“[The] feeling of loss of place that my friends and family are experiencing as their local weather patterns shift is key in my mind here. An embrace of that loss and a fostering of a new land ethic seems important to me. We need to look at things like that, things we’d taken for granted. We need to look for what those things meant to us and to what those changes can teach us: the way natural resources, our climate, and our livelihoods are linked.”
— Student reflections from UCI’s Advanced Community Resilience Organizing Seminar
“[A] just transition is rooted in community [and] involves healing the violence, domination, and extraction of peoples, resources, [and] communities [ ]. It needs to fix these systemic issues and I think the best way to do that is for folks to come together, which of course requires a lot of empathy and strength, and [is] unfortunately easier said than done.”
“[The] thing that struck me was … how important it is not only to say no in activism, but also to make it clear what we are saying yes to.”
About UCI Community Resilience Projects
Based at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), Community Resilience is a unit within the UCI Office of Sustainability. Community Resilience brings together teams of faculty, students, staff, and community collaborators to address environmental, health, and social justice challenges by fostering community-driven and equity-focused solutions. Current projects support research, education, and training to bolster.
- local worker cooperative and urban farming ecosystems;
- local youth-led investigation of levels of lead in the soil;
- local health equity-focused COVID-19 response capacity;
- statewide & campus participatory action research teams for community-driven climate resilience;
- national legal educational support to low-income communities and communities of color that are in transition from extraction-based economies to regenerative economies; and
- international human rights and environmental protection.
Community Resilience relies on a nimble team that includes over twenty community partners and university counterparts as well as student fellows, visiting community scholars, popular education training partners, and a small staff. Our work takes place within the ancestral homelands of the Acjachemen and Tongva peoples. Read about our engagement with Native Nations and Indigenous Peoples here.