Apply Now: Join the CAPECA Year-long Training

As you know from your lived experience and work, communities across California increasingly experience the impacts of the climate crisis. In response, cities, counties, and universities are accelerating the development and revision of climate and climate resilience action plans. However, too often these processes leave out the vital knowledge, priorities, visions, and leadership of the people who bear the brunt of climate impacts locally, and who often know the most about what is needed. Key to closing equity gaps and resolving climate vulnerability is direct participation by impacted communities in the development and implementation of solutions and policy decisions that directly impact them. This level of participation can unleash much needed capacity, but also requires initial capacity investments across multiple sectors to strengthen our local democracies through systems changes and culture shifts.

While excellent training resources focused on such shifts already exist in community-based settings, there is a need for additional and comparable state-wide training resources to support communities and community-based organizations to partner effectively with universities in climate-impacted communities across California. When effective, such partnerships can advance the research needed to support communities in galvanizing action for relevant climate solutions. Community-Academic Partnerships to Advance Equity-Focused Climate Action is a project that aims to help fill this gap. We call the project CAPECA for short.

CAPECA seeks up to ten Californian place-based teams of community leaders and university researchers from the UC and CSU to work together over the next year to draw on participatory methods to ask and answer key research questions that inform climate planning and action in their place. The year-long training will be rooted in the principles and practices of participatory action research, popular education, and social equity.

To Apply: use this Application Form to submit an application on behalf of your place-based team for consideration in the year-long CAPECA cohort. The deadline to apply is April 1, 2022, by 11:59 pm. Preview the application questions here.

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To Inquire: use this Inquiry Form to submit a request for assistance from the CAPECA Project Team in bringing together a place-based team. The deadline to inquire is March 25, 2022, by 11:59 pm. Through this inquiry form, you can also register to join a Community Building Session on March 17, 2022, from 10 am – 12 pm. Facilitated by the CAPECA Project Team, the purpose of the Community Building Session is to connect with other interested parties.

For more information, and to review the recording of the CAPECA Introductory Workshop, please refer to the
CAPECA webpage (URL: https://sites.google.com/facilitatingpower.com/capeca/home).

Si quiere recibir estos materiales en español, contacte communityresilience@uci.edu. El equipo del proyecto CAPECA es bilingüe en inglés y español.

Questions? Ideas? Connections? Please contact communityresilience@uci.edu. We look forward to hearing from you. And at your discretion, please share about CAPECA with your networks. Thank you.