Advanced Community Resilience Organizing Seminar

This new Winter 2018 seminar is currently on-going. Students are learning skills for community resilience organizing with an emphasis on environmental and climate justice, deepening practices of transformative movement building, cultivating audacious vision, building community across movements, and navigating into action. This seminar is part of the our campus’ nascent Community Resilience Co-lab, an experimental co-curricular education response to the enduring and intersecting crises of environmental, racial, and social injustice.
 

2017-18 Community Resilience Fellows

What: Advanced Community Resilience Organizing Seminar
Who: UCI undergraduate and graduate students
When: Winter Quarter 2018; Wednesdays, 3 – 4:50 pm
Where: Wellness Room, Cross-Cultural Center

Units: 1.3 unit class P/NP
Instructor: Abby Reyes, Director, UCI Community Resilience Projects

 

Seminar Objectives

The framing question during a recent Transitions Lab hosted by Movement Strategy Center (MSC). The UCI seminar draws from strategies and practices that MSC is helping to bring together across multiple social movements.

Through highly participatory activities and practices, it is expected that students will:

  • Deepen understanding of ways that issues of environmental, climate, racial, and social justice intersect;
  • Deepen understanding and practices of regeneration, resilience, and interdependence;
  • Learn skills for transformative leadership, movement building and advocacy;
  • Learn skills for community visioning and action planning;
  • Create a support network and strong sense of community and solidarity with their peers; and
  • Develop student-led project(s) to execute after the course with continued guidance and support from the Community Resilience Co-lab.

 

Additional Information

Students should expect to be able to complete all work for the course during the weekly seminar on Wednesdays, 3-4:50 pm. Optional additional activities include a weekly skill-building workshop/reading group immediately following the seminar from 5-6 pm and eligibility to attend one weekend intensive training in Spring 2018.  The seminar draws upon framing, practices, and strategies from multiple sources including, among others, SERES, Movement Strategy Center, Social Transformation Project, Emergent Strategy, Movement Generation, and the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program.

 

About the Instructor

Abby Reyes is a human rights & environmental lawyer. She cut her teeth doing rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian U’wa pueblo for dignity against big oil. She is now director of UCI Community Resilience Projects and trains UC food and climate fellows in transformative leadership statewide. A graduate of Stanford and Berkeley Law, she co-chairs the board of EarthRights International and is a partner in the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners.