Climate Resilience through Community Resilience is a four-year creative scholarship project culminating in multiple public exhibitions in Hazard, a community vision plan, and capacity-building for local community institutions. We are currently at the beginning of year three. Partnering with the City of Hazard, InVision Hazard, Invest Appalachia, and Mountain Association, we seek to invite a conversation about climate impacts in coal country through participatory design processes. Further, we are demonstrating that a rigorously defined platform can ensure accountability and promote sustainability in the process, while building the capacity of community to engage the design disciplines. Finally, we aspire to elevate the conversation about climate impacts in Kentucky and other regions too often left out of the conversation to a national audience.

Year one of Climate Resilience through Community Resilience utilized service-learning imbued courses and studios offered by Hannah DeWhirst, Rebakah Radtke, and Brent Sturlaugson (now at Morgan State University) to generate content for the benefit of our community partners in Hazard, culminating in a public exhibition at the future African-American Cultural Center in downtown Hazard. The studio students also hosted a day-long design charette for local building owners during the Spring semester, resulting in the acquisition and renovation of a downtown building (underway). 

Year two of the project saw a maturation of the relationships between community leadership and university faculty, establishing redundancies and robustness in the connection between community and university. Faculty supported the Appalachian Big Ideas Festival (Sept 30-Oct 2, 2022). A Spring studio generated redevelopment concepts for a vacant downtown lot. Refinement of the preferred design is underway as well as plans for implementation. 

While my colleagues have taked the lead on instruction, in my capacity as Extension Faculty, I developed the program design and service-learning framework while cultivating community relationships and securing funding for the on-going work. I am the PI on multiple grants funding the work in Hazard. Utilizing $48,0000 in seed funding from a UK Sustainability Challenge Grant, we were able to secure $125,000 in external funding from National Endowment for the Arts Our Town Program to support years three and four of the program. The LIFT Fund at Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky provided $50,000 to match the NEA grant, which will fund a new staff position at Appalachian Arts Alliance for two years and fund the employment of artists to create new works. 

We were also awarded $50,000 in seed funding through UK’s Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES) to further develop the translational and transdisciplinary nature of the work. We are currently listed as sub-awardees in two federal grant proposals to support post-floods recovery work. 

The project has been presented nationally and internationally, elevating the topic to a broader audience.