Advanced Community Resilience Organizing Seminar
This seminar will be offered next in Spring or Fall quarter 2020. Students will learn skills for community resilience organizing with an emphasis on environmental and climate justice, deepen practices of transformative movement building, cultivate audacious vision, build community across movements, and navigate into action. This seminar is part of our campus’ nascent Community Resilience Co-lab, an experimental co-curricular education response to the enduring and intersecting crises of environmental, racial, and social injustice.
What: Advanced Community Resilience Organizing Seminar
Who: UCI undergraduate and graduate students
When: Spring or Fall Quarter 2020; Wednesdays, 3 – 4:50 pm
Where: TBD
Units: 1.3 unit class P/NP; University Affairs Course Code 86720
Instructor: Abby Reyes, Director, UCI Community Resilience Projects
Seminar Objectives
Through highly participatory activities and practices, it is expected that students will:
- Deepen understanding of ways that issues of environmental, climate, racial, and social justice intersect;
- Deepen understanding and practices of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence;
- Learn skills for transformative leadership, movement building and advocacy;
- Learn skills for community visioning and action planning;
- Create a support network and strong sense of community and solidarity with their peers; and
- Develop student-led project(s) to execute after the course with continued guidance and support from the Community Resilience Co-lab.
The framing question during a recent Transitions Lab hosted by Movement Strategy Center (MSC). The UCI seminar draws from strategies and practices that MSC is helping to bring together across multiple social movements.
Additional Information
Students should expect to be able to complete all work for the course during the weekly seminar on Wednesdays, 3-4:50 pm. Optional additional activities include a weekly skill-building workshop/reading group immediately following the seminar from 5-6 pm and eligibility to attend one weekend intensive training in Summer 2019. The seminar draws upon framing, practices, and strategies from multiple sources including, among others, SERES, Movement Strategy Center, Social Transformation Project, Emergent Strategy, Movement Generation, Rockwood Leadership Institute, the Work that Reconnects, Youth Lead the World, and the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program.
About the Instructor
Abby Reyes is a human rights & environmental lawyer. She cut her teeth doing rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian U’wa pueblo for dignity against big oil. She is now director of UCI Community Resilience Projects and trains UC food and climate fellows in transformative leadership statewide. A graduate of Stanford and Berkeley Law, she co-chairs the board of EarthRights International and is a partner in the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners.
