Location: Oakland, Calif.
Region: National
Founders/leadership: Corrine Van Hook-Turner, CEO

People’s Climate Innovation Center (PCIC) (formally Climate Innovation) has been a powerhouse supporting vibrant movements across the country using a community-driven approach to lift up grassroots communities as leading solution makers on the frontlines, in government, philanthropy, and beyond. PCIC brings a whole systems approach to movement building, cultivating a strong culture of designing transformative solutions that restore and regenerate healthy earth systems and build environments for all. Their approach emphasizes the need for solutions that are community-driven, interconnected, and intervene at multiple levels.


Read more about Corine Van Hook-Turner, CEO of PCIC, on the Move Blog.

Read more about the support PCIC receives from MSC board member Jacqui Patterson on the Move Blog.

Read more about the relationship between funders and movement leaders, including PCIC’s Young Black Climate Leaders, on the Move Blog.

Read more about PCIC’s actions on climate change on the Move Blog.

Read what Tamira Jones, PCIC’s former Director of Capacity Building, said about the passing of ibrahim abdul-matin on the Move Blog.

Goals


  • Increase capacity for whole systems thinking, cross-sector collaboration, and community-driven solutions while building the field of climate resilience planning and extensions of the larger movement building ecosystem toward Just Transition and just recovery.
  • Ensure climate solutions meet the real needs of climate-impacted communities by centralizing and resourcing frontline, BIPOC leadership.
  • Create opportunities for strategic alignment among leaders in the climate movement ecosystem to scale community-driven solutions and accelerate the rate of change.
  • Incubate place-based efforts to grow and support models for replication and evolution.

Services


Another world is possible. PCIC supports governments, institutions, and funders in becoming more effective game-changers by centering equity and justice in their climate, resilience, and sustainability work. Simultaneously, they support grassroots and frontline communities and organizations to build capacity and networks to support leadership and a vision for a more beautiful, just, and sustainable world. PCIC facilitates planning processes that ultimately make climate efforts more successful and seamless, with deeper community partnerships and frontline leadership for the immediate and long term. 

The PCIC team is Black-led and made up of a diverse group of leaders who have first hand experience of their voices and expertise being sidelined in planning processes. Their leadership possesses decades of experience in design and facilitation across the country drawing from permaculture, ancestral wisdom, and community organizing pedagogy. Their approach to community-driven processes and decision making is all about increasing capacity and relinquishing control in order for power to be shifted to communities so they may be the designers of their own community and future.

PCIC's Work


Purpose

Young Black Climate Leaders (YBCL) is a cohort of 25 youth leaders who receive training to grow, connect, and advance their leadership, work, and role in the climate movement both individually and collectively as a network. This leadership development work is rooted in AfroIndigenous principles and practices to heal generational harms and restore connection to Earth as a framework for deep lasting change that can enable all systems and people to thrive in relationships. Our core outcome and impact will provide young Black climate leaders with the tools to tackle the complexities of the climate crisis and the diversity of our environmental ecosystem, as well as centering on Black liberation in the field. An initial cadre of five young Black leaders will receive intensive coaching and training, then lead a cohort of 20 additional Black youths. We have also assembled an amazing partner network of leading thinker-practitioners to support the program and the young leaders.

Goals

  • Provide intensive and ongoing youth organizing support and capacity building.
  • Introduce youth to community-driven planning and principles and to enacting those principles.
  • Support leadership of core cadre in leading additional 20 youths nationwide.
  • Cultivate a culture and ethic within youth organizing that promotes inclusivity, intersectionality, and mind-body-spirit integration and wellness.
  • Envision a climate movement led by young Black leaders.
  • Grow networks of support, mentorship, thought leadership, and action for Black climate organizers.

Purpose

The National Association of Climate Resilience Planners (NACRP) is a multi-stakeholder, peer-learning, resource, and referral network that fosters effective, place-based climate resilience planning and implementation.

In 2021, the NACRP, in partnership with Facilitating Power and the NAACP, launched VISION | POWER | SOLUTIONS, a workshop series to build capacity for community-driven planning among facilitators, organizers, leaders, and educators who are accountable to Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. This training is part of a larger effort to foster a facilitator’s community of practice and referral network within the field of community-driven planning.

Goals

  • Center the expertise of grassroots and frontline organizations working to assert community vision, power, and solutions and intervene on public planning processes by shining a light on expertise and stories, while working to direct resources to the work.
  • Cultivate a community of practice that builds the field of community-driven climate resilience planning to support a Just Transition.
  • A referral network that supports local and state governments to contract with facilitators, that is rooted in community, and who can facilitate community-driven planning.

For more information, visit https://www.nacrp.org/vision-power-solutions.

Purpose

Envision a place where each year thousands of BIPOC communities reclaim their relationship to the Earth, their history, and their future. Black-led and operated, the EARTHseed Permaculture Center (EPC) will serve as a working farm and educational center to reconnect communities to AfroIndigenous principles and practices for living in our world today.

Earthseed Permaculture Center (EPC) is Sonoma County’s first black owned, AfroIndigenous 14-acre farm and education center that:

  1. Heals cycles of systemic harm by reconnecting Black people with AfroIndigenous practices.
  2. Supports the Earth and community with food grown using restorative methods.
  3. Teaches people how to build resilience in their communities in the face of climate change.

Goals

  • Provide direct community support (including farm production to nourish our communities), plus teach how to honor wild tended areas, practical instruction in regenerative agricultural techniques, and modeling resilience practices.
  • Offer space for curriculum support so that outside groups and individuals can deepen the ecological and social justice lens for the workshops they host, such as courses in eco-therapy, doula training, climate justice activism, and community-driven resiliency planning.
  • Host programming rooted in permaculture principles and design with a special focus on the legacy of these practices in AfroIndigenous communities.
  • Offer curriculum and programs that will honor the legacy and practices of Indigenous communities in the places they call home.

For more information, visit https://www.pandorathomas.com/contact.

Purpose

The Marin City People’s Plan (MCPP) began as a grassroots African American organization in 2018 and is an example of site-based adaptation of the CDCRP approach. Climate Innovation has partnered with the MCPP since its inception, as the role of co-facilitator of the CDCRP through People’s Planning. Learn more

For more information contact Pandora Thomas & Michelle Gabrieloff-Parish

Current Engagements

Strategic Growth Council

PCIC partnered with a team of organizations and governmental partners to build capacity and expand the networks of California’s frontline communities working to address climate inequalities. After months of preparation and outreach, 22 leaders representing California’s diverse communities were selected as the 2021 inaugural cohort of the Partners Advancing Climate Equity Program (PACE).

Developed by Climate Innovation, California Strategic Growth Council, the Local Government Commission, Climate Resolve, Urban Permaculture Institute, and The Greenlining Institute, PACE advances community-driven, equitable climate solutions at the pace and scale demanded by climate change and ongoing racial, social, and environmental inequities.

The members of the inaugural cohort worked on an array of issues at the intersection of climate and equity, including affordable housing, air quality, youth and resident empowerment, water and wildfire resilience, and urban greening. The program consists of two phases: A peer-to-peer learning cohort, and place-based technical assistance to support local capacity building to advance community-identified initiatives.

Resources


The Community-Driven Climate Resilience Planning Framework brought together leading voices in community power building to create a toolkit for advancing community priorities. The framework advocates deepening democratic practices at the local and regional levels, puts forth principles and practices defining the emergent field of climate resilience, offers examples and resources for community-based institutions implementing community-driven planning processes, and is useful for a range of stakeholders, including community-based organizations, philanthropy, and the public sector.

The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership charts a pathway to strengthen and transform our local democracies. Thriving, diverse, equitable communities are possible through deep participation — particularly by communities commonly excluded from democratic voice and power. The stronger our local democracies, the more capacity we can unleash to address our toughest challenges, and the more capable we are of surviving and thriving through economic, ecological, and social crises.

Pathways to Resilience: MSC, in partnership with the Kresge Foundation, the Emerald Cities Collaborative, and the Praxis Project, conducted a series of convenings, interviews, and conversations (called “The P2R [Pathways to Resilience] Dialogues”) to produce a vision of climate resilience grounded in the realities of low-income communities and communities of color, and pragmatic pathways to achieve it. The synthesis of these Dialogues and insightful articles were compiled into this e-book.