Introduction
Climate Resilience in Urban Campuses + Communities (CRUX) is a multi-city partnership supported through a grant from the Kresge Foundation. As part of this initiative, Second Nature is working directly with six campuses and their community partners in three cities in the western United States (Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Portland) to evaluate the first two action steps in the recently launched Climate Commitment. The CRUX cohort will share learning among the campuses and with the Climate Leadership Network to accelerate resilience progress across the country.
Partners
Institutions participating in CRUX include:
Los Angeles
- California State University, Northridge
- Los Angeles Valley College
- Northridge Vision
- Greater Valley Glen Neighborhood Council
Phoenix
- Arizona State University
- South Mountain Community College
- Habitat for Humanity Central Arizona
Portland
- Portland State University
- Mt. Hood Community College
- Portland Downtown Neighborhood Association
- City of Gresham
- City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability
Other partners include the Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU) and the New Knowledge Organization.
Goals
The CRUX project goals are to:
- Facilitate implementation of a nationally-scalable strategy to develop climate resilience with campuses and communities, and
- Learn with and from these clusters as they complete the first two benchmarks of the new framework. These two benchmarks are:
- Create a campus/community task force or introduce the resilience planning framework into an existing campus/community structure
- Complete a resilience capacity assessment including preliminary progress indicators
Deliverables
Second Nature will:
- Support an organizational mapping process in each city to identify existing relational linkages and organizational priorities
- Establish positions of CRUX Fellows and Ambassadors for each city
- Establish pools of implementation funding for the CRUX clusters
- Share learning and progress through Second Nature’s public reporting tool, national meetings, and team communication outlets
- Complete an evaluation for the first two benchmarks in the Commitments to be shared across urban campuses and the national CLN
