Roundtable 5 - Community Solutions to Protect Against Climate Change

Transcript

CEC Climate Resilience Roundtable: Community Solutions to Protect Against Climate Change

Below is the full transcript from the CEC Climate Resilience Roundtable: Community Solutions to Protect Against Climate Change webinar. It is sectioned by slide so you can easily follow along.

Welcome

Sharyn Main, Community Environmental Council (CEC): Good morning. My name is Sharyn Main. I’m the Director of Climate Resilience at the Community Environmental Council. Welcome to our Climate Resilience Roundtable: Community Solutions to Protect Against Climate Change. We will have this webinar available with Spanish interpretation this morning so I’d like to introduce Nayra Pacheco and Aliz Ruvalcaba and they’re going to help us understand how to set up the channel. 

Interpretation

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: Yes. Hola. Buenos días. Mi nombre es Aliz Rubalcava y mi co interpreter es Narya Pacheco. El CEC mantiene un compromiso fuerte para espaces justicias lingüista para que mas nuestra comunidad puedan participar. Por este motivo, la reunión del día de hoy será interpretada simultáneamente en Inglés y en Español. Así que por favor escuche en el idioma que más se siente cómodo y comoda. La presentación de positivas está disponsible en ambos idiomas.  

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: Good morning. My name is Nayra Pacheco and my co interpreter is Aliz Ruvalcaba. CEC has a strong commitment to creating multilingual language justice spaces so that more of our community can engage. For this reason, this meeting will be interpreted simultaneously in English and Spanish so please listen and speak in the language you are most comfortable. The PowerPoint presentation will be available in both languages. 

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español] 

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: You can write your questions or comments in the language of your preference.

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español]

Nayra Pacheco: If you are bilingual please do not switch back and forth between languages in the same sentence and make sure to speak in the appropriate language channel to ensure you are heard or interpreted for or choose original audio.

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español]

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: Contributions from the entire group are welcome.

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español]

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: The interpretation feature is now activated. If you are calling through a phone line you will not be able to access the interpretation channel so please switch to the app. If you are on a computer you will see a globe pop up on the bottom of the screen. If you are on your phone, you will see three dots on the bottom right-hand side. Click on these and select the language you speak. If for some reason the original speaker sounds louder than the interpreter you are listening to, you can mute the original audio at any moment.

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español] 

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: We create these spaces with everyone’s support. Please communicate any issues by chat. 

Aliz Ruvalcaba, Spanish interpreter: [en Español] 

Nayra Pacheco, Spanish interpreter: Thank you. We may now begin. 

Sharyn Main, CEC: Great. Thank you Nayra and Aliz. Looking forward to it. And just a reminder to our presenters today. Please slow down, speak clearly and take pauses so our interpreters can keep up with our speedy language.  

So just a few quick things before we get started. The webinar is being recorded. We’ll make the recording available on our website later. Instructions and other need-to-know information will be in the chat in both English and Spanish. If you need assistance or have comments or questions, you may also put that in the chat. If you have questions of our speakers today, put those in the Q & A section. We will be taking a few questions after our keynote discussion. And if there are questions we can’t answer live, we will try to address those in the follow up information that we’ll send out after the webinar.  

As we begin today, it is important to recognize that we inhabit the unseated land of the Chumash. Please join me in acknowledging the Chumash Nation and its bands of this region, their elders, past, present and future generations. Many of our organizations, institutions and practices were founded upon the exclusion and erasures of many indigenous peoples. We hope that we can begin to dismantle the legacies of colonialism so that we can seek a healing path for all people. We welcome the indigenous wisdom and participation of our Chumash siblings and we thank you for your long stewardship and care of these lands.  

Great. Let’s begin this morning.  

Welcome to the Climate Resilience Roundtables: Community Solutions to Protect Against Climate Change. I’m Sharyn Main, Director of Climate Resilience at the Community Environmental Council. I’d like to take a few moments and orient you to the roundtable series and provide a few highlights. Today’s event is the final in a series of roundtables that CEC has hosted. They’ve been funded by local partners and guided by an expert steering committee. Over the past 15 months, we’ve explored the climate threats to the region through these roundtables. We brought together community leaders and partners from different sectors in order to begin thinking and working at the intersections of climate change. That’s public health, social justice, the economy, and the environment.  

The roundtables are based on the six climate threats identified for our region: that’s increased fire, sea level rise, heat, drought, extreme storms, and reduced snowpack which impacts our water supply. The first roundtable many of you may have attended was in November 2019, it was on wildfire and smoke. It was followed by sea level rise and flooding on March 4, 2020. And this of course, was just a week before the global pandemic was declared. And we went into our first quarantine. Of course we have just passed the one year anniversary of that.  

These first two events were in person gatherings. But in that post pandemic world, we had to reinvent the roundtables in a virtual online platform. This is also a time for us to have reflection. And given that one of the primary goals of these roundtables was to engage more diverse voices, and to identify gaps and needs in local climate planning, we found this to be the opportunity to shift the focus of these roundtables to really the compounding climate impacts on vulnerable populations and frontline workers. The first of these was in August of last year, it was vulnerability, health and equity. And the second was in September, and it was stories of resilience from the frontlines of climate change. This last roundtable was really particularly impactful and critical to the culmination of this roundtable series. For many of the attendees, it was a real shift in awareness and understanding of equity, justice, and inclusion, and how we as a community are doing our climate planning work. With the leadership of our partners from the Central Coast Climate Justice Network this event focused on stories of people living on the frontlines of climate change every day. Those who are disproportionately impacted, being the outdoor and essential workers, marginalized people and communities of color. This was always also a Spanish first event. This would ensure that our native speakers felt safe and respected sharing their stories in this space. And if it wasn’t already clear, it became crystal clear after this event. Climate Resilience is only possible if we have a just and equitable approach that considers all people, particularly those most vulnerable and on the margins.  

Next slide. 

Top Idea: Community Resilience Hubs and Strong Neighborhood Networks

At each Roundtable, we did a series of table level and breakout group exercises, with prompts that get people thinking about resilience from the personal level, to the neighborhood scale, and to a whole community approach. We collectively generated bold ideas and core principles that are needed for adjusted equitable climate resilience in Santa Barbara County. These ideas were up voted by the room and put into what we call an opportunity matrix. And these are available on our website so you can go take a look at all of them. All told, we gathered over 700 community generated ideas from these four roundtables.  

 At the first Roundtable, on wildfire and smoke, we heard from fire and health experts about the changing nature of modern day fires and their impacts in this climate changed world. We had officials from Montecito Fire, a retired fire chief from the US Forest Service and others that really helped us dig in. And one of the top ideas from this event was around community empowerment and readiness at the neighborhood level. Developing resilience hubs and strengthening networks was a key theme, which will appear throughout the roundtables. Other ideas included fuels management, home hardening and other land uses to protect us in the wildland urban interface.  

Next slide. 

Top Idea: Innovative educational tools and simulations of climate change projections

At the sea level rise Roundtable, we had a demonstration of virtual reality tools to see what the future of sea level rise projections would look like for coastal communities. It was very powerful.  

One of the top ideas from this event—no surprise—was to use innovative tools and approaches to engage community members to help them better understand and grasp the realities of sea level rise impacts. I find it ironic that we had to use virtual reality to help people grasp the realities of it. But sometimes that’s how it has to happen. There are other top ideas of course; nature based solutions, like living shorelines and sentiment management. Next slide.  

Top Idea: Align with Public Health on climate resilience goals

At our Vulnerability, Health and Equity Roundtable, we focused on public health. And Dr. Linda Rudolph of the Center for Climate Change and Health stressed the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income, frontline and vulnerable communities. We also heard stories from workers experiencing heat in the field, from homelessness in a disaster and what that’s like, and even discrimination and barriers faced by a multi-generational family who was trying to build back after the fires. Of course, aligning with public health on climate resilient schools was a key theme coming out of this Roundtable. Next slide. 

Top Idea: Meaningful accessible and culturally competent engagement 

And at our final Roundtable, Stories of Resilience, we heard stories of the struggles and resilience of local people dealing with the compounding impacts of climate disasters and a health crisis, from harsh working conditions and having to put themselves and their families at risk to earn a living, to having information available in their language or not having it available in their language during disasters, or feeling unwelcome and discouraged from accessing beaches and parks, places that are really important to cool off during extreme heats. This roundtable really highlighted the need to break down the barriers that prevent people from being able to take action from being part of the community planning effort. And that is again, a key theme. The top idea from this event was for governments and planners to have meaningful and accessible, culturally competent engagement processes. 

I’m going to wrap up and just give you some highlights for what we’re going to hear about today. Again, with over the 700 data points that we collected from the roundtables, we needed to make sense of this all. So our team spent months sifting through all of this roundtable data, and doing a deeper analysis of the key principles, themes and values that are necessary for climate resilience. And we’ll dive into that in just a few moments. Today we’re also going to have a conversation with the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research on how we might align local climate resilience efforts with their priorities and potential funding opportunities coming down the pipe. We’ll also have an opportunity to look at those top 50 ideas that I mentioned, from all of these roundtables and even upvote those that may be most compelling to you or that you feel are really priorities for our community. And finally, we’ll consider structures for working more effectively in collaboration with networks in order to set in motion implementation of community driven solutions. So the webinar will end at 11:30. And those who signed up for the afternoon breakout session, we will reconvene at 1:00. You will be sent a link for that a little later. And we’ll also have it available later on at the end of this webinar. 

As a reminder, we will be taking questions of our keynote speaker in the Q&A. If you need any help or need assistance, just let us know by putting that in the chat. And we’ve also posted the agenda for today in English and Spanish, so you may take a look at that.  

Now I’m going to pass it on to our presenters. I’m going to start with Carl Palmer and Carl is with the LegacyWorks group, a local nonprofit that convenes, facilitates, and manages collective initiatives. And this is a really important element because sometimes no single organization can take these on their own, so having this convener is such a valuable tool. LegacyWorks and Carl have been a key facilitator, presenter and co-creator of these climate resilience roundtables and we couldn’t have done it without his guidance and support. So Carl, over to you. 

Core Principles That Underpin Climate Resilience

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you, Sharyn. If there was any doubt the importance of building resilience, it’s crystal clear after convening this series together. We started two Novembers ago with smoke in the sky over Direct Relief. We were disrupted in March by a devastating global pandemic that has since taken the lives of half a million Americans and laid bare the structural inequities in our economy and society. And we endures a second wildfire season of an intensity that we couldn’t have imagined just a year ago, when we convened our wildfire Roundtable.  

The need is crystal clear, but the question, the question really is how do we go about building resilience in the face of these daunting challenges and compounding crises. Those challenges require collaboration across sectors at a pace and scale beyond anything we’ve yet even attempted. They require building trust, shared vision, social cohesion, and collective capacity. And that, in turn, requires empowering everyone in our communities, to show up with their whole selves and all their gifts, inviting them into leadership to be a part of the solution. And perhaps above all, the crises we face require taking bold action together with urgency, not trying to figure it all out at the front, but getting going and learning by doing. We believe that this is how we need to do the work, and that the How is just as important as What we do. And we’ll get to that later.  

So we developed a set of shared principles and key insights from the roundtables that should guide our shared journey moving forward as we build community resilience. And we’d like to invite a few members of our steering committee to share those insights with you today, starting with Chris Ragland of Healing Justice and Black Lives Matter Santa Barbara. 

Themes From the Climate Resilience Roundtables

Chris Ragland, Healing Justice: BLM SB: Thank you so much, Carl, it is an honor to be here. And to be a part of this process. I’d like to start by introducing three themes: equity, building capacity, and fostering leadership. Next slide, please.  

Equality, Equity, Reality

You may have seen this picture before. I use this picture as a creative exercise. Climate change affects everyone though they may not be aware of it or just don’t care about it as much as they care about baseball. Fair enough. But it’s important to acknowledge what activities and sectors are influencing culture in the United States, because ultimately, that’s what will captivate the hearts and minds of people. The folks that we’re talking about today are the folks that are intersected.  

From my work that looks like building relationships between people, and the environment that we’re expecting them to care about.  

So what I’d like for you to do is substitute the height of the individuals for the history of oppression amongst minority groups in the United States. And please neglect the fact that all three of the folks in this image are brown, because that’s not our reality. It’s important to acknowledge that equity ain’t equal. Here we see the tallest person will be able to see what’s happening. And in the context of the discussion today, on the other side of the fence, that’s a flood, that’s a fire. That’s people poisoning water, where we are now the resilience, the preparedness of the shortest person, that symbol for intersected communities of color, relies on others to relay that message to get ready. Considering hurricane season in the south. That’s not enough, that’s not working.  

So to go back to the boxes. You need money to make boxes, at the very least you need wood, nails, hammers, and hands. When we talk about building capacity, what we mean is having the resources to address those challenges that we know are coming. 

And the question is, are we making the boxes? Or are we teaching them how to build the boxes? Or are we just putting folks on our shoulders. So more than money, we need intel. You know, that’s why we’re here. We need to know what we need.  

And, lastly, you know, we’re the leaders in this image. They’re everywhere. They’re actually everywhere. They’re the captains on the team encouraging their players to stay focused, keeping the morale high. They’re the leader that gave up their box so that the smaller person can watch the game. Leaders in the stands trying to get people to do the wave. There are leaders in the stands that don’t know that they’re leaders. Part of this work is uplifting folks to see their potential and step into those leadership roles. And more than anything, I believe, we need to be creative and see that in every moment. There is actually an opportunity to move the needle so thanks for having me, folks. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you very much, Chris.  

Next, Teresa Romero of the Santa Ynez Chumash Environmental Office. Teresa, if you will, please turn your video on. 

Empowerment, Educate & Raise Awareness, Learning By Doing

Teresa Romero, Santa Ynez Chumash Environmental Office: Haku and good morning everyone. Thank you for being here this morning. And I wanted to talk a little bit about resiliency as it pertains to the entire community, and the indigenous and tribal communities that may surround you. I want to start with UNDRIP. That is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. And article three talks about self determination, which includes the right to freely determine their political status—that’s indigenous beliefs, people’s political statuses—to freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Then there are many articles in the declaration, but article 26 states specifically that indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied, and otherwise used or acquired. In addition, here in the United States, the tribes also have self determination. And the federal government has a trust responsibility to tribes.  

It really is imperative when we talk about resiliency planning to include tribal and indigenous peoples as part of your planning processes. As indigenous people and tribal peoples, we have experiences and knowledge that can really benefit the entire community. Some of those are traditional practices, seasonal changes that we see when we’re out doing our gathering of medicines, plants and foods, as well as our traditional tending practices that could also build resilience in community, especially in terms of wildfire. There’s many tribes in the state of California now that have returned fire to their lands in collaboration with outside agencies, and are doing cultural burning in the state of California, which helps build wildfire resiliency along with prescribed burning. Really what’s important here is that we work in a collaborative way, because together we have shared answers and knowledge that can really build resiliency for the entire community. And as has been mentioned before, climate change affects the entire community, not just one pocket of a community. It’s really, really important to have our voices work together. Thank you. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Beautiful. Thank you, Teresa. And now Michelle Sevilla, from Office of Assemblymember Steve Bennett. 

Michelle Sevilla, Office of Assemblymember Steve Bennett: Thank you so much, Carl.  

Word at the Intersections, Work at Human Scale, Invest Locally

Other themes and priorities that were uplifted by attendees of these several past resilience roundtables included heavy focus to address and focus our attention to the intersections of our problems and the challenges that we face. It is impossible for us to remain or work solely on a single issue. Our work and our challenges are intersectional, interdisciplinary, and interorganizational. And so solutions and planning and mitigation must be likewise. This requires integrated, holistic, and networked approaches. We must prioritize projects that are focused at these intersections with the goal to create and generate multifaceted impact and community benefit and to build the skills and experience needed to work in these very complex arenas.  

What was also uplifted in resilience is that it must begin at the local, individual scale. It begins at the relational level; resilience between individuals, families, neighbors, and neighborhoods. Our future investments must be made in this social foundation first and in parallel with large scale physical infrastructure that supports equitable and greater connectivity within and between our communities.  

And finally, we must redirect our resources wherever possible from top down expert consultants to localized solution building, which are facilitated by local partners, but very much tapping into and utilizing the local expertise that we have throughout community members found in all social and economic strata.  

And finally, again, solutions must be rooted in local wisdom. And we must focus on generating positive externalities like building capacity, agency, empowerment, and building and sharing leadership and power. Thank you. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you, Michelle. And finally, Garrett Wong of Santa Barbara County Sustainability Division. 

Shift Government Role, Align Plans & Work Effort, Prepare for Resources

Garrett Wong, Santa Barbara County Sustainability Division: Good morning. Thank you, everyone. I am the County’s Climate Program Manager. And it was my pleasure to be part of this roundtable series not only as a steering committee member, but also as a participant. That’s been extremely valuable for me to be able to sit at the table in the virtual rooms, and listen to community members, and really connect with individuals and participants who are both on the frontlines and who are working at multiple levels to make sure that our community is prepared and resilient and more prosperous going forward into the future.  

Some of the learning that I’ve taken away, and I’m hoping to continue to infuse into my work, and the work that my colleagues do at the county level, is to re-envision the way that we perceive our role. The County, we recognize that as a local government, we don’t have the answers, nor all the resources to do everything that we think we can. We have to really work with our partners. We have to find new partners. And we need to build the capacity of our community to take on some of the work and build the resources that are necessary from the ground up.  

We’re starting to do this in small ways. We have an Equity Advisory and Outreach Committee, which is a diverse group of community stakeholders and representatives who come from or work with marginalized and underrepresented and under resourced communities and populations. And they’re helping to guide and shape and shift the County’s approach to climate planning and programs. We also have launched last year at the first Climate Resilience Roundtable, the Santa Barbara County Regional Climate Collaborative, which is a new and growing multi-sector network of public agencies, organizations, other entities and individuals who are coming together to solve our region’s complex climate challenges, and develop climate solutions that will serve our needs locally.  

We recognize that we need to align our plans and work efforts in order to ensure that we’re looking at the same issues, identifying the same solutions, and also making sure that we’re leveraging common resources. And one way we’re doing this is by the County’s initiative: the One Climate Initiative. We’re in the midst of planning our new Climate Action Plan, updating our safety element, and creating a new active transportation plan, all of which will have tremendous impacts for the community as we go into the future to planning for a more low carbon and climate resilient Santa Barbara County. One Climate provides us with the opportunity to really broaden the conversation, bring in more participants and hopefully elevate the awareness and enthusiasm that people have for making our community a better place.  

And finally, we need to make sure that we’re all prepared for the race for resources. We know funding is always tight and capacity is always limited. But the state of California and the federal government have clearly stated now that climate is a priority, that economic recovery is a priority, that community wellbeing is a priority. These are issues that are critically going to be funded and targeted on the state and federal level. We need to be prepared for those resources. As grant opportunities and funding resources come and go, we must be competitive, we must be prepared, and we need to be adequately resourced in order to take advantage of these. We try to provide as much support as we can to make sure that our partners are capable and interested when these funding opportunities arrive. One small example of that is we recently partnered with the Isla Vista Community Service District, one of our newer community service districts in the county. And they recently were awarded up to $200,000 to develop a community sustainability sustainable mobility plan in this community and unincorporated community has never had a Community Plan before. So this will be their first and we look forward to exploring more opportunities with all of our partners across the county. 

If you’d like to learn more, I’ll share a couple links into the chat. And we’ll look forward to taking the learnings from this series and starting to integrate them into our work. Thank you. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you, Garrett. Thank you, Chris, Teresa, and Michelle. What’s really clear is that if we’re going to build resilience, we need to expand leadership and our steering committee. Quite a number of you are here with us as attendees today, as well, who are not participants. We’re really grateful for your leadership, for what you brought to this series, and grateful to all of you as participants for showing up as community leaders as well. It’s going to take all of us coming together, operating under these sorts of principles and with these insights, as Chris, Teresa, Michelle and Garrett so ably shared. Thanks very much.  

Now, it’s my pleasure: Sigrid Wright, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Council. Sigrid and CEC on planned key leadership roles and our community’s response to the climate crisis. Thank you.

Sigrid Wright, CEO of Community Environmental Council

Sigrid Wright, CEC: Thank you, Carl. I’m very glad to be here. This has been a very illuminating year and a half or so — 15 months — of resilience roundtables and I’m appreciative of everyone who’s been showing up to those. It’s my pleasure now to have a conversation with Nuin-Tara Key, who is the Deputy Director for Climate Resilience at the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research for the State of California.  

Niun-Tara is the Chair of the Technical Advisory Council for the Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program. It’s a big mouthful. Prior to joining the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research Nuin-Tara co-founded an international initiative on community based climate action and she has worked in the public, private and nonprofit sectors on sustainable urban and regional planning and policy with a focus on social equity and climate change. So she’s right up our alley. Nuin-Tara has a Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University, and a Bachelor’s of Art from Lewis and Clark College. So welcome Nuin-Tara, it’s good to see your face again. 

Nuin-Tara Key, Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR): Yes, thank you so much for the invitation. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: All right. We’re glad you’re here. There’s a lot happening and I want to get into it. I want to talk about what’s happening in your office, what’s happening at the state level. I want to talk a little bit about what’s happening, what we can expect to happen at the federal level. 

 Let’s just start with — maybe you could briefly bullet out the Office of Planning and Research’s climate-related priorities this year. What’s new, what do we need to know? 

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Yes, well, thank you just for the invitation here. It’s wonderful to join this conversation. And I really want to thank everybody who’s joining here today for your tremendous work that everyone is doing in your communities in these unprecedented times. And so really a huge thank you to everybody, for everything you’re doing every day to make California communities stronger and healthier. Thank you all. I also want to thank the organizers for pulling together what is already just an amazing and inspiring event here today. And thank you to all the previous speakers for sharing such wonderful and amazing themes that have come through your work. There are so many synergies across what the speakers just went through as well. 

OPR’s role for those who do not know, I’ll give a very high level kind of overview, and then dig into our climate resilience and adaptation and other other priorities. OPR kind of big picture, we are the state’s land use planning entity. We also serve the governor and the cabinet on long range planning and long range kind of thinking issues. This includes climate change and climate resilience. It includes work, emerging work that has come through over the last couple of years, really focusing on just transition, and thinking about how we prepare communities for the transition to a carbon neutral and resilient economy and communities.  

I’m going to slow down a little. I think I got a note to slow down for the interpreter. I will work on that.  

So that’s our big picture. In terms of our role on resilience, I want to take a step back and say that we take a very broad view on resilience, again, aligning with a lot of what the speakers prior this conversation shared, where we are thinking about resilience as a systems approach. To address the impacts of climate change, we have to be thinking about resilient build systems, resilient social systems, resilient natural systems, and how they all fit together within communities. The other highlight that I want to make is that we in this administration have really been trying to drive on in all of government approach to climate, so rather than thinking of climate as something in the abstract, or some separate issue that needs to be addressed independently, we really need to be thinking and building towards a place where climate is part of both building climate mitigation actions. And climate adaptation is just a part of how we as a government do business and as communities are approaching work. Central to that is also recognizing that our climate strategies have to be fully integrated and one in terms of addressing underlying inequities. And identifying solutions that are driving to resolve those as well. I think many of the speakers before hit on this and I wanted to flag that is central to how we also approach our adaptation work. We will not succeed in building resilience if we’re not supporting communities to achieve our equity goals as well.  

In terms of our work, the last quick thing here, and then I’ll hand it back to you Sigrid, is that we have a couple elements of our work. We really drive on one of those in our office, which is the integrated climate adaptation and resiliency program, or ICARP, and our colleague, Julietre Hart is on and I know she’ll talk a little bit more after I’m done here about that. Through that we serve as the hub for interagency coordination and resilience on adaptation. As part of that we are really focused on how we help communities on the ground build capacity, providing technical assistance, guidance, and also helping to serve as a convening role and supporting the value of convening and collaboration. We’ve been focusing a lot over the last few years around funding alignment. I’m happy to talk about that a bit. And then really thinking about how do we drive on implementation and how do we support and create an enabling environment so that we’re actually able to implement on the ground. I will stop there. There’s lots of detail that we can get in there and a lot of priorities that I’m happy to go into, but maybe I’ll hand it back to you.  

Sigrid Wright, CEC: That was great. You picked up right on the theme that I want to spend some time on because if there has been one kind of takeaway or theme from this whole series that we’ve been doing, it’s that we can’t apply simple solutions to something as complex as  climate change. And that we really need to be able to think across multiple threats and multiple timelines.  

It really is a challenge to build capacity. It has to operationalize that whole system or whole community approach. You spoke to a few things that your office does and focuses on including technical assistance, convening funding alignment. Let’s just pick up on one or two of those that you think might be most helpful or applicable to a region like ours that is really leaning into climate resilience. 

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Yeah, there’s so many places to dig in. I will start with a big picture and then drill into a couple things.  

One is this year, we’re just kicking off an update to the state’s adaptation strategy. I want to make sure that’s on everybody’s radar, definitely, we’ll be sending out additional information for engagement opportunities to help us shape what that strategy looks like. But one of the things that has become really clear over the last couple years just recognizing the scale, the kind of unprecedented scale impacts that we are seeing in California, is that we need to, as the state, better articulate a vision for resilience, and a vision and guide for what it means when we’re driving on climate adaptation. We have done a lot of great foundational work to understand who’s taking action and what state agencies are making investments that support resilience. But I think we’ve really realized that we need to create a more strategic framework that can provide structure and guidance, and then also allow our partners on the ground—  local, regional partners, community based organizations—to understand how all our work is more collective and drive towards these goals. Starting there, our update to the state adaptation strategy, it’s ambitious, and we’re on an ambitious timeline. We’re really trying to chart a much more strategic approach to how we’re thinking about our priorities around resilience. That is one area of work that we’re focused on.  

A second one that I want to highlight, and I think this came through going back to the theme of the previous presenters, is we have to also be targeting and make sure we are consistently targeting our work to communities that are the most vulnerable to climate impacts, and to the compounding stressors that climate change is going to exacerbate. One of the priorities for us this year is to jumpstart and kick off an initiative to develop a vulnerable communities mapping platform. Our goal and intent there is twofold: one, there’s a lot of existing tools and data out there and we’re not looking to recreate tools and information that’s already out there. Rather, we need to bring it together so decision making can be informed in a more integrated way. The second is that we really want to approach this, from the beginning, approach the development of this platform using a more co-production type of model where we’re working with communities to understand the vulnerabilities and the factors that are driving vulnerability on the ground and make sure those are reflected in this platform that we see as a really important and frankly, kind of a missing piece to our toolbox in terms of being able to target investments and policy decisions that support communities that are the most vulnerable.  

I’ll pause there and hand it back to you. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: A couple of really excellent opportunities. You talked about the state adaptation strategy update, and perhaps some opportunity for regions to share their learnings within that process, and then you talked about the vulnerable communities mapping. That’s another great project.  

Let’s talk about one thing that’s probably on everyone’s mind and that is funding. A lot of us are tracking Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Over a decade ago, much of the funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was funneled through states and in many cases found its way to regional efforts.  

So what are you hearing Nuin-Tara? What should we expect? And how can regional partners and collaboratives like ours prepare? 

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Yes. Great question. Very big question. I would start with kind of going back to the whole government approach that I mentioned before. That has been how we in this administration are approaching climate. There is absolute alignment, I think, between that approach and the federal administration approach that they are also taking on climate. I think there’s a lot of opportunity as we think about where we, as the state and communities, can be preparing to partner with this administration, and thinking about where we can leverage funding alignment. I think it’s important to remember that we’re really trying to drive on this whole government approach.  

I think in a couple specific areas: there’s Build Back Better, I also want to highlight an executive order, the Climate Executive Order that came out in the early days of the administration. One of the things that I think is important to keep in mind is the federal government is looking at how investment in infrastructure and facilities will be an opportunity to drive on our resilience goals. One of the areas I think that’ll be important is looking at some of the transportation funding that may come down the line in terms of both the recovery package, but also potentially, additional or sorry, the stimulus package, as well as longer term recovery funding. I want to highlight that the California Transportation Agency, or CalSTA, has been working on and just released a Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure, or CAPTI, is the acronym. That is really charting a framework for how the state can use our discretionary transportation dollars to better drive on our climate goals. I think as we look at the Federal Transportation Reauthorization Bill, as well as other federal stimulus, that’s an opportunity to think about aligning the federal and state and then local transportation priorities.  

Another quick opportunity, where I think there’s room for alignment is around the Governor’s Executive Order, N82, which called for our natural and working lands, or the Biodiversity Executive Order. That charted a really ambitious goal of 30% state lands and waters conserved by 2030. The federal government has also, through an executive order, the Biden administration issued a similar target of 30 by 30, for federal lands. The governor’s January budget includes a significant amount of funding to support those goals. Part of that is also looking at wildfire resilience.  

Then the third maybe isn’t quite funding, per se, but it goes back to the vulnerable communities platform that I mentioned, which is the Climate Executive Order at the federal level, also called for a targeting of investments and they have explicitly said they are targeting 40% of funding and federal investments to disadvantaged communities. I think that’s an opportunity where California has already been leading in how we’ve been thinking about identifying priority populations and communities. And that is another opportunity where I think we could inform federal investments as well. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: Excellent. You have to hold a lot of acronyms and bill numbers in your mind. Thank you for sharing all of that and executive order numbers. 

We have just time for a couple of questions. And I’m going to ask if you have a question to post it in the Q&A. That’s an actual tool at the bottom, not the chat section, that’s called Q&A. And I’m going to be curating from that. 

Nuin-Tara, let’s talk a little bit about community resilience in our region. I’m going to pick up a question from Craig from the clean coalition.  

In our region, we have an unusual circumstance where Santa Barbara, like the Gaviota area, is the end of the line for Southern California Edison. And then PG&E picks up and those two utilities don’t necessarily connect. We also have a lot of vulnerability here to wildfire and our lines that run through. So we’re at the end of the line, and we’re in kind of a risky part of the transmission lines. This has definitely come up in our conversations about the infrastructure of being resilient. And so the question really is around how aware is Governor Newsom that true community resilience requires significant levels of distributed energy resources?  

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Well, your first question goes right to an area that I will say I am not a subject matter expert on in energy. I apologize, I’m not going to be able to answer this question probably, as substantially as you all would like. I’m not going to speak on behalf of the governor individually. But I think we absolutely, across the administration, understand the importance of thinking about how we build resilient grid and what our energy transition looks like. I will flag that the Public Utilities Commission did last year adopt rulemaking on adaptation that requires the utilities to develop resilience and adaptation plans and strategies. And so I think I would maybe point the question there to think about that as an opportunity to start thinking about these. But apologies, this is not my subject matter in energy and grid resilience.  

Sigrid Wright, CEC: That’s quite okay. I do know that I’m switching gears here that Governor Newsom does think when we’re talking about housing challenges that he does have a clear sense of the nexus between housing and climate. There’s a question specifically around that.  

Housing is central to individual family and community resilience. Aligning housing and work is key to reducing vehicle miles traveled. Wildfires and the pandemic make it clear that housing is a huge vulnerability for communities and the state. And how is OPR centering housing in its climate resilience work?

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Yes. Great question.  

This is definitely a priority for our office. And I think the question here hits on so many aspects of the work that is really central to OPR’s role. Housing is absolutely a climate issue. It’s an equity issue. And it is where we see the intersection of so many priorities coming together. Our office plays an important role in issuing guidance to local governments on meeting state planning law. One of the areas we have focused on coming through a number of bills that have been passed by the legislature, really since 2015, is how do we better integrate and how do we support the integration of climate resilience into the general plan and thinking about it more consistently across our planning. 

In terms of housing, specifically, one of the key areas we have been working on is how do we balance growth and development and land conservation with thoughtful, sustainable community development in a way that is also building resilience. Again, taking that broad view of resilience that is both resilience, specific climate impacts, thinking about changing wildfire patterns. And we actually are just about to release an updated wildfire technical and technical advice series, specifically looking at better planning on wildfire. But it also is the broader community resilience. How do we make sure that communities—how we’re growing, where we’re building, and prioritizing affordable housing investments is providing communities with access to resources and economic opportunity? This is central for our work, and maybe in the interest of time I will just tee up Juliette. When she speaks she could maybe touch on some of the insurance and landscape kind of thinking that we’re doing in partnership with the California Department of Insurance. Just a flag for her later.  

Sigrid Wright, CEC: Excellent. Thank you, Nuin-Tara. We have just one more question. Time for one more question. Just a couple more minutes.  

You know from your interactions with us that this group is really trying to think outside the box. Knowing that every community is going to be dealing with climate resilience and climate threat issues, how do we really help take care of ourselves here? This question is back to that funding question. What role can private philanthropy partnerships play alongside public investments in building regional climate resilience in California? This one’s near and dear to my heart and a few of us on this team. So any thoughts on that? 

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Yes, I would say there is a really important role. 

I didn’t get a chance to talk about it in detail, but one of our priorities is thinking about this funding alignment. And that includes federal funding with state as well as bringing in private and philanthropic dollars. The scale of need is so significant, we do really need partners working together. One example that I would give as a successful model is an initiative that is just launching now and getting off the ground, which people here on this session may already know about, and that is the California Resilience Partnership, which has received significant seed funding from the Hilton Foundation, which I think, really saw that there was a need for funding on the ground, convening, capacity building, and just creating a space for communities to come together.  

We could get into state budget nuance here, and spend a long time, but that funding for convening, for capacity building, is often very hard to come by. I think that is a great model of showing where philanthropic dollars can fill a gap, but in partnership and in context of state initiatives, local priorities, and bringing people together. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: Very good. Nuin-Tara, thank you so much. I really appreciate any time you and I get a chance to talk. I really appreciate it. I come away having learned a number of things.  

I am going to hand it back to Sharyn, and thank you again. 

Nuin-Tara Key, OPR: Thank you.  

Sharyn Main, CEC: Great, thank you. That was wonderful. Thank you, Sigrid and Nuin-Tara. I so appreciate you taking the time this morning and popping in. I know you came right from another meeting. We greatly appreciate your time. I always enjoy listening to Sigrid in these engaging conversations. Thank you both.  

Top Ideas & Solutions for Climate Resilience

I am going to bring on Carrie Kappel. She’s going to join me for this session. This is where we’re going to look at these top ideas that were generated from our Climate Resilience Roundtable series. I just want to first say a little bit about Carrie because you haven’t seen her yet today. Carrie has been a staple as part of our roundtable series as a co facilitator along with Carl. She’s also been a co-creator along with Carl and me and our steering committee team. We certainly appreciate it. For those of you who have come to past events, you may remember the beautiful wall size data captures that Carrie draws. Just stunningly beautiful artwork really capturing the essence of our conversations. It’s really a pleasure to have Carrie. Carrie is also a research biologist with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at UCSB. And she does facilitation, strategic planning and visioning for CEC and other agencies and nonprofits.  

Next slide.  

We’re going to take you into a little exercise room. But before we go there, I wanted to just give you a few examples of some of the top ideas for climate resilience. I did a recap this morning and discussed a couple of them. And I’ve just pulled out a few more because this is a board that you’re all going to go into and participate in in just a moment. I just wanted to break it down for you.  

As I mentioned, we collected over 700 ideas, solutions, and values propositions through a roundtable series over the last 15 months. You’ve heard some of that. These 700 ideas needed to be pulled down into something that was manageable, so I just wanted to let you know that first at each roundtable, there was always a prioritization or uploading process. We were able to filter the top ideas with each roundtable and then we worked with our steering committee and other leaders to do some of what we call “sensemaking” of all this data, and we sifted through and sorted and created categories and themes.  

Carrie’s going to walk us through this process, but I wanted to just give a couple quick examples. What we have here across the top are the seven categories. We have community resilience, planning and empowerment, neighborhood connectivity, structure, infrastructure and land use, nature-based strategies, energy, transportation and equitable economy, safety net support, and education and communication. Below those there are 20 strategies and each one of the boxes that you’re going to be looking at has that strategy in the beginning. In the example, the first one you have, inclusive planning, is one of those strategies. Then the idea that follows that is that there’ll be an inclusion of diverse knowledge systems and lived experiences in visioning and planning. And Teresa actually spoke a little bit to this this morning of really integrating that indigenous wisdom and knowledge of management. That’s one example.  

A second example that we have popped out here is under nature-based strategies. The strategy here is ecosystem services and looking at regional sediment management programs to ensure that there’s sand on the beaches for coastal protection.  

Then the last just quick example I’m popping up here is under the safety net support category. Under health and wellness strategy, there is an idea of a comprehensive, whole community wellness support system for mental health recovery post-disaster. This is really an important element. I think many people are still feeling the trauma of our fires and debris flows and it doesn’t just go away. This is really, I think, an important thing that came up throughout our roundtable discussions.  

With that, I’m going to turn it over to Carrie and she is going to prompt us on how to get into this board so that we can actually play around with it and you can look through all the other ideas. I will say, there’s a lot there. There’s 50 ideas, but I think they’re well organized. And I think that if you maybe stick to a lane that is most interesting to you, you’ll be able to easily get through it, and Carrie will explain how to do that. I’ll turn it over to Carrie. 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: Thanks, Sharyn. All right, Iris, if you could take the slide down, I’m going to share my screen.  

Okay, can everyone see that? And Alan, if you would also repost the links in the chat.  

So we’ve posted two links to this interactive board in the chat one with the cards in English like you see here, and one with them in Spanish. You can choose your preference, they have the same information in both just translated.  

You can open this up on your computer, your phone, or your tablet. If you open it on your phone, I don’t know if you can see this, maybe not because of my background. If you open it on your phone, it will just bring up one column at a time and there’ll be a pulldown menu at the top where you can switch columns. So Sharyn reminded you, she showed you, that there were seven different columns here, each in a different category or theme and if they don’t all fit on one screen for you, you can scroll across the whole size to see all of the columns. Each colorful card here represents a different idea. As Sharyn said, they have a header that represents that strategy or sort of subcategory under the theme.  

What I’m going to invite you to do now is to open this up and start to play with these ideas and read through them. I want to show you one thing you can do here. On each of the cards you have the opportunity to upload it so if you click on that little thumb that’ll say you endorsed that idea, that you like it, and I’ve given you each 25 votes, so you could vote for as many as half of these ideas and highlight them in their importance. You also can, if you like, add a comment to it. Looks like maybe commenting is turned off, I can turn that back on in a moment. But the comment function allows you to add specific suggestions or leads. For example, if there’s someone that you think that we should connect with who’s already working on this idea. Mainly though, we want you to focus on voting for the ideas that you think are most intriguing. Let’s not all start at the top left and work left to right and top to bottom. Maybe pick your favorite color or start from the bottom and move up just so that we make sure that we spread our effort across the board. We’re gonna give you five to seven, maybe 10 minutes to actually look at this.  And I will stop talking so you can read.

Okay, I’m going to bring us back now. If you want to spend a little more time with these ideas, the boards will be open until noon today for voting. Then we’re going to close voting at noon, because we’re going to use these cards to inform which topics we bring into the breakout sessions that are happening this afternoon. And thank you to those of you who signed up to continue the conversation with us. We will be taking the top ideas that were elevated by this group and working on those more this afternoon and leaning into the possibilities around how we can start to put these ideas into action. For now, thank you all so much for your input, thank you for taking that dive into the ideas. As Sharyn said, we will be sharing all of these ideas on the website, as well and with the materials that will be sent out to you after the webinar. This isn’t your last chance to check them out. I’ll turn it back over. Actually, I’m not going to turn it over.  

I’m going to do the next section. I hope that you all found that dip into the many good ideas generated by our community and the important shifts that are already underway, as inspiring as I did. So much good work to be done by all of us, and so much good work already underway.

Sharyn Main, CEC: Carrie, can you stop screen share?  

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: Yes, thank you.  

As you saw many of the top ideas cut across multiple issue areas, underlining the important message that many of our speakers have already highlighted this morning, that climate resilience is an intersectional issue. The success of tackling these ideas is really going to require the coordination and collaboration of many different entities, and in many cases, a whole new way of working across scales and across boundaries and hand in hand with communities. 

Coordinating & Collaborating for Success – Juliette Finzi Hart

It’s my pleasure now to introduce our next discussant, Juliette Finzi Hart to help us chart a path forward toward a more resilient future for our region. Juliette Finzi Hart is the Program Manager for the Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resilience Program in the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Prior to joining OPR, Juliette was an oceanographer and Director of Outreach at the US Geological Survey Pacific Coastal and Marine Science center. Earlier in her career, Juliette was a Research Assistant Professor in the Marine Environmental Biology program at the University of Southern California, where she also served as the Marine and Climate Science Specialist at USC Sea Grant. Juliette has a PhD in Ocean Sciences from USC, and a BA from Columbia University. So welcome, Juliette. It’s fun to be in conversation with a fellow marine scientist.  

Over the course of this webinar, we’ve gotten a sense for how much we as a community of climate actors benefit from this series of climate resilience roundtables. Sharyn recapped some of those highlights. Carl and members of the steering committee shared what we’ve learned about how we should approach building climate resilience. Sigrid and Nuin-Tara’s conversation situated our local efforts to build climate resilience within the broader context of state priorities and federal priorities. And Nuin-Tara drew some really valuable links between the kinds of things that are emerging as priorities here in Santa Barbara County, and the resources that might be available from state or federal agencies to fund this work. Now we’ve just looked at our top 50 projects, which cover a significant portion of what we need to do to build resilience here on the ground. In our conversation, I’d love to try to weave all that together and have you help us look forward and think into how we most effectively come together to create the change that’s needed, based on where you’re sitting at OPR.  

I would invite you to start by just telling us a bit about the integrated climate adaptation and resilience program that Nuin-Tara mentioned earlier? And maybe speak to how we might think about partnering with you as we work to build climate resilience here at the county level?  

Juliette Finzi Hart, OPR: Yes, can you hear me? I always seem to like triple mute myself.  

Okay. Great. Excellent, thank you.  

Thank you for the invitation and thank you for the chance to speak to this group. Just on a personal note, I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and spent a lot of time in my work at USC, and then at USGS in Santa Barbara, thinking about the coastal aspects of all this. It’s really nice to virtually be back in Santa Barbara.  

So ICARP was established in 2016. ICARP is the friendly nickname for the Integrated Climate Adaptation Resiliency Program. So ICARP was created, basically, at a time when climate adaptation was just booming in this state. There was a lot of activity across the different state agencies, so there was this need to develop this hub for all the activities that are ongoing. That’s why ICARP was created. When it was first considered as a program, there were two main items that came out of it. One was to establish a Technical Advisory Council or the TAC and that the goal of the TAC is really to connect local and regional actors, from governments, to community based organizations, to what the state is doing in the climate adaptation space. And then vice versa, as an opportunity for the state to be able to share where we’re headed, and get feedback and have conversations and learn from what’s happening at the local and regional scale.  

The tech meetings are public and they are quarterly. We have one coming up on March 26th. Please consider this an invitation to join us. That is the first answer to your question about connecting. In those meetings, we spend a lot of time addressing key topics that are coming up, and just to circle back to what Nuin-Tara was saying earlier, we will be publicly launching the process to update the state adaptation strategy. You’ll hear about the process, but kind of the platform that we’re thinking with it and be able to provide feedback. It’ll be the first chance to provide feedback on the priorities. I just also really quickly wanted to acknowledge there are a lot of fabulous questions and can’t get to them all today, but we will connect you and address those at a later point. But buried in there, I did point to a link: today’s the last day for our first push on the adaptation strategy, which is understanding how communities may or may not have used previous versions. The last one was called Safeguarding. We’re really using that to help shape how we develop the next one.  

So there’s the TAC, and then the other resource that we’re developing is the Adaptation Clearinghouse and that is a place to try to bring all the state resources into one location. You can see all the different plans that all the different state agencies have. I think the thing that’s the most useful and the one that we are actively trying to build out is the case studies, because this is where you can look at individual topic areas or regions or climate impacts and see examples of how other peers across the spectrum from governments to CBOs, etc, are thinking about adaptation, planning and trying to do it, because we’re all creating this as we go. Those are the two big things with ICARP. Happy to talk in more detail. 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: That’s great, Juliette. Thanks so much. Yeah, I think in our Sea Level Rise Resilience Roundtable, we’ve actually pointed participants to the Adaptation Clearinghouse as one source of really useful, important information for coordinating efforts across agencies. 

I’m curious what you’ve seen, both in those case studies and in your conversations with communities across the state, what’s really inspiring you? Where have you seen communities succeed at bringing all of this together? Through impactful or innovative, collaborative efforts around adaptation and resilience? Who should we be looking to? 

Juliette Finzi Hart, OPR: I think everyone.  I mean, that’s kind of a cop out, but it’s also the truth. Like I just said, I think, unfortunately, there’s no answer yet. Right? We are all figuring this out as we go. And we’re all learning from each other as we go.  

Regional work has been a big focus of conversation over the years. I can speak the best to the coastal zone, because that’s what I’ve been so immersed in for years. But in thinking about how to do planning for sea level rise, for instance, we recognize that what one community does is going to have an impact on the community upstream or downstream or up ocean or down ocean from it. We’ve recognized that there’s a need for regional planning, but that’s really quite tricky. And so there’s been a lot of great work at that with the various collaboratives. In your part of the world, there’s the Central Coast Climate Collaborative. And these collaboratives have been a way for people on the ground to be learning from each other and to understand the best practices within a specific region, because you’ll have shared issues. And then through the ARCA, which I won’t even try to acronym right, but it’s basically the collaborative of collaboratives working on adaptation. That is also a way to connect back to the state. We at the state play a liaison role so we can hear what’s happening at the regional level, bring it back, and then have another venue for that cross pollination. I think continuing those regional conversations will just bring people together to be able to address the other all these complicated challenges.  

The other thing that gives me hope, is that I think there’s been a real shift in how we’re talking about this. In the adaptation world, I think there’s always been this understanding that just talking about climate by itself is not the solution. There’s so much more that’s in the conversation from lived experience, from the challenges that people are combating and winning every day to all the historic structural stuff that’s in place. That’s always been in the conversation. For tragic reasons, I now think that is on everyone’s mind, and people are really struggling to see that we can’t just talk about this anymore. We need to enact this. This program shows how people are working towards that. I actually have hope, from this roundtable, and how you all shifted, brought in the voices and made sure that it was inclusive, having the interpretation, having the resources put there, towards this truly inclusive work.  

Those are my highlights. I don’t know if that answered the question.  

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: That’s great. Unfortunately, we’re out of time, but thank you so much for your remarks. If you want to address any of the questions in the Q&A directly, you can type in there. We’ll try to have our speakers answer some of those questions and send out more information in the follow up. But Juliette, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and for joining us today. I’m going to hand it back to Sharyn. 

Closing and Thank You

Sharyn Main, CEC: Thank you. Well, we’ve come to the end of our final Climate Resilience Roundtable. And I want to thank all of you for joining us on this journey of listening, learning, reflecting and now hopefully doing. I want to particularly thank our speakers today Nuin-Tara Key and Juliet Finzi Hart of OPR and our steering committee speakers this morning, Chris Raglan andTeresa Romero. Appreciation and thanks to Nayra Pacheco and Aliz Ruvalcaba on their interpretation today. And a special thanks to Nayra, she has also done all of our Spanish translations on the materials on the slides and all those top ideas, our notes, and it’s been beautiful and skillful. And so we thank you for that.  

Again, much gratitude to our steering committee, they have been with us throughout this process. I’ve said before, they have always been tough. We’ve come back from a really successful event and they will always challenge and say: How can we do it better? So, so much gratitude for these people. Particularly, I want to point out Rachel Couch. She was one of our early design thought partners on these roundtable series and she’s been instrumental in bringing in really key, important speakers. A real shout out to Rachel. But to everyone it’s just been a great team to work with. I also can’t pass by that Carl Palmer and Carrie Kappel have been such skillful and thoughtful and wholehearted facilitators during this roundtable series. We thank you so much. We have so much appreciation for the beautiful spaces that you’ve provided for our community to come together in respectful dialogue. Thank you for that.  

Next slide.  

And of course, our sponsors, Santa Barbara Foundation, California Coastal Conservancy, James S. Bauer Foundation, County of Santa Barbara City Sustainability Division and Sea Forward Foundation have been our sponsors throughout the series.  

I just wanted to let you know that we will be doing a roundtable opportunity matrix from this one as well and all these top ideas and themes from today’s input will go into that. Like we’ve done with other roundtables, we will have a wrap up opportunity matrix as well as a recording from the event. That will be on our website and you’ll get some information as follow up.  

Next slide.  

You can access our materials on our CEC website on our current climate resilience page. And as I said, there’ll be videos and the opportunity matrix and slides and other information from not only this event but also from the previous events. I also want to let you know that CEC is going to use this information for our own upcoming climate resilience priorities snapshot report. This is a way for us to take all this information we’ve heard from from the roundtable series, as well as other things that are just popping all over the place, and bring that into a report that talks about what’s happening now; what needs focus, what are the most immediate threats, what has the community energy, what’s the community really calling for, what needs to be elevated, and what needs to be or is not being addressed. That report will come out sometime in the next couple of months, so be looking for that.  

Final slide, please. If you signed up for the breakout group discussions that begin at one o’clock today, you will be getting a zoom link for that. For those of you who said yes to that you’ll be getting a link via an email from me, and that should be in your inboxes any minute. We’ll also put that link in the chat. If you want to copy it and hang on to it for later and then use that link. It’ll be a different link than what you’ve used this morning.  

Thank you all again, and we will continue this great work. Have a lovely weekend. 

Moving Into Action

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: A few reminders before we start: please mute your sound when you’re not speaking to the group. Instructions and info you need will be in the chat in both English and Spanish and the shared Google Doc that we’ll be working on today. If you need assistance, or have any comments or questions, please post them in the chat. And please rename yourself in zoom so your full name is shown so we all know your name and put an asterisk in front of your name if you prefer to be in a Spanish language breakout room.  

Today, we’re using the Google Doc that you’ll see if you’re not in it yet, please go to the Google Doc and add your name and affiliation and that’ll get you down. When you enter it just scroll down a little ways to find it. We’ll also work with that document quite actively and then our second breakout room a little later. We really encourage everyone to actively participate in the Google Doc.  

The goals of this afternoon’s session. We are moving. We’re ready. We’re wrapping up the final resilience roundtable. And we’re moving into action here. Our goal is to center the series insights and principles as we all begin to shift into action on priority projects. We’re going to work together to begin the process. Co-creating initial project planning outlines and identifying critical needs and next steps moving forward. I’d invite you all to spend time today reflecting on your individual, organizational, and collective commitments to this next phase of the work.  

Some principles briefly for the day: we invite you all to be present, put your phone away, close your email, just focus on being here in this virtual space together. It’s not quite the same as being at Direct Relief, in a big room with all that energy, but we invite you to bring the same focus as if you were there. We invite you, as we have all throughout this series, to take off your hat, takest off thou hat as Carrie says. Your work hat, your affiliations —show up with your whole self, your whole heart, your spirit, with your grief, with your love for this place. Bring all of that here today. We invite you to stay open, curious and committed to learning, to listen for understanding, to speak to be understood, and to ensure all voices are welcomed, honored and heard. That may mean dialing yourself down a little bit if you tend to talk a lot. Or if you’re a bit more reserved, give yourself a nudge to participate a little bit more so that we benefit from your voice in the room.  

All right, we have one more key task to do right now. I can share my screen and show you our most recent output from the Climate Resilience Roundtable series. If you’re with us this morning, we upvoted a series of projects that emerged from the roundtables and here are the ones that received the most votes. The link to this new board is being posted in the chat. So you can open it up yourself if you would like.  

We’ve numbered each project 1 through 16. These are the top 16 vote getters. We weren’t quite sure how to or where to draw the cut off, if we wanted one from each vertical or one from each strategy. We ended up taking all of the ones that scored 30 votes or higher. There’s a pretty considerable number of votes for any given project here, when you think about it. We had about 140 people in the room at the peak this morning. So some of these got more than a third of the votes.  

What I invite you to do right now as you scan these is to click on your zoom window, your little zoom screen on the three dots and add the numbers of the top two or three projects that you’d like to be in a breakout group for. So it could be 123, it could be 11, five, four, whatever, whatever projects you’re drawn to. Go ahead now and take a minute and add those in. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: So Carl, to be clear, you’re wanting us to identify by project number not by bucket, not by color, or bucket number.

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Correct. So just use the project number and that’ll allow us to match people up with that box. The green box with the number nine or the purple box with the number eight. 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: We’re gonna do our best to match you with your top choice. But if we have one group that’s really oversubscribed, we’ll probably put some folks in their second choice options just so that we can have a good quality of conversation with a reasonably small breakout group for each topic. 

Sharyn Main, CEC: Do we put the number in our name or where do we put the number? 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: Yes, please put the number in your name. If you just hover over your video, click on your video, there’ll be three little dots in the upper right corner and then you can rename yourself. You can also do it in the participants list where it says “more” next to your name. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Sort of a personality test of sorts. A Rorschach test. We’ll see where everybody lands. 

Looks like we’re getting numbers posted. If you’re having trouble with that… Anyone having trouble getting their numbers posted to their name?  

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: If you’re agnostic about which group you go into, we’ll just put you somewhere and I’m sure you’ll have a great conversation. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Great.  

You can put the number before your name or after your name. Don’t erase your name, include your name. And as I said, if you can’t rename yourself, just chat Iris and she’ll do it for you. 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: There’s the link again to the board in the chat now. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Wonderful. Okay, Carrie.

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: Great, well, this morning, we had such a wonderful dip back into the experience of the resilience roundtables. It’s nice to be now in this format, where we can see all of your faces. So many of you such familiar faces to us — people who have been on this journey with us from the very beginning. I want to thank you for your commitment to this process and share how grateful I am that this is the group that we’re moving into action with. That you all see the need and you are committed to carrying these ideas forward in a variety of different ways. That’s our focus today. We wanted to start by giving you a chance to connect with each other one on one and share whatever was coming up for you about this morning. 

Small Group Reflection

In particular, reflecting on the prompt: How well the insights that we gained and the principles that we’ve forged over the last 15 months in this series shaped you personally? How are they shaping how you take action? Or how are you thinking about carrying them forward in your own work or in collaborative work that may be ahead for all of us?  

We’re going to put you into pairs to share for a couple minutes. You’ll each have about two minutes to share what comes up when you think about what you’ve learned and how that’s shaping how you take action. And if you are not speaking, your job is just just to listen, not to respond or add to what the other person has said, but just to drink it in. Then it’s your turn to share. These will be quick and then we will come back together and move into the next portion. 

I’ll just reflect as we’re, as we’re waiting. I think there were really strong and beautiful threads woven through the themes this morning around centering, equity, building our local capacity, empowering all of those leaders who we know are out there. And learning from each other and learning from all the diverse ways of knowing this place we bring to the table and forging new collaborative ways to be moving into action together. And learning as we do that learning by doing. There is a lot of energy around working at the intersections to develop whole systems solutions, and all communities solutions, and I’m excited for us to dig into the ideas that got elevated today because so many of them really require that kind of whole systems, all communities thinking.  

The other piece that I think is exciting for all of us to dive into is how do we get started? Where are the partners who should be at the table? That is in the back of all of our minds. It looks like now we’re ready to join our rooms. Again, this is an invitation to connect and share how the principles and insights from working together over this last year are shaping how you are moving into action now. Thanks.  

Click that blue button to join your room. 

Welcome back, everyone. Those were short, but sweet, I hope –  to connect one on one. I’m going to turn it back over to Carl now.  

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Iris, maybe you could mute everyone, since we have a little bit of background noise.  

Iris, it sounds like there’s a little background noise where you are actually. Thank you. Iris is going to be putting together those breakout groups, so we don’t need the slides right now. I can just talk through what we’re going to do next, but if you’ll take over the slides on SlideShare, that would be great. Wonderful. 

Project Planning Framework

Welcome back, we’re going to invite you all to a project planning breakout group. Each one will have a brief volunteer from our steering committee, who has stepped up from CEC, who has stepped up to facilitate a breakout group. What we’re going to do together is we’re going to work through a basic project planning framework. Now is the point in this process where all this collective energy and effort is shifting into action. We’ve identified top priority projects and we’ve really clarified how we want to work together. Now the question is, how do we activate these projects? How do we get them in motion? How do we get this good work done, so that we can achieve the direct results that we’re looking for and simultaneously build capacity to collaborate more and more on the things that matter most—big challenging, difficult projects and opportunities.  

This is going to be a quick pass planning exercise. We’re not going to get to a plan, obviously, in the next 30 minutes or so, but with a small group of like-minded folks, people from all different parts of our community, all different sectors, you’re gonna have a chance in a breakout group to move through a rapid first pass at filling in a planning framework. Our goal is to gather ideas and insights about these projects, how they can move forward, and to elevate key needs, resources, and learnings that may apply across all these projects that can better prepare us to move into action.  

Each group has its own section of the notes document. When we’re inviting you all, for this exercise to be successful, this is an experiment, we really need your active participation. We’d love for you to be in the Google Doc, to be entering ideas and thoughts in the Google Doc alongside your facilitator who will be taking notes as well.  

Note that in the Google Doc, there’s a link where you can click on your groups. Click on the bookmark. That will take you to your group section of the shared notes document. Just above that is a list of all of these projects. You’ll need to grab your project name and description off of that list and bring it down with you. It’s a little bit of  the Wild West right now. We jumped out of the last webinar, we left voting open for a little while, we figured out which projects made the cut —these top 16 we’re seeing —which ones now have attention and energy, and Iris is working feverishly behind the scenes to put together these breakout groups. So we’re doing this on the fly. And we’re really grateful that you guys are with us on this on the journey. You will have a facilitator in the room to help guide the process and they have an instruction sheet. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them.  

And Iris. I’ll just check in with you. How are you feeling? Are we getting close? 

Iris Kelly, CEC: Two more minutes.

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Two more minutes. Wonderful.  

Carrie is showing the framework here. Can you make that fullscreen? It’s a little difficult to see. And will you just jump down now to one of the groups and then we can see.  

Carrie is clicking on a bookmark here for group one. This is the project planning framework that we’re going to ask you to work with.  

Together what we’d like you to do is jump in here and start to work on articulating an answer to these key things. How do you begin about your project goal? What about a project description? Can you describe it in a sentence? What’s the pathway forward for this project? What first steps could you envision? How can the project be phased?  

Importantly, who are the partners and the funders that might be key to this project? Who needs to be involved?  

What roles are critical for six successes? It’s a complex collaboration that might require facilitation. Is there a need for a project manager, someone who’s solely focused on this who keeps track of all the details and herds all the cats?  

How will you think about centering equity? We’re going to really need to focus on this. We’re going to need to be really deliberate about it, otherwise, we’ll fall into the old patterns and traditional approaches, which we know don’t set our equity. We lack equity because the path that we’re on isn’t focused on it.  

What resources are needed? There’s a lot of different kinds of resources. There’s a lot of resources in this community. There’s a lot of resources coming from the state and the federal government. What do we need in order to move forward?  

One interesting question that’s really present for us in the region, in the community now is what do we need from the state and the federal government? What do we need? What do we need from our regional collaboratives? From the Santa Barbara Regional Climate Collaborative? From 4C, The Central Coast Climate Collaborative? What roles could they play in this project’s success?  

What are some deliverables or outcomes that you could imagine might come out of this? What are the direct results? And what are some of the indirect results? What kind of capacity might be built from this? What kind of skills will we gain? What will we know? And what will we be able to do that we weren’t able to do before?  

That’s the rapid process that we’re going to go through. As you can see, we only have about a half an hour to do it. That section that we just went through, we have about 15 minutes or so to work through.  

We invite you all to dive in. If a particular question resonates with you, jump down to it and start putting information in. If you’re not in the Google Doc, that’s okay. It’s not as good, but it’s okay. You can unmute, and you can speak into the room with your fellow participants and the facilitator can capture those notes. But see if you can’t fill out something for all of these as you move through. Then the facilitator will take you to the next phase, which is thinking about what this all means and what we’re learning from it. 

Iris Kelly, CEC: All right, I have done my best to give you your first choice. It’s not perfect. I have 30 minutes on the timer, Carl. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Let’s do 30 minutes. Yep. We’ll send you some periodic time checks so you know to keep moving along in the process.  

Thank you very much, facilitators, we really appreciate it. And thanks everybody for jumping in.  

I don’t know about you all, but if your group was like ours, that was fast, and we were cut off midway at the very end. Really appreciate that. Thank you to my group for an excellent conversation.  

What I’d love to do now is invite group room facilitators to share back a top idea, or two or three. One or two or three things that their group felt were really important as they started to elevate ideas towards the end doing plus ones and highlights. I’d also invite you if you’re in the Google Doc you can scroll through other groups and see what things were plus one or highlighted. Is there a facilitator who’d like to jump in and go first?  

If you do, just go ahead and name the project that you are working on and then share some of the insights. 

Alhan Diaz-Correa, CEC: We can definitely start here on our end. We were from group number eight. We were talking about restoring indigenous access to the use and management of lands and reducing fire risk and improving ecosystems.  

When we talked about the first steps (this is a kind of a small group of four), we talked about the need to slow down and listen and to basically not come at it from a point of view of, “we have the knowledge now partner with us”, but that we have to take the first step is to listen. On how this project could be phased, again, there were a lot of highlights of the current work that’s happening in-state and regionally. Making sure that we’re setting up more listening sessions, more meetings, and kind of more knowledge gaining from these tribes and these groups of people.  

As far as partners and funders, it was all fire-focused, partner-focused and indigenous knowledge-focused. What was critical for success was deep connections. Connections not only between the tribes, but also with the people with influence, and the fact that we probably need some sort of ambassador or a deep connection to the community and to the indigenous groups, basically, connecting institutional knowledge with indigenous expertise. That’s, I think, a pretty good summary. We stayed in that realm for a while. 

Carrie Kappel, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you Alhan.  

Sharyn Main, CEC: Okay, I’ll go. We were room one. We all want more time, by the way, Carl. I know last time we kept this working document open, so folks wanted to go back in. You have the link, so go back to your section and continue to add because we have some prolific writers and thinkers in our group.  

We had the ecosystem services, green infrastructure master plan project to restore ecosystems, living shorelines, etc. That whole theme got everybody excited, but within that there’s many layers. We don’t know that there has been such an integrated plan before. You have plans related to the shoreline or to creeks or to land base, but the integration of it, and also because we saw the word infrastructure, the human component, the living in the space. We were also talking about habitat of humans and how we live in that space of permaculture and built environment. How those things all work together. It’s going to take quite a bit of work to, first of all, understand if there’s anything like this that has been done and what we could draw on.  

We see this being a master plan, being all levels of sea, land and built environment, stormwater capture, urban cooling, carbon sequestration, all of those elements that come together. It is really critical that we look at this from a phased approach. We need to bring in indigenous voices and communities that have a stake and interest early on, and we used the example of San Marcos Foothills. Many of us thought the project was long gone, and the younger group afterwards came in and kept it going. This idea that there’s young voices that need to be brought into the design of this, not just a full timer getting in there and doing what you do best. Also then looking at not only the groundswell of activism, but the leadership, wave of profit, and others, from the resource agencies being able to assemble men and senators putting forth bond measures that actually make the resources available, to bringing in kids and educators and collecting stories and wisdom from folks on the ground to see what they really need and want in this and what they could really offer in terms of this indigenous and homegrown knowledge.  

We have a lot of work to do. And there’s much more I could tell you, but I’m going to leave it at that. Just that we know that we need some resources to build capacity to get this going and to bring the partners in early so that we have a nice, inclusive approach.

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Beautiful, thank you, Sharyn. 

Sigrid Wright, CEC: Well, I can go next. This was a very fast paced and excited, energetic group about expanding access to healthy local food. We realized right away that this is a much bigger discussion. That food insecurity and hunger are a bigger, more systemic problem than I think most people recognize, and that no one agency or one project can be a solution. We ended up pretty quickly honing in on one potential project, and that was about a humanitarian garden or humanitarian farming. To that end, we talked about where we’re at in the project, in terms of what phase we’re currently in. And we ended up being more at the beginning phase for the humanitarian farming idea and what that really means would just be an expansion way beyond a community garden. Making sure that people have access to land in which they can work to help grow their own food. Examples that we could learn from there were smaller models of this type of thing, like a little bit more expanded than community gardens, with say Trinity Garden or Oxnard Community Roots Garden. There are other examples around the country like the Seattle Food Forest.  

Food partners, and funders who could be involved: there were a plethora, we can look at the doc, there were tons of them. I would say that many of those folks are already in some sort of network such as the Santa Barbara County Food Action Network. That doesn’t need to be the beginning place, but it might be an efficient place to get started. There’s also another network called the Santa Barbara Food Rescue Network that aims to match high-end quality food with agencies that serve those in need.  

What roles are critical for success: lots of very tangible things in terms of access to resources, like seeds and tools, access to land, a volunteer labor pool, garden mentors to help gardeners learn delivery mechanisms like veggie rescue food donors, food recipient agencies, like food bank, or rescue mission, and a number of other skill sets, like communications expertise, as well as some structural needs, like food refrigerators, or food processing kitchens or community kitchens. 

How will we center equity? This was one of the more exciting parts of the conversation about the the value and importance of connecting those who are either growing food, such as farmers, with those with people who need the food, and helping to build direct relationships. Empowering people to grow their own food through access to land, tools, seeds, etc. But really engaging the community directly in their own food production resources. I’ve touched on some of them already. An interesting conversation around where land might come from. One of those potentials is working with churches and schools that might have extra land or might have more land that they’re situated on than they can use. Vacant city plots were another area.  

What does the project need from government or regional collaboratives? This will not surprise you, you’re going to probably hear this theme across the board, but state, federal or private funding. And then again, you’re hearing land. But this was a very generative and exciting conversation.  

Thank you to Abe Powell for when we landed on that particular project idea. Abe really brought a lot to the conversation. This is an area he’s spending a lot of time in.  

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you. Don’t be shy, jump in. 

Facilitator: Group four can uplift what they were working on. I also had a similar experience facilitating this group. They were already at it, just talking about how to streamline zoning and other government or bureaucratic processes in order to achieve the greatest alignment of local and regional general plans with our common and shared climate goals.  

Some first steps included generally reviewing, which is already a systematic update with general plans, but to determine commonality. And which, if any of these updates, would address resiliency issues that we see at the local level. That’s where that local knowledge that was uplifted in our session earlier, becomes critical, and to revise new development standards to incorporate the latest resiliency standards established at local, state and federal levels in energy sourcing, transportation and affordability. And of course, one of the topics that was uplifted in earlier sessions was addressing the vulnerable populations and their need for housing as we continue to grapple with our housing crisis, especially in the expensive, sometimes exclusive area of the Central Coast.  

Some partners and funders: when it comes to planning for these general plans included a lot of emergency preparedness stakeholders, so flood control staff, FEMA, of course, when we’re talking about zoning and different land use management, we have to incorporate LAFCO. And, of course, SBCAG, as they’re critical transportation partners. But what would be necessary, because those are regular stakeholders, is that we need to start including stipends for participation, especially for marginalized populations. Typically, their participation involves some sort of economic loss, when they have to take time out of their working hours of an unlivable wage to give us their much needed thoughts.  

Some other resources to support that were identified, included volunteers, continued advocacy, subsidies for renovations and for retrofitting because the city of Santa Barbara has already made that decision to electrify new buildings. That also needs to be addressed for already existing buildings.  

Finally, an outcome that was highly discussed was the decarbonization of the building sector, for electrifying in that movement. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Wonderful. Thanks, Michelle.  

Maybe it’s easier to call on you. Does anybody want to jump in? Or should I call on you? 

Facilitator: We could – group two could go. Yeah, I was very fortunate to have Ashley join in as a co-facilitator. We had a great group. The city of Santa Barbara, County of Santa Barbara, representative from Das Williams’ office and Office of Emergency Management. Our focus was on resiliency centers and hubs. We immediately went down the conversation of the nuts and bolts of what it would take to build that hub. But then through our conversation, we realized that the critical goal was to improve the level of service and resources that are available to our community during a disaster. And with the resiliency focus of getting folks back to where they were before the disaster occurred.  

We did not do any plus ones, I gotta just say that up front, Carl, we failed on the plus one front. We really focused more on our project goal and our critical project description. We got there, but it was more through our conversation. We definitely added a lot of information to the document for future reference.  

I think what was really important to our group was identifying what we have now as far as all of the facilities throughout our community, and county-wide that exist, or have the potential to exist, and what are the essential components that they would need to have in place in order to serve as a resiliency hub, and then make sure that of those facilities that may have the intent and the desire to be there to serve the community, make sure they’re fully built out and able to accommodate our community’s needs when a disaster strikes. We also talked about who would be in on developing this plan. And not only are the typical individuals from the city, the county, the community organizations, but who are we serving and what do they need and what do they want? What will they be comfortable going to? That was an important aspect of bringing in all of those voices at the very beginning, as we define and make those centers in place for a later time. 

Ashley, what else did I miss? Is there anything else that you would like to highlight? 

Ashley Watkins, County of Santa Barbara: I think you did a really good job. I would just say that we thought we needed to have a really holistic approach in terms of the resources provided, but one of the key issues that Craig pointed out was just the need for energy resilience. Thinking about what that looks like, and having a tiered approach to resiliency with solar batteries, and then looking at things like generators. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Beautiful, thank you. 

Group 2 Speaker: And I’ll just add in, I thought that having Yaneris in our group was really helpful because she works for the Office of Emergency Services for the County. Having somebody there in that conversation who actually plans these kinds of facilities for a living is really helpful. I couldn’t help but thinking when Alhan was was opening up this discussion, it’s amazing to have so many voices to participate in the conversation, but the same time, having the expertise there to guide the conversation is really important, just to make sure that at the end of the conversation, you’re gonna have something really useful to the community. I think that was really important to our conversation, and having that kind of professional expertise was really helpful. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Great, we’ve got a few minutes left. Garrett and Chris, I think, are the remaining facilitators. 

Garrett Wong, County of Santa Barbara: If you don’t mind, Chris, I think I’ll let you go. We actually ended up doing resilience centers and hubs as well. Albeit at a slightly different angle, but maybe we should take on a new subject. 

Chris Ragland, Healing Justice: Yeah, sure thing.  

Our project description, or what we focused on, was climate resilience campaigns in developing a regional coordinated education campaign on climate impacts, threats and resilience. And we thought, to start, you want to center the most impacted and work your way out. That way, the language can be framed in a way that isn’t exclusive and operates on such a high level to where some folks don’t understand. As is the case with spaces like these. Obviously, we speak the language, so we get it. But the folks that really need it may need it packaged a little differently.  

One big topic from just where to start phasing out is to research and understand to see how we can reach folks: what do these people need? Well, before we figure out what they need, why don’t we figure out what they know. And then from there, we can start to engage community members to be able to reach the different pockets and all aspects of whatever community that we’re trying to reach.  

Who needs to be involved? Everyone. I mean, climate change affects everyone. That came up a lot in our first session today. Schools, kids, local businesses, partnering, maybe incentivizing, businesses to make more environmentally friendly decisions that will then make folks that are going there, aware of and impact them as well. Farmworkers was a big one. Ag is sort of always in its own sphere and it is very important to acknowledge that the food on the table— those folks need attention as well.  

What roles are critical for success? Making this culturally relevant, and creating opportunities that don’t cast such a dark, rainy cloud over what needs to be done. Hey, sea levels are rising:  don’t just put information out there. Give people actions that they can move forward with.  

How do we center equity? This is kind of a tough one, because folks are disproportionately affected, so it’s making sure that we’re thinking about how others will be affected; being empathetic to them. And not just operating from our own place of being or in most circumstances, physical place. 

Key resources? Interpretation, going back to the language. Really important is building trust within communities. That’s sort of a complex issue that I think is going needs a lot of attention.  

Project needs from the government? Let’s skip over this.  

Let’s go to really quick, actionable things. A big point that came up for us was, is it okay to start and adapt at the start of the process instead of just focusing on planning? Because our problems are also evolving, so not just always being in that, “Whoa, we need to figure this out”. Before we do this, it is okay to act. 

Who must be involved to center equity? Everyone. And in some circumstances, that’s not being on social media, that’s not sending something in the mail, that’s actually meeting them where they are on their lunch breaks— being creative about how we’re reaching people. 

And key steps? Something that resonates with me specifically is leadership of youth and inviting kids that will maybe influence their parents, because that’s a really easy way to influence folks that may not want to give something a chance. They love and believe in their kids and want the best for them, so allow their kids to hold their hand there as well. Yeah, that’s about it. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Beautiful Chris, thank you.  

Thanks to all the facilitators who dove into that rapid fire exercise, and for all of you for showing up in such a generative way. There’s a tremendous amount of output and wisdom and knowledge now, down in that shared Google Doc.  

Sharyn Main, CEC: I’m just gonna say, Garrett, I know you guys did hubs. Did you want to give a couple pointers on maybe something different you guys came up with? 

Garrett Wong, County of Santa Barbara: Sure.  

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: You’ll have to keep real brief, because we’re running out of time. Just a minute or so guys.

Garrett Wong, County of Santa Barbara: I think we kind of came in from a couple different angles. One, looking at existing analysis that’s going on, like the climate change vulnerability assessment to help us identify sites that would help communities particularly need, but also recognizing that some of these sites that we identify may not necessarily be government run. So what does that mean if we’re partnering with local community leaders and institutions to prop up and manage these kinds of centers? And what does it mean to do it, not necessarily from an emergency services standpoint, but from a community building and honoring of the local community culture, rather than one that’s just purely for emergency incidents? 

I think, just continuing to ensure that the people who are going to be most impacted or most affected or should be the ones most involved are actually there, and that their participation is equally compensated like the professionals who get paid to do that work.

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Beautiful, Garrett. Thank you very much. Tremendous wisdom shared from each of those groups. Thank you all.

And some real commonalities that I imagine you all are pulling out as you’re hearing this. These are all complex, cross cut needs and projects. Many, many partners need to be involved. There’s a need for the capacity to bring those folks together and to move these things forward. And that capacity requires funding. Whether that’s funding for NGOs to organize or funding to ensure that people who need to be in the room can be in the room when they are sacrificing otherwise, to show up. A lot of insight here about what we already have: the assets, the expertise, the capacity that’s in the room right now and in the community. We have a tremendous amount to build on, we have much of what we need, we just need to mobilize it in service of these outcomes.  

Real insight here, too, about layering value. We want to deliver a resilience hub, but let’s also ensure that it delivers cultural value and community building like you just said, Garrett. Let’s make sure everything we do does many things, because we don’t have time to waste and we don’t have a lot of spare time. No spare capacity, so let’s make sure we’re getting a lot of bang for that buck or a lot of impact for the time and effort.  

A lot of emphasis on tapping into indigenous wisdom and many ways of knowing. Lots of insight in this community and lots of it’s not top-down, expert type wisdom and expertise and knowledge that we can tap into and expand leadership.  

I’m feeling a tremendous amount of gratitude for what we’ve gained together through this process, what we’ve learned from this session, and how you all showed up to it. It shows that the culture that we’ve woven together, it feels durable, feels like it’s ready to shift into action, and how we’re showing up feels really aligned with the needs of the moment. I’m feeling a tremendous amount of gratitude for that and feeling a lot of hope and optimism.  

Sharyn has a quick litany of thank yous to run through. We thanked everybody earlier. Sharyn, what do you think?

Gratitude

Sharyn Main, CEC: That’s perfect. Let’s just leave it at that slide. Because that’s the absolute perfect one. The other closing slides were ones we saw this morning.  

Again, I just really want to thank you all for participating in our final Resilience Roundtable, and then, this afternoon, break out sessions, which I think was, like Carl said, probably one of the richest, deepest one we’ve had. To be able to take this and spend some time and actually think about it from the project perspective is really, really rich for us.  

Again, just great appreciation to our presenters this morning as well as the facilitators and again, Nayra, and Aliz for your patience with us as we speak too quickly. Thank you for your interpretation. Then of course, it’s CEC staff, Iris and Alhan and Sarah and Lisa and those behind the scenes folks that have made this happen. And then again, our steering committee. I just can’t thank you guys enough. Such a dedicated, devoted team that has been with us from the beginning and has just has shown up. Here we are, Friday afternoon, after now three hours of this. We will be continuing to work together and we’ll figure out our paths forward together. We have a lot to do together. 

Thank You to Our Supporters

Then finally, again, our funders which we couldn’t do it without but more than that just greatest appreciation for Carl and Carrie for their absolutely beautiful facilitation and creating spaces for us to have these conversations. As somebody said early on, I think it might have been Aaron, after the first event. That became our signature and it was really Legacy Works and style of facilitation that really I think has promulgated throughout our community and it’s being used in other forums. And I’m just so proud that we were able to spread that. With that I just wanted to again, thank you all for showing up and we will continue this great work together. 

Carl Palmer, LegacyWorks Group: Thank you all. Feel free to unmute and speak into the crowd.