Co-designing Tools for Community Climate Action: Participatory and Culturally Sustaining Research, Education, and Organizing

• In Event: Expanding Research Practice Partnerships: Integrating Youth Voices for Equitable and Impactful Collaboration

Abstract

Purpose
A university and a local non-profit environmental justice organization have formed a community-based research practice partnership to develop a Climate Action Certification Program for Environmental Justice and Air Quality Improvement for residents in a local city. The certification program builds upon the local non-profit’s established community air monitoring program. Partners will draw on Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) and Culturallly Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP) to develop, implement, and assess the program between 2025-2027, to engage 50 participants—25 youth and 25 adults from the local city’s Environmental Justice (EJ) clusters— with local research on immediate air pollution reduction strategies while offering pathways to career development in STEM fields and environmental justice advocacy.
We co-developed the following research questions to guide this study:
How do youth and adult participants contribute to the co-design of place-based environmental justice curriculum and educational tools?
How do youth and adult participants engage with community-based air monitoring tools in the context of a highly surveilled environmental justice community?
In what ways do participants interact with and make meaning from air quality data as they design research projects grounded in community concerns and environmental justice storytelling?

Theoretical Framework
YPAR positions youth as co-researchers alongside adults, fostering intergenerational collaboration in identifying, investigating, and addressing community concerns (Rodriguez & Brown, 2009; Branquinho et al., 2020). CSP will inform the design of the Climate Action Certification Program by ensuring that the curriculum reflects and affirms the cultural identities, languages, interests, and community practices of participants (Paris, 2021).

Methods
Youth and adult participants will co-develop original research projects and co-construct narratives and solutions supported by scientific data, such as air monitoring data and community testimonials. The EJ non-profit and the certification participants will host workshops to co-design a variety of tools for advocacy, such as counter-mapping, which involves creating maps from residential perspectives to challenge dominant narratives (Dalton & Stallmann, 2017), and speculative futures, where residents envision and design culturally relevant and sustainable futures for their communities (Edwards & Pettersen, 2023). Tools such as these will be tailored to address the needs of each research project.

Data Sources
The EJ non-profit and the university research team will simultaneously develop and pilot a mixed-methods evaluation framework tailored to the program’s participatory approach. Evaluation tools will include pre-, midpoint, and post-program surveys to assess shifts in environmental literacy, technical skill development, and interest in STEM and advocacy career pathways, especially among youth. Qualitative evaluations will include post-workshop surveys, facilitator interviews, and participant reflection prompts focused on leadership development and public-facing engagement. The framework will be co-designed by the research team and EJ non-profit, ensuring tools are culturally responsive and aligned with community-guided curriculum goals.

Significance
This project expands educational practices in Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) and collaborative knowledge production by documenting how youth and adults co-construct strategies for climate action in contexts where visibility itself can pose a threat, and where data is not merely technical, but deeply entangled with questions of safety, belonging, and power (Pellow 2017).

Authors

• Victoria Nguyen, University of California - Irvine

• Erika Mayoral-Ramirez, GREEN-MPNA

• Leonel Flores, GREEN-MPNA

• Aylin Camacho, GREEN-MPNA

• Marianna Davison, University of California - Irvine

• Tatiana Flores, University of California - Irvine

• Victoria Lowerson Bredow, University of California - Irvine