIF). Royal River Conservation Trust, Cumberland and Androscoggin Soil and Water Districts, rbouvier consulting, North-Star Planning and local leaders in the towns serving on various committees will be subject matter experts. Students will be major influencers on these town's futures.
Sessions will meet on Wednesdays, including long sessions on early release days. Then there will be programmatic events happening at various times and locations as well. Friday meetings will begin at 4pm and end at 6pm. Saturday meetings will be 10am to 3pm. There will be field trips, events and guest speakers as well.
Field Trip locations may include Gray Transfer Station, Durham Middle School orchard, Skyline Farm and Transportation Museum, Royal River Conservation Trust, Village Green Park in Gray.
Important Dates:
- December 9 &10 - The Game - kickoff and orientation
- January 14 &15 - Field trips and Community Conversations
- February TBD. (Winter break is 2/20-24) - Interurban Resilience Co-Lab
- March TBD, -Telling a New Future Story
Early release dates are especially important sessions. These dates are extended sessions beginning after school and completing at 3:30pm.
- December 14
- January 16
- February 15
- March 15
- April 19
Transportation - Bus transportation is provided and encouraged. Some trips will be hands-on and some will be meetings with subject matter experts, stakeholder groups or attending town meetings and of course the regional convergence.
Modules:
In between module meetings students will perform defined research tasks, communications projects and meet with experts.
Module 1 - Coherence - Self Awareness & Creativity
Module 2 - Home, Habitation and Habituation
Module 3 – Group Community and Action Research
Module 4 - Convergence and Action Planning
Module 5 – Telling the Story
* Raymond as a town is participating in this work and the advisor for this program at GNG is not involved with that. You can be supported in this program if you live in Raymond and want to engage there.
