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UCI Community Resilience is a member of a community-academic partnership in Santa Ana, California that is working together to plan a new popular-education based climate disaster preparedness and response curriculum called Alt-CERT.
Alt-CERT Roots
Over the last few years, 12 community-academic partnerships rooted in climate vulnerable communities throughout California participated in a learning cohort to accelerate equity-focused climate resilience planning and action. Convened by UCI Community Resilience, the cohort learned values, methods, and practices of participatory action research, popular education facilitation, and community-driven climate resilience.
One of the cohort's cross-cutting research outcomes was that resident leaders observe their communities to be underprepared and under-resourced for climate disaster response. They identified the need for better and more community-relevant climate disaster emergency response curriculum. Cohort participants and UCI Community Resilience then gathered leaders from seven additional climate vulnerable communities, who echoed and expanded upon these observations. Mobilization of the Alt-CERT curriculum arises from these roots.
Alt-CERT Gist
The Alt-CERT curriculum project is both a response and an antidote to the limitations of FEMA's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training. Alt-CERT does not replace FEMA CERT. Rather, Alt-CERT responds to calls from disinvested communities to address community-identified limitations of the federal curriculum through greater focus on understanding the causes and consequences of the climate crisis, practicing community-driven mutual aid, building the power of our communities that are left behind in conventional disaster preparedness and response, and liberating resources for community-led climate disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in disinvested communities.
Learn more about Alt-CERT’s learning objectives, timeline, people, and workshops by visiting the Alt-CERT webpage below.
Want to get involved? Contact UCI Community Resilience.