Title,Recipient,Competition,"Fiscal Year","Award Number","Federal Funding","Principal Investigator",State,City,County,District,Lat/Long,"Grant Dates",Abstract,Partners "Community Partnership for Resilience","New England Aquarium Corporation / New England Aquarium (NEAq)","2016: ELG for Community Resilience to Extreme Weather Events and Environmental Hazards",2017,NA17SEC0080001,"$481,110","Rebekah Stendahl",Massachusetts,Boston,Suffolk,MA08,"42.35914, -71.04977","2017-10-01T00:00:00 - 2020-09-30T00:00:00","The New England Aquarium worked with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to establish Community Partnerships for Resilience (CPR) starting in 2017. CPR created partnerships in three Boston-area communities that face severe risk from a changing climate – Chelsea, Hull, and Lynn, MA. Project leads worked with local professionals with diverse and relevant expertise in climate science, engineering, community planning and community action, as well as representatives from local schools or school-based educational programs serving youth in Grades 4 through 8. Partners determined the most critical, climate-related hazards for their area that would benefit from public involvement and understanding. With a focus on extreme heat, inland flooding and storm surge, project leads, and educators developed a curriculum framework. The framework was used as a guide for the creation of a unit that had students explore the identified hazards and create a Public Education Project (PEP) to communicate with community stakeholders to drive both understanding and action. Through a series of collaborative working Summer Institutes, project partners led teachers on an exploration of the framework materials, relevant science content, and a crash course on Project Based Learning techniques. Implementation of the unit in the 2018-2019 and 2019-2020 school years led to further refinement of the curriculum framework, insight on the need for further teacher supports, and improved relationships and connections with municipal and community contacts. The resulting curriculum framework was finalized alongside partner teachers in the spring and summer of 2020 and can be adapted to different climate resilience topics and PEPs, as driven by student interest. Students themselves represent a key constituency – they will be most directly impacted by future changes, and they will need civic capacity to foster positive change. Teacher resources also include a rubric to evaluate PEP plans to meet project objectives, resources on trauma-informed teachers from colleagues at Riverside Trauma Center (Needham, MA), instructional and motivation videos from educator partners on key unit phases, and a beta version of a mapping portal developed with partners at Metropolitan Area Planning Council using layered data across a variety of sources. As a result of this project, participating educators showed an increase in knowledge and awareness about climate change on a broad level, as well as local impacts in their specific Massachusetts region. CPR participation also made educators more comfortable collaborating with other educators and inviting outside expert voices for lessons. By working collaboratively, participating teachers felt they were able to better support their students to impact their communities in a positive way. CPR provided the opportunity to have students work together to communicate with the public using PEPs, allowing students and community members to collaborate in “a common effort to increase climate resilience.” As a result of this, CPR was able to expand the group of change agents who could tackle critical environmental challenges and strengthen their communities.","Girls Incorporated of Lynn, Museum of Science Boston, NOAA Climate Program Office (CPO), Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM), Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), Harwood Institute, City of Chelsea / Planning & Development Department, Chelsea Public Schools, Hull Public Schools, Town of Hull / Community Development & Planning Department, National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) / Greater Atlantic, Barr Foundation, University of Massachusetts Boston / School for the Environment, City of Lynn / Public Health Division, Lynn Public Schools, GreenRoots, Hull Lifesaving Museum (HLM), Neighbor to Neighbor (Lynn)"