H.O.P.E. for Heat Resilience

H.O.P.E. for Heat Resilience is a collaboration between community groups, City government, and academic researchers in Roanoke, Virginia to address the risks of rising temperatures in the city caused by global climate change. The project is one of 19 projects nationwide funded by the National Science Foundation Civic Innovation Challenge.

H.O.P.E. stands for Healing Our People with Empathy. In the planning phase of our project, we realized that the communities that are most vulnerable to the risks of increased temperatures are also the communities that must simultaneously deal with many other social and environmental stressors: poverty, lack of affordable housing, food insecurity, policing and mass incarceration, and gun violence, to name a few. With such pressing issues in people’s’ day-to-day lives, how do we simultaneously raise longer-term, and perhaps less recognized, impacts of the impacts of climate change, which are already making many of these issues worse?

The project aims to create social and digital infrastructures for community resilience to extreme heat through deploying youth technology, arts, and urban planning programs in partnership with city government and existing community development and faith organizations. Through this work, we demonstrate a grassroots and youth-centered approach to community planning for the risks of climate change in cities. In addition, our collaboration is defining what trauma-informed, healing-centered urban planning means in the context of history and coming challenges of global climate change.

Highlighted Impacts and Outcomes

• Series of All Hands Meetings which included trauma-informed community engagement training and group sensemaking with 85 participants from over 7 government agencies, 16 community-based organizations, 6 faith-based organizations, and 2 school districts.

• 8 High school students in the High School Panner’s Program which was a community planning initiative where students learn about urban planning practices.

• A digital hub of artifacts from the project which helps visualize the different community engagement activities and artifacts overlaid on the city of roanoke w/ census and heat layers 

• Arts engagement which involved weekly engagement with youth as well as collaboration with 23 unique organizations.  Many of these events can be found on the digital hub site

• Science engagement with Roanoke City Public Schools middle school teachers, Green Team programs (35 activities, 125 unique youth, Melrose Library, Goodwill Youth HQ, YMCA, and West Eng Center), wearable temperature sensors activities, and a West End Center summer program with 19 4th and 5th graders

• Tree planting - 24 trees planted and 200 person-hours of planting-watering

• Capacity-building work with the Hope Center as a heat resilience hub – became a 501c3, joined the state board, created mission and vision statement, and moved into a new facility with expanded capacity.

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