Get involved
It’s time to get involved—and there’s room for everyone!
Forging Resilience starts with a host institution and relies on community members to actively participate, engage in good faith, and enact solutions. Use of the toolkit can involve many actors, playing different and multiple roles.
Here are some of those roles:
Libraries and local museums “host” our toolkits and use them to engage their community.
Community members:
- Visit and engage with the exhibits
- Participate in and host Living Room Conversations
- Participate in and facilitate Skills Workshops
- Build consensus around and advocate for solutions
- Recommend their library or local museum request a toolkit.
Local institutions, groups, and leaders can participate as individuals, help host and facilitate the use of tools in our kits, and can recommend to their library or local museum that they request a toolkit.
Local and regional experts can be called on for special lectures or collaborations to supplement the tools in this kit.
Click on one of these links to learn
how to get involved:
For librarians & museum officials
We are still building our infrastructure, so the easiest way for you to request a toolkit or a consultation to discuss our toolkits, is by completing this form.
Our small team is still building our topical templates for many of the toolkits, which means that our production time is both uncertain and likely not swift. Despite potential time lags between expressing your interest and receiving a toolkit, please know that we value your partnership in forging resilient communities and are doing our best to serve you!
Public libraries and museums offer a way to talk to people where they live and work about climate impacts they are already experiencing or are likely to experience by 2040.
For community members
At the moment, we are building toolkits almost exclusively for libraries and local museums. However, we encourage community members—as individuals or leaders, representatives of local institutions, or regional experts—to get involved. There are a number of ways you can do this:
- If your library or museum has a toolkit already, be sure to participate in the exhibits, conversations, and workshops! You might also consider hosting a Living Room Conversation or facilitating a workshop.
- Meet with your local library or museum officials and share your interest in Forging Resilience–they might not know about it! You can have them fill out an interest form if they’d like to meet with our team to learn more.
- Regardless of whether Forging Resilience is in your community or comes to your community, you can work to build consensus around and advocate for solutions that make sense for where you live. You do not need Forging Resilience to participate in civic life!
We tie our environmental work to civic participation and democracy because action on environmental solutions at a societal level does not happen without engaging with each other.
For funders
These cultural institutions are uniquely situated as gathering places that are open to all and trusted sources of information. And they are ubiquitous: The United States has more than 17,000 public libraries and 33,000 museum-related organizations throughout the country. They are in rural towns and big cities and are well poised to engage uniquely and specifically with their community’s environmental challenges.
Our approach is holistic and hyper-local, designed to develop community members’ skills to respond to their community’s needs. At its heart, this project seeks systemic change by strengthening communities’ social fabric, empowering residents to find and adopt solutions that work best for them. While the tools have been built to overcome barriers to action on climate change, the lessons and skills learned can be applied to almost any societal concern.
Forging Resilience is entering the next phase of development. We continue to develop toolkit templates for additional environmental challenges, while adjusting and then broadly distributing the toolkit templates we have already created. But this is just the beginning. With additional funding, we can exponentially increase our efficacy by connecting Forging Resilience communities with each other. Through the sharing of experiences—successes, failures, and lessons learned—across communities that are engaged in resilience work, we can help to create a community of practice: a network of skilled, resilient communities that can solve big, difficult problems, including climate change.