With Congress’ historic investments to support climate and environmental resilience (C&E resilience) through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, we are at a pivotal moment to ensure that, through service years, young people have an opportunity to leverage their unique talents to uplift community resilience while also gaining the skills and experience they need to successfully secure careers within the growing green economy. Learn more about the projects Service Year Alliance is advancing to connect corps members to green sector careers by visiting our workforce development page.
To ensure these objectives are met, Service Year Alliance formed a multi-year partnership with the Cisco Foundation to launch our Climate Project that intentionally examined how service year programming can be further leveraged as a human capital solution to effectively combat the impacts of climate change and develop the next generation of leaders to advance C&E resilience efforts.
Through hosting targeted conversations with national service programs, green sector employer associations, workforce development partners, and other organizations and agencies advancing C&E resilience, Service Year Alliance identified a high level of alignment between service year programming and the effort to address climate change. To further examine key areas of opportunity, Service Year Alliance then formed a learning cohort made-up of standout service year programs advancing three diverse program models: Energy Efficiency, Community Capacity Building, and Rural Resilience.
In addition to having an intentional opportunity to learn from one another, these program partners assisted Service Year Alliance in defining key components of program design and implementation that have been shown to produce successful programs and achieve a high level of impact for both corps members as well as the communities being served. These learnings were then consolidated into the following resource, the Climate & Environmental Resilience Guide, which is intended to expedite the process of either standing-up new programming or expanding and enhancing current programming within our three C&E Resilience focus areas.
Get Started with the Climate & Environmental Resilience Guide
This common guide serves as your starting point. The Guide will first provide you with a further overview of each of the three project focus areas — Energy Efficiency, Community Capacity Building, and Rural Resilience — and includes spotlights of a diverse array of programs from across the country implementing programming that falls under each model.
Use the Climate Guide to determine which of the three roadmaps best meets your community's needs.
Once you have determined which model may be best suited to meet the C&E resilience needs of your community and stakeholders, you can use explore the full Roadmap associated with that model.
- These Roadmaps will highlight a program framework that uplifts top recommendations that surfaced as part of the work with our partners and will also guide you through each major component of service year programming.
- Second, each Roadmap contains an appendix which provides a menu of options that will allow you to also consider and adopt alternative programming that may best suit the unique needs and opportunities that exist within your community.
- The appendix can also be leveraged by existing service year programs that seek to gain a more in-depth understanding of strategies for expanding or enhancing their current program model.
If you’re interested in exploring ways to get involved in this work, please contact Brent Kossick at [email protected].
