Project Goals
Through BIPOC youth-led mapmaking and advocacy, we hope to build community resilience to intersecting disasters. The project team collectively brings to this goal academic expertise in civil engineering, climate science, digital media, environmental justice, public health, sociology, and urban planning, as well as local expertise in community-based research, education, and policy. The Harambee House and Co-PI McClain bring decades of experience racial and environmental justice activism and community education and research, which will be vital to the success of this project. Finally, the residents who will participate in this project best understand what resilience means within their own communities.
Project Background
In Visualizing Resilience, we propose to engage Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) youth—living within frontline coastal communities—in disaster resilience planning, through a combination of mapmaking and advocacy. Our curriculum, Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters(YARDs), and custom, open source, mapmaking tool, Map Spot, will guide middle-school aged participants enrolled in after-school clubs to first, understand the effects of intersecting disasters in their communities, and identify infrastructural improvement projects to address them, and second, advocate for themselves and their neighbors by exhibiting the resulting maps for local experts and public officials.
Beyond the potential for the proposed infrastructural improvements to be realized, we argue that participating in these activities can help youth increase self and collective efficacy, as well as connect to a broader network of allies and advocates. Research has shown that such engaging youth in advocacy can substantially enhance disaster resilience (Peek et al., 2016).We will pilot our framework with coastal communities on the West Side of Savannah, Georgia, where the project team already has significant experience in disaster-related data collection, community engagement and resilience planning.