Toolkits
Forging Resilience has assembled tools aimed at fostering community and encouraging collective problem-solving. Our tools are designed to help people make connections between environmental change and their daily lives by offering basic science education, highlighting local resources and solutions, engaging communities in storytelling, and strengthening skills for participating in civic events and processes.
Our toolkits will soon be available for download! Sign up for our newsletter to be notified:
Our Topics
Not all environmental changes are caused or worsened by climate change. Our toolkits address those that are. Forging Resilience has identified 11 environmental challenges that communities across the United States are currently experiencing and that are likely to worsen in the next two decades as a result of climate change. These topics are starting points for Forging Resilience’s work with museum and library officials to tailor participation relevant to their community:
We tailor our toolkits in several ways, including by adjusting the tools in the kit and by selecting a toolkit topic that speaks to experiences a community has shared.
Check out our inaugural toolkit here:
Inland Flooding & Extreme Rainfall
Tools for common causes
Each kit contains tools that are aimed to overcome obstacles that often get in the way of adoption environmental solutions. Each toolkit includes:
Toolkit Guide
Our toolkit guides give librarians and museum officials tools and information to support their patrons in building a more resilient community.
Exhibits
Each kit includes exhibits that help patrons connect with new information, each other, and solutions for their environmental challenge. Each exhibit designed to travel among library outlets and museums—even small ones!
Science & Trends
We work with Climate Central to create graphics that can be printed at any size on posterboard and placed around your exhibit site, or they can be included as PDFs in handouts. Together, they offer patrons insights into how the environmental challenge affects your community and how it will likely affect your community in the coming years.
Connections Exhibit
This interactive exhibit invites patrons to engage with the information they have learned from the Science and Trends Exhibits. As they do so, they also have the opportunity to engage with other community members’ reflections, thoughts, and concerns.
For our first toolkit, we invited local artist Pamela Nowak to help us design a Connections Exhibit that makes sense for Sutter County, California. Our designs for this exhibit, in particular, are always changing!
Solutions Banner
Each kit comes with a stand-up banner that offers information about potential actions community members can take to improve their local environmental challenge. This is meant to move patrons from thinking about important steps each can take at home to acting together to take even larger steps.
Community building, public works, and policymaking are local efforts, so we tailor our toolkits to each community we serve.
Living Room Conversation Guides
These guides to small-group discussions offer participants the opportunity to process information learned from the exhibits in direct conversation with fellow community members. The guides assist in creating a space for participants to engage with each other to develop understanding and discover common ground. We partner with Living Room Conversations, experts at bringing people together.
Skills-Building Guides
These tools help community members develop the functional skills they need to engage with governance policies and procedures to navigate a path forward. This programming empowers participants to implement environmental solutions beyond households by offering space to practice soft skills like public speaking and hard skills like how to find and secure rebates for energy-efficient appliances. Each skills workshop guide comes with information for how to plan a workshop, a guide for a facilitator to use to conduct the workshop, and a handout for participants.
Promotional Templates
To make the tools above as easy to use as possible, corresponding outreach templates accompany each one.
The details
Tools that come to you
Where possible, tools are available both in a physical format and for digital download via this website. Those downloads are coming soon.
| Downloadable | Shipped to you | |
| Toolkit guide | ✔ | ✔ |
| Trends exhibit | ✔ | |
| Solutions banner | ✔ | |
| Connections exhibit | ✔ | |
| Living Room Conversation guides | ✔ | ✔ |
| Skills workshop guides | ✔ | ✔ |
How we build our toolkits
We start by identifying an environmental challenge that is broadly experienced by your community. This indicates the toolkit template we build from.
Then we consider the community itself: What conversations are you already having? What is the history of your town or neighborhood? What resources do you already have and what might you need?
Then we bring those two pieces together. How does this environmental challenge present itself to this community? With the answers in mind, we build each tool for your community.
Using our toolkits
Reprints and distribution are expressly permitted:
This content is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC) License. Adaptations, excerpts, or other works that build upon the material must provide appropriate credit, indicate that changes were made, link to the CC license, and be distributed under the same CC license as the original. Attribution may be credited in any reasonable manner but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the product or creator. This material may NOT be used for commercial purposes.
©2025 UC Berkeley Law.
Suggested citation: Middleton, Chandra L., “Inland Flooding & Extreme Rainfall Toolkit Guide for Sutter County, CA, Museum & Library Officials,” Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment, UC Berkeley Law. Berkeley, CA: 2025.