Meg, Thanks for your question,

What CUSP has done is helped organizations connect their existing work to climate change. By help I mean, we all feel like we are part of a bigger supportive community which makes brokering the conversation with our stake holders easier. In the US many people are concerned about climate change but few actually have conversations with other people about it. Here we have a network that is getting better at having the conversation together and then taking that conversation to their public stakeholders- using locally relevant examples and solution strategies. 

We've been exploring what locally relevant stories might be useful in regions with very different climate impacts or in rural communites close to us, as our project currently focuses on urban systems. We'd love to talk more about those two ideas with people (and other ideas too!)

Thanks for your question...

Mary Ann

Hi, Rowena! While we knew that residents in our 4 cities ranked higher than the national average in terms of their beliefs that climate change is happening, etc.,* we drew more on social science research to formulate our approach. Also, we can't overstate how much the networks make the approach move and work in a city, which is why we thought it was important to tell the story of where we've seen success in getting such a diverse set of stakeholders working together. Nothing concrete in terms of additional funding at the moment, but we think our model is adaptable to lots of other places. Thanks for your question!  (*via Yale Climate Opinion Maps).

Carol,

The research on boundary objects has been participatory and iterative with network members and public experiences shaping the intent and process of kit and map building.

We have been positioning the kits and map as boundary objects because we saw how they allow people from diverse sectors in our network and diverse backgrounds in our public audiences open up a conversation. Kits are physical representations that are simplistic but locally relevant. Because they are basic and often in progress in terms of design, we have found they advance a shared conversation that can expose areas of agreement, disagreement, and interest. Also they are flexible, people are comfortable proposing ways to adapt them to their own needs or just improve them more generally which helps us learn from each other and see our work as interconnected.

For example…
So the man at the table puts a chip in a plinko board and finds a he has landed on a low or high asthma incidence day with its random bounce down the board. He then rolls a die to see if he has positive or negative circumstances that would increase his likelihood of a healthy outcome .. living on a shady street, having a high income, being a healthy adult vs young child/elderly person...each positive outcome leads to an additional chip for the board and increased chance of landing on a good day. Then we ask participants to think of a system change that would impact . They create a guide that is strung across the pegs making it easier for everyone to have better air quality days … restrictions on fossil fuel emissions, policy to encourage public transit use and reduce traffic city wide greening plans…we are still playing with having some solutions pre prepared vs having participants identify them.

This kit was developed at a kit building workshop because a partner at Tree Pittsburgh whose only connection with us to date had been as a presenter at the festivals asked if there was an air quality kit..staff at the Carnegie replied they had been interested in one and so organized a workshop where this network member worked with three other agencies to come up with the Plinko game. She told us one member was expert in the health questions, she was passionate about the role of trees, and a third team member was interested in the mechanics of how to make the game work and promote the topic of equity and systems solutions.

More than being about a few targeted content outcomes, the kits elicit what people know and want to know about the topic and then as facilitators we offer connection to our own agencies or other to local groups who are actively engaged in work in that area. Shifting to this type of facilitation has been supported by presenting in a shared space or tent at afestival where people see the strategies other network members use and by network meetings where we discuss the best public experiences and how they were supported and also critique sets of kits creating lists of ways they engage or how they could better engage a user.

From start to finish when using kits or asking people to tag and find uses for the map we are inviting a conversation and drawing people into a shared problem space, letting them know others are also trying to address it…and that for the most part we need all the new ideas we can get from all sources to address this complex problem of climate change. We try to break down the isolation that comes from being individually responsible for behavior change, by providing concrete local examples of climate change impacts and how we can address them together as a city.

We found early on through testing ideas as a network with each other and having partners rest them with the public that the homemade look of the kits made people really comfortable in approaching and using the kits because they look familiar and fun. In DC after a kit workshop network members adapted three existing kits with local images and examples and generated a new kit weighing the benefits of different choices. At festivals we often hear people say..oh we could make this for our scout troop or class ...in NYC partners reported that in communities where the kits were presented mothers would watch and then take over facilitating the kits...

The kits elicit people’s personal experience with the topic in part because they open up conversations and get people doing things right away. We also saw because of the simple materials network members and the public were comfortable with the idea of making one of these for a purpose of their own, or improving aspects of it to better address an issue they work on, we have found constructive critique of kits to be really helpful in bringing out how people at different organizations approach the kit topics

Mary Ann--

I can see that how this could be adapted contextually for specific "shared" contexts to create and amplify problem solving for unique climate impact scenarios, for example those dealing with snow pack issues, or irrigation/pest management agriculture issues. Exciting possibilities.

Hi, Brian. The CUSP model is nice, because it has capacity building baked in. All the organizations involved in the networks, including the lead institutions, are folding best practices into their work. For example, the table top activities (or "kits") that were originally created as boundary objects, are now being used in the core programming of several institutions. Also, several mini-grant projects have developed into more robust programs. And, the networks themselves are vibrant and growing still, so we'll make a concerted effort to ensure their 'afterlife' :) Thanks for your question!