Explore awards

The FH Faunteroy Community Enrichment Center will lead intergenerational efforts to build climate resilience and address complex environmental problems with Ward 7 residents through a model built on self-determination and collaboration with public and private partners. The project’s geographic focus is on Ward 7, home to not only the majority of single-family homes in Washington, DC’s 100-year floodplain, but also a predominantly Black population that faces increased climate vulnerability due to socio-economic stressors and legacies of systemic racism. The Ward 7 Resilience Hub Community Committee is the lead project partner, with collaborators including the DC Department of Energy and Environment, Harrison Institute for Public Law at Georgetown University Law Center, NOAA Chesapeake Bay Office, and additional support from NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments Program. Project goals, centered around Ward 7 residents, are to: (1) reshape workforce development programs and initiatives; (2) increase environmental literacy and civic participation; and (3) create community-driven decision-making processes and structures that guide the development of resilience hubs in the District. The full project title is “Nothing Without Us: Building Environmental Literacy, Resilience, and Sustainability in DC through a Multi-Partner, Community-Led Approach.” Activities will include workforce development programming, environmental education, and convenings for and with the partner organizations to develop promising practices for community resilience hubs. This collaboration will build a climate-ready workforce among Ward 7 residents, support community action and advocacy, and position residents to be leaders in the implementation of the District’s sustainability and climate plans, including Climate Ready DC, Resilient DC, and Sustainable DC 2.0.

Science On a Sphere (SOS) at Fiske Planetarium will raise awareness and understanding of Earth system science for over 30,000 visitors per year, using student docents and newly-developed, tested pedagogy. SOS will enhance Fiske’s ability to engage 3,000 university students and 30,000 K-12 students and members of the public. A student docent program will transform the traditionally passive experience of a planetarium visit into an interactive learning opportunity. The docents will be drawn from two sources: undergraduates who will be future science teachers, who we take from a selective CU program called "STEM-TP", and Hispanic university and high school students taught by Fiske's planetarium manager Francisco Salas. Docents will talk with visitors and help them understand key science issues that affect the earth, leading to more informed decision-making. Fiske will develop bilingual pedagogical material and new data sets, and share them with NOAA and SOS sites. To support the docents, and visiting students and teachers, Fiske Education Manager Traub-Metlay will lead development of explanatory materials that challenge visitors and provide context for what they are seeing. These will be translated into Spanish by Fiske Manager Salas. New data sets, contributed by faculty members, will expand the range of SOS, into space, adding solar interior models, the celestial sphere, and the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang, along with new terrestrial data such as the worldwide distribution of forest fires. SOS will become a focal point in Fiske's longstanding tradition of teacher workshops, which are often done in cooperation with the University of Colorado and NOAA scientists and highlight NOAA’s role monitoring the earth and sun. It also will be integrated with a small suite of hands-on exhibits we are installing that explains how observations can be made in infrared, ultraviolet, and X-rays in addition to visible light. These would complement SOS, which features multi-wavelength data. Fiske and its Boulder Colorado-area partners have raised $75,000 to cover the full cost of SOS hardware, and have formal institutional commitments to long-term program development. This award from NOAA will go into materials development, evaluation, and student pay. Colorado communities are aware of NOAA’s important work and the nearby David Skaggs Center, but security measures make it difficult to visit there. Fiske is much more accessible. Fiske will improve the usefulness of all SOS sites by conducting formative evaluation to assess what kinds of SOS presentations work best with public and school audiences, giving feedback to NOAA and all SOS users.

This project works to: (1) Continue to develop software that allows a docent to easily control Science on a Sphere from a small touchpad computer while interacting with visitors. (2) Continue to develop software that allows easy "drag and drop" construction of playlists. (3) Put kiosk control of the sphere, already developed as a student project, into a real kiosk. (4) Assess the use of wireless response devices or "clickers" to enhance audience interaction, learning, and enjoyment, and gather information from visitor responses and share all these improvements with the network. (5) Improve the resolution of the 4 projectors of our SOS installation, in anticipation of new data on the moon and Mars coming to our university, which has been selected to lead NASA moon and Mars missions, and add flat screen TVs for the presentation of auxiliary data.