6.4: The UCSD Community Stations

Social science research confirms that individual and collective behavioral change in disadvantaged communities begins with community-based education and that successful educational initiatives localize climate change by linking global challenges to concrete local conditions. In disadvantaged neighborhoods plagued by poverty, violence, failing schools, and failing infrastructure, climate can seem remote from the acute challenges of everyday life. Disadvantaged urban populations are likelier to change consumption and production habits when they understand the linkages between climate and local effects in their neighborhoods and when opportunities for participatory action with local impact are made available to them.

Led by UC San Diego political science professor Fonna Forman (the author of this chapter) and UC San Diego visual arts professor Teddy Cruz, the UC San Diego Community Stations are a network of field stations located in disadvantaged neighborhoods across the San Diego and Tijuana region. In the stations, university researchers and students partner with community-based nonprofits on projects involving environmental literacy and climate action. We have three stations distributed throughout the region (Figure 6.4.1).

The Community Stations are committed to three main climate change agendas: (1) providing community-based climate education for undergraduate and graduate students on our campus, teaching them to become effective climate educators; (2) increasing climate literacy among adults and especially children in the communities we partner with; and (3) stewarding high-impact participatory climate action projects at neighborhood scales. These projects range from small-scale activities like community workshops and demonstrations to designing and financing net zero retrofits of homes, schools, and businesses. Each summer, through the Blum Summer Field Internship, we fund dozens of UCSD students from 15 majors and minors across the campus to work on integral, team-based research projects on climate change, sustainability, and environmental health in the UCSD Community Stations.*

Figure 6.4.1 The UCSD Community Stations Network. Reproduced with permission from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

Take, for example, UC San Diego’s EarthLab Community Station, a partnership with the environmental nonprofit Groundwork San Diego, which is located in Encanto, San Diego’s most challenged inner-city neighborhood, near Chollas Creek, the city’s most polluted waterway. EarthLab is a 4-acre outdoor environmental classroom and climate action park, equipped with community gardens, water-harvesting facilities, a solar house, an energy “nanogrid,” and other green infrastructure, all designed by university researchers as learning tools for the six public schools in walking distance of the site. Thousands of low-income youth and their families circulate through EarthLab each year, learning about the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation in their own neighborhoods and participating locally in climate action in concrete ways (Figure 6.4.2).

Figure 6.4.2 The UCSD EarthLab Community Station, image tiles. Reproduced with permission from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

We’re now in the process of designing a master plan for the EarthLab to increase its capacity into the future, focusing on food, energy, and water, the major challenges of environmental justice in underserved communities today. And we’ve been recognized by the California Energy Commission for our potential to change behaviors and attitudes in this community. In 2017, we received an Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) grant to design a “near-zero net energy community” for the surrounding neighborhood. EarthLab will serve as a base for the solar power and energy storage infrastructure that will make this possible. This project demonstrates how the university can use its leverage to partner with local nonprofits not only to change attitudes and behaviors, but also to facilitate high-impact climate action projects in underserved neighborhoods.

The UCSD Community Stations also focus on climate change and poverty in the neighborhoods that flank the US-Mexico border separating San Diego and Tijuana. Given UC San Diego’s proximity to the international border, we’ve come to understand this region as a local site for research on the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable people across the globe. We also believe we have an ethical duty, given our proximity, to figure out how to mobilize our research and capacity to assist these vulnerable communities.

Figure 6.4.3 Local youth in the UCSD-Divina Community Station, learning through doing. Reproduced with permission from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

Our UCSD-Divina Community Station is located in an informal canyon settlement of 85,000 people on the periphery of Tijuana that butts up directly against the wall marking the international border. We work in a neighborhood called Divina Providencia, in close partnership with a nonprofit called Organización de Colonos de la Divina Providencia (Figure 6.4.3). Together, we design and lead environmental literacy programming to help children and their families understand the impact of climate change and environmental degradation on their health and the well-being of their communities (Figures 6.4.4 and 6.4.5). Again, it’s not just about filling empty vessels with knowledge. It’s about hands-on learning and participatory climate action. When we get people involved at an early age, they come to value the environment and to appreciate its direct impact on their lives and their communities.

We conclude our chapter on social transformation with the UCSD Community Stations because we believe they provide a highly replicable and scalable model of local climate action. Universities everywhere are positioned to do this kind of collaborative work in their local communities, training our students across disciplines to become the climate educators and communicators of the future and mobilizing university resources for the public good, locally and for the planet.

Figure 6.4.4 Local youth in the UCSD EarthLab Community Station, environmental literacy in situ. Reproduced with permission from Groundwork San Diego, Chollas Creek.

Figure 6.4.5 The UCSD Blum Summer Field Internship, Summer 2015, Tijauna, BC, Mexico. Reproduced with permission from Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman.

*The Blum Summer Field Internship was made possible by University of California Regent Richard C. Blum and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.