COVID-19 and Climate Resiliency Community Interviews and Analysis in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties (2020) Project Report
Students: Adrian Gonzalez, Andrew Skelton, Bless Romo, Fenella Scutt, Riley Lynch, and Sophia Lynn
This report will cover the work of our student team in conjunction with the community-engaged partners in our efforts to better serve North Fair Oaks and surrounding communities during the COVID-19 pandemic and recent climate hazards. Through the community-engaged learning component of the Sustainable Cities course, this student group aimed to serve both the Stanford Future Bay Initiative as well as Climate Ready North Fair Oaks in their sustainable community research and development efforts. Through qualitative analysis of interview studies, this project aims to better understand the disproportionate impacts of both COVID-19 and climate hazards on low-income and BIPOC communities, particularly the North Fair Oaks and Redwood City greater area. This report will outline our goals, our research, our findings, and our recommendations for county-level action and future research.
Students: Brian Delgado, Steven Kohl, Katherine Moldow, Jessica Mi, Andea Scott
The goal of this project was to analyze and visualize data collected via the Climate Change Community Survey to gain insight into the current knowledge of East Palo Alto (EPA) residents with regards to climate change. These findings will provide the Climate Change Community Team (CCCT) with valuable information that will allow them to make knowledgeable and informed decisions with regards to their projects in the community. From the data, there were three key findings. Finding #1: East Palo Alto Residents are aware of the threats of climate change. Finding #2: East Palo Alto residents are not directly concerned about climate change but are concerned about climate change-related issues. Finding #3: educational interventions increase awareness and concern for climate change. Taking these findings into account, our team suggests that there be an increase in educational efforts to help residents understand the real impacts of climate change. We also recommend that the data be continually maintained, and finally, for the community to continue to support the important work that the CCCT undertakes.
Students: Erik Miller, Claire Lang-Ree, Lydia Zemmali, Michael Espinosa, Jim Yu
The overarching goal of this project is to elevate narratives of displaced Black San Franciscans and create an online interactive platform for people to engage with the human aspects of these stories, root this issue in its geographic location and understand the historical and present-day forces behind displacement and injustice in the Bay Area. Our project was dedicated to working through transcribing, editing, and producing short audio clips for AEMP to integrate into their various platforms. AEMP had already collected a series of long-form interviews with Black San Franciscans as part of their (Dis)Location / Black Exodus Project. The interviews were focused on the individual experiences of different Bay Area residents revolving around a few central themes of housing, eviction, environmental racism, community power and resilience. Through the process of transcribing, editing and crafting our deliverables to AEMP, our group was able to create something that could shift peoples’ perspectives on displacement.
Community Voices at the Tech Interactive (2019) Project Report
Students: Ayoade Balogun, Keona Blanks, Natalie Cross, Alisha Jani and Priya Miller
The Tech Interactive’s Community Voices exhibit will be a collection of stories of local climate change impact and local adaptations/mitigation. Localized stories––‘local’ being used in a broad sense to refer to the Bay Area––are the focus of our project and the broader Community Voices exhibit due to proven effectiveness of narratives that have personal impact in increasing climate change awareness. Climate change impacts included in the scope of the interviews we conducted over the course of the quarter are natural disasters such as wildfire, air pollution, and warming temperatures/changing seasonal patterns, and cultural impacts from a changing environment. Climate change adaptation and mitigation efforts included in the scope of the interviews we conducted range from establishing and maintaining community gardens to grappling with environmental justice issues.
Community Voices: an Interactive Exhibit at the Tech Museum of Innovation, San Jose (2018) Project Report
Our project, titled Community Voices aims to make the issue of climate change more personal by sharing stories of climate change adaptation, mitigation, and general community resilience from individuals across the Bay Area. Through these stories, we - and our partners at the Tech Museum - not only hope to educate people on existing climate efforts in their area but also to inspire hope and to motivate these people to get involved in climate activism. For our project, we collected audio stories from members of different communities about how they have personally been impacted by climate change. The project aims to elevate the stories and lived experiences of individuals and organizations across the Bay Area who are not only feeling the impacts of climate change but adapting to and mitigating these impacts in creative and innovative ways. Through seeing and hearing about climate impacts in their communities, our audience will understand how urgent climate issues have become.
Natural Resource Management in San Mateo County's Parks (2017) Project Report
Students: Holly Tullo, Emmanuel Assa, Dani McDonald and David Cross
Protected land covers 42% of the County of San Mateo. These protected lands provide vital ecosystems services related to clean water, food security, disaster mitigation, and carbon sequestration, and also provide critical habitat for a myriad of plant and animal species living within the region. However, most of these benefits are difficult to quantify, and land managers often point to anecdotal evidence versus actual data when acquiring land or implementing natural resource management actions to improve the ecology of a protected landscape. This project will focus on a) what wildlife camera data already exists for San Mateo County Parks from other organizations; and b) best practices for camera trapping (location selection, camera setup, data collection, and photo cataloging using the Wildlife Insights program) that can be implemented in four more County parks going forward.
Empowering Residents in Housing Planning in the Alisal City of Salinas (2017) Project Report
The Alisal Vibrancy Plan was created in response to the advocacy performed by residents of Alisal, encouraging a more community-driven process in policy decisions. As a team, we were tasked by our community partner to read the Alisal/East Salinas Housing Target Market Analysis (HTMA), summarize the information into concise and clear language, and translate the key findings into Spanish. We then created an infographic that is easily understandable and accessible to the residents of Alisal as the information is concise and in a language known to them. The goal of this project, headed by Visión Salinas and the City, is to empower the community of Alisal by putting their voice and opinions into direct conversation with the current housing recommendations being proposed. We wanted to help the City identify solutions to the housing crisis that are appropriate and effective for the local community and its needs. We hoped to enhance their understanding by taking the key points from the technical HTMA document and condensing it into a format that allows for greater community understanding of the data. On a larger scale, we as a team sought out to learn about the Alisal community and its needs in order to understand the complexities of policy documents, their implications and the potential impact on the community.
Through this project, Salinas seeks to (1) create a windshield or walk-audit survey methodology that can be completed from the public right-of-way, (2) test the methodology on a sample of blocks in the Alisal and create simple education materials staff can use to train residents to complete the survey, (3) review the Housing Authority’s assessment of its own units and determine if any may qualify for a Choice Neighborhood Implementation grant, and (4) combine this information in a report that includes a brief summary of sustainable housing and neighborhood practices that can be considered by working groups in developing the Alisal Vibrancy Plan.
Students: Luis Ceferino, Gideon Davidson, Camilo Gomez, Ryan Lee, Jack Lundquist
Our project team worked with the City of Oakland and the 100 Resilient Cities Initiative to develop their Soft-Story Earthquake Retrofit Program to mitigate the damage caused to Oakland’s inhabitants in the event of an earthquake. Our team focused on using existing outreach and survey data to create planning tools for the City of Oakland that were visual and communicative. Of Oakland’s self-identified seven areas of vulnerability, our contributions could be understood as primarily addressing the areas of community planning and capacity building, as well as housing. Our four contributions were the production of a GIS risk map, a FEMA structural analysis of a statistically typical soft-story building, communicative online media, and a profile analysis of demographic preferences of Oakland residents. Our goal with these deliverables was to 1) inform the city of areas of greatest risk and 2) package the data into visuals that would make relative risk more clearer to both planners and the community members.
Streamlining City Sustainability Data Reporting (2012) Project Report
Students: Alireza Harandi, Jaslyn Law, and Reese Rogers Partner: Kara Gross and John Sztukowski (Joint Venture Silicon Valley)
This memo outlines our recommendations to Joint Venture Silicon Valley for the design and implementation of a sustainability data reporting tool. Throughout the quarter, we investigated several different pathways to find, report, and communicate sustainability data. After considering several alternatives, including a sustainability dashboard and a sustainability data hub, we ultimately conclude that there is an immediate and demonstrated need for a tool to streamline sustainability data reporting for cities in the Bay Area.
We reached our final recommendation by performing one-on-one interviews with several representatives of different stakeholders, including Sustainable San Mateo, Redwood City, and Benetech. Our team created several prototypes of how this web-based solution might function, based on stakeholder feedback and an in-depth literature review of strategies to enact behavior change for environmentally sustainable outcomes. Our final deliverable prototype is a social central hub for regional sustainability information reporting. It is composed of a public-facing front page and a secured backend for data reporting.