INTELLECTUAL MERIT

The Climate and Urban Systems Partnership (CUSP) project created comprehensive networks of community organizations to educate public audiences about climate change impacts. CUSP unites learning scientists, climate scientists, and informal education specialists in collaboration with local community partners to design and deliver innovative educational experiences. More than 600 organizations have engaged with CUSP?s four urban learning networks (ULN) based in Philadelphia, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. More than half of these organizations sustained multi-year engagement with CUSP, and ULNs remain active following the project?s completion.

ULNs promote citywide climate literacy by increasing the overall number and quality of opportunities for public audiences to engage with climate change education. Through CUSP, ULN members have increased their capacity to communicate climate science and how it relates to their own work by accessing climate communications trainings, a digital resource sharing database, hands-on educational activity design workshops, and mini-grant funding for collaborative projects, among other efforts.

CUSP programming is based in research and is participatory (hands-on, authentic experiences lead to learning, increased personal connections, and development of climate-friendly attitudes), relevant (made personally relatable by appealing to audiences? unique values), and rooted in local systems understanding (addressing climate change requires understanding of interconnected environmental and societal systems). Such an approach allows for meaningful conversations about concern over climate change and actionable solutions to emerge.

Further, CUSP advanced the understanding of what makes informal education networks successful and valuable to participants. CUSP network structure began as a community of practice, but evolved to incorporate features from networked improvement communities (structured, prescribed networks specific to certain industries/sectors), and collective impact strategy (a purposeful network strategy intended to effect change and promote cross-sector collaborations). Learning scientists identified four features of the CUSP network structure that enabled sustained engagement with ULN members:

1. Adaptive and flexible project leadership?project leaders allowed the network structure to evolve to best suit members? needs by maintaining open communication and flexibility; in turn, members felt empowered to share in decision-making with project leaders; 
2. Use of hands-on educational activities?these acted as a central, organizing featured within the ULN, as well as shared tool for communication with public audiences; 
3. Shared system of iterative development and inquiry?co-design of hands-on activities, especially, allowed for collaborative relationships to develop; and, 
4. Support of heterogenous, cross-sector collaboration?ULN members carved out their own niches within ULNs, which fit their organizations? specific missions, needs, and expertise.

BROADER IMPACTS

Impact on ULN members

Each CUSP ULN unites otherwise disparate organizations?including workers from educational, governmental, non-profit, and community leadership roles?and offers unparalleled accessibility to one another: 90% of ULN members made new connections to local researchers, urban planners, and/or decision makers in urban centers due to their participation in CUSP. The vast majority of CUSP members came away from having participated in the project with a strong desire to seek and maintain professional collaboration with other ULN members beyond the project.

Participation in the ULN further increased ULN members?:

-  Ability and confidence to communicate using consistent language about climate change, climate impacts, mitigation, and adaptation;

-  Awareness of tools and strategies for communicating the science of climate change in a way that is relevant to their audience; and,

-  Recognition of the value informal education has on citywide learning.

Impact on city residents

More than 10,000 city residents attended an average of 110 CUSP events each year of the project. Considering subsequent ripples of community learning, we expect program reach well into the tens of thousands of people each year. As a direct effect of participating in CUSP programming, city residents reported connecting their daily behaviors to something they learned at CUSP events and adjusting these behaviors; and--importantly--reportedcommunicating about climate change content they encountered through CUSP programming, predominantly as it related to hands-on activities with which they engaged.

In addition to increasing climate literacy, the CUSP experience directly exposed community members to local climate adaptation and mitigation plans, helping to build the social will and public capacity necessary to reach municipal, statewide, and regional climate action goals.

Impact on project partners

CUSP project partners are sustaining collaboration with ULN members and applying CUSP best practices to ongoing institutional and federally-funded projects at their home institutions. Notable examples include:

- The creation of an annual climate & sustainability teacher professional development session born of a CUSP collaboration between The Franklin Institute, the School District of Philadelphia, and the National Wildlife Federation;

- The application of CUSP networking approach through the Climate and Rural Systems Partnership (CRSP), an NSF AISL-funded project based at Carnegie Museum of Natural History; and,

- The co-design of a new exhibit themed on climate resilience at the New York Hall of Science.

Last Modified: 11/22/2019
Modified by: Rachel D Valletta