‘CREATE’ing Resilience to Hazards through Informal Education and Multi-Disciplinary Collaborations

Abstract:

Making communities more resilient to local hazards necessitates sufficient education, communication, and resources – a task that requires a multi-disciplinary approach to be effective and successful. CREATE Resilience is a collaboration that explores the best approaches to engaging youth and communities around local natural hazards. Led by the Nurture Nature Center in Easton, PA, the four-year initiative involves youth ambassadors to increase knowledge of weather and climate science, the risks from local hazards, and strategies for hazard mitigation, while storytelling and co-creating a vision for community resilience.

CREATE Resilience combines community dialogue, art, and science, along with interactive community meetings, interviews, surveys, educational events, story-gathering, community tours, discussion forums, arts-based activities and mapping workshops, hands-on household preparedness events, and the active involvement of a diversity of local and federal partners, as well as tools and assets from NOAA to engage the community in learning. Using the regional hazard mitigation plan as a starting point and teams of local high school students as ambassadors, improved education and communication around hazards and mitigation strategies provides a platform for a shared community vision of resilience. This vision will be elucidated through artist created murals, and community guidebooks will be developed to inform about local hazards and strategies for mitigation.

This presentation will describe the approach taken for CREATE Resilience, focusing on efforts to engage youth, including local hazard and resiliency tours and a virtual Youth Climate Summit. The CREATE process and its results will be informative for other organizations and communities around the country in their efforts to become more resilient to hazards and provide ideas for developing youth and community engagement around resiliency.