As climate impacts become increasingly visible at the local level, Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute (ERI) is preparing the next generation of professionals to help communities respond. Now in its 10th year, ERI’s McKinney Climate Fellows program has established itself as a cornerstone of Indiana’s climate workforce development, connecting students with meaningful, hands-on sustainability work that delivers lasting value for communities across the state.
Originally launched as the Indiana Sustainability Development Program, the initiative joined ERI in 2022 as the McKinney Climate Fellows program with the support of the McKinney Family Foundation and has grown into one of the Midwest’s leading models for experiential climate education. In May 2026, the program surpassed 300 student placements, building on last year’s milestone of more than 100,000 hours dedicated to sustainability and resilience projects throughout Indiana.
Each summer, undergraduate and graduate students are matched with public, private, and nonprofit organizations to work full-time on projects that confront real-world climate and resilience challenges. Rather than observing from the sidelines, fellows become integrated members of their host organizations, contributing professional-quality work that advances sustainability objectives while building the skills needed for careers in the field.
Over the past decade, fellows have supported an impressive range of initiatives, from conducting waste audits and developing sustainability dashboards to engaging communities around solar energy, assisting with climate action planning, evaluating infrastructure durability, and designing urban green space strategies. Their work provides host organizations with functional data, planning tools, and community engagement resources that often continue yielding value long after the summer concludes.
A defining feature of the program is its close connection with ERI’s Resilience Cohort, which helps Indiana cities, towns, and counties build local capacity for climate action. Through this partnership, fellows are embedded directly within municipal government initiatives, supporting projects such as the Heat Pump Accelerator, which expands community education and contractor engagement around energy-efficient heating and cooling technologies, and the Urban Green Infrastructure Cohort, which helps communities plan and implement tree planting strategies that strengthen resilience to extreme heat and stormwater challenges.
The influence reaches well beyond a single summer. Alumni like Halee Griffey credit the fellowship with providing the practical, community-centered experience that helped prepare her to direct local government climate action planning and implementation as a sustainability officer, first with the city of West Lafayette and now with the neighboring city of Lafayette. Similarly, Erin Lasher‘s fellowship experience equipped her with in-demand technical skills that gave her an edge in pursuit of a climate career. Today, Lasher works as a target validation manager with the Science Based Targets initiative, a global corporate climate action organization that works with companies and financial institutions to help them reduce their contributions to climate change.
The program is also helping build and retain Indiana’s climate workforce. Approximately 60% of McKinney Climate Fellows alumni now work in sustainability or environmental careers, while 58% continue to live and work in Indiana, strengthening the state’s capacity to address climate and resilience challenges with locally rooted expertise.
As ERI looks toward the next decade, it continues to fine-tune the program to meet the evolving needs of host organizations and the state. The institute is sharing lessons learned with other Midwestern universities interested in developing similar workforce pipelines, demonstrating how higher education can cultivate skilled professionals and guide communities in implementing practical climate solutions.
By pairing students with meaningful, community-driven work, the McKinney Climate Fellows program is doing more than preparing future sustainability leaders, it is building a stronger, more resilient Indiana while creating a model for climate workforce development that other regions can follow.
