Cohorts

Cohorts

36.5/PEAKS – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

36.5/A DURATIONAL PERFORMANCE WITH THE SEA & PEAKS

36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea (2013 – present) is a site-specific participatory performance and multichannel video artwork that invites people to have a radically present embodied experience with the Sea and Waters that surround us, and to reconsider our contemporary relationship with Water and Sea-level rise on personal, communal, and global scales.

• 2022— Free and Accessible 36.5 Global Livestream of 36.5 / New York Estuary – On the day of the final performance, hundreds will join me to stand in Water at the Cove in NYC; hundreds more will participate in satellite performances in eight global locations where I’ve created 36.5 works previously; and thousands of people will watch the live stream in public spaces and online, and/or standing in their local bodies of Water around the world.
• 36.5 Legacy: In 2023, my focus will shift to creating the final form video installation and organizing all other project documentation so it can effectively be shared with the public, in exhibition format and in print.

PEAKS (2017 – present) is a cumulative video project, a site-specific performance installation, and an experimental exhibition that
reuses the everyday detritus of the built environment (ie. tinfoil, coffee grounds, paper) to construct brief cinematic moments of
geological vastness. Created in collaboration with composer and digital artist Joshua Dumas, PEAKS investigates scale, awe and
beauty, human ecological impact, corruption, deep time, modes of production, waste, and distribution. The first two phases of
development for this project happened in 2017 and 2018. Now it is time for me to revisit this work and take the next step to share it
with the greater public.

• We imagine the work as YouTube ads, on subway flat-screens, as a smartphone app (a Peak unlocks every 50K steps), in a film fest, in museums, projected on a glacier. We will engage commercial and common spaces, as well as traditional sites of cultural presentation. This expansive dissemination, and its implicit critique of capital, is a core component of the work. Meanwhile, the multimedia installation translates the videos into a 3-dimensional environment for public activation and is punctuated with daily performances. Using choreography, sound, and projections on sculptural objects and bodies in motion, the performance invites participation and explores site-specificity, everyday activities, and deep time.

---

AMERICAN RESILIENCE PROJECT – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT 

AMERICAN RESILIENCE PROJECT

ARP intends to cut through the misinformation and disinformation prevalent in social media with short clips that highlight the experiences of ordinary people and pinpoint the intersections between environmental concerns and other issues, like national security, economic growth, and civic engagement. ARP intends to create a media resource library that allows us to quickly search, share and create short clips that meaningfully contribute to the online conversation about the transition to a clean economy. By including short interview segments in our social media posts, we will inspire new audiences to seek out ARP’s full slate of films and draw out future collaborators who are yet to discover the organization. With this new strategy in mind, we will produce micro-documentaries that bring greater diversity to ARP’s subjects, but we will also empower our collaborators with the skills and tools to make their own short films and become ongoing contributors to ARP’s catalog. This library will be a vital internal resource for our organization, while it will also be offered for free on our website for educators and activists. 

ARP is also in a collaborative project with another ITP Grant Partner, Clean Energy Leadership Institute and The Ballroom Freedom School.  Read about that project here.

---

AS YOU SOW – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

AS YOU SOW

Launched in Sept 2015, Fossil Free Funds has welcomed over 284,000 visitors and over two and a half million page views, and the number of U.S. sustainably-mandated fossil free funds has grown from 12 funds with $4 billion, to 88, with assets reaching $81 billion. Kiplinger’s recently recognized As you Sow’s Invest Your Values as the #1 ESG tool for sustainable investors. AYS now seeks to add to Fossil Free Funds’ screenings the companies in the companies in the banking, insurance, and private equity sectors that enable these fossil fuel companies to continue conducting business as usual.

---

CLEAN ENERGY LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

CLEAN ENERGY LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE

CELI and Michael Roberson – theologian, public health practitioner, activist, artist, curator, cultural advisor and leader within the LGBTQ and House Ball community – will work together to support the development of a new energy education component within the Ballroom Freedom School’s civic participation curriculum. 

The transgender, lesbian, bisexual and gay, African-American and Latino men and women who form the House Ballroom Community (HBC) sustain some of the highest rates of suicide, violence, housing insecurity, HIV infection, stigma, and energy burdens that will only be exacerbated by climate change. The HBC’s own historical, protective response to this marginalization has been the creation of self-sustaining sanctuaries—formations of “Houses” and gatherings at “Balls”—an artistic collective and kinship system that has grown over the past 100 years into a strong network of LGBTQII persons of color. The leadership of the House Ball Community (HBC) has already been working to create a portable leadership development training built upon the practices of HBC self-organizing; the Ballroom Freedom School is a set of practices rooted in the HBC’s traditions of skills exchange, collective learning, and self-organizing–practices.

By introducing a relevant curriculum around energy issues, utilizing CELI’s energy education experience, CELI will work with Michael Roberson and the Ballroom Freedom School to support organic organizers in the House Ball Community to become engaged in the climate challenge. 

Roger Sorkin’s America Resilience Project (ARP is another current ITP Grant Partner, click here for more information) will also be a primary collaborator on this project. ARP understands the unique power of film and short videos to draw new voices into conversations around clean energy, sustainability and environmental justice. ARP will partner with CELI and Michael Roberson on a pilot micro-documentary project to create the narrative of how the House Ball Community (HBC) is navigating the clean energy transition at the intersection of energy justice and health, housing, and safety.

---

THE CLIMATE CHANGEMAKERS – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

THE CLIMATE CHANGEMAKERS 

A documentary series by filmmaker Casey Beck and Producer Mary Carderas – The Climate Changemakers, a six-part series of 30-minute episodes, features stories of the energized, committed, innovative young people who have taken up the  challenges of the climate crisis and are making both real progress and names for themselves. These documentaries will delve deeply into our protagonist’s work, investigating their personal stories and what fuels their passion. Amidst the bleak future we all face, where do  they find hope and the motivation to fight the impending climate catastrophe? This character driven pilot puts the spotlight squarely on the young people who are doing something about the climate crisis and, against all odds, succeeding. Casey and Mary are currently in development for their first episode.

---

ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

ENVIRONMENTAL ENTREPRENEURS (E2)

E2 plans a major communications campaign to change the narrative around the economic costs of climate change and the economic benefits of climate action. E2 will create a dynamic and regularly updated communications toolkit that can be used by E2 and shared with partner groups, and will include among other items:  national and state-specific factsheets, collection of social media videos and state ads, template editorial board memos and letters-to-the editor, and a short film highlighting the economic costs of climate change, but also feature business people and ideas that are changing the energy, transportation, and agricultural sectors. This campaign will include equity and environmental justice components that will specifically seek to tell the story of the disproportionate costs of climate change on low and middle-income communities and communities of color and the potential economic benefits of climate action in these communities.

---

LAND CORE – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

LAND CORE

Land Core has a mission to advance soil health policies and programs that create value for farmers, businesses, and communities.  The organization is building the missing infrastructure, and economic incentives that will make the rapid adoption and scalability of soil health possible. It has convened a world-class, cross-sector working group that is building and actuarially-sound, predictive model that quantifies the risk-mitigations benefits associated with specific soil health practices.  The model uses satellite imagery to quantify the impacts of soil health practices on crop yields, enabling lenders insurers and investors to off new incentives (eg. better terms, cheaper loans or discounted policies) for farmers, accurately reflecting the mutual economic benefits to all parties when specific practices are applied.  Land Core will implement a “Farmer Outreach Project”  not only to develop and pilot incentives with farmers, but also to analyze these incentives to ensure that their work is farmer-centric and regionally appropriate.  To do this, they will form and engage a Farmer Advisory Council, representing farmers across the Midwest.  Land Core believes this toll will pave the way to fund a large-scale transition to a regenerative, soil health-centered, carbon sequestering, ecosystem-restoring agriculture.  The ITP Climate Challenge would help ensure the expansion and successful implementation of the risk model during the next two critical years of model development as they build, test, and scale towards widespread adoption.

---

THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM

The mission of The Natural History Museum of Not An Alternative is to connect and empower communities, scientists, and museums to address critical environmental and social challenges and build a more inclusive and just society. The Natural History Museum collaborates with artists, community groups, organizers, researchers, and educators to create new narratives about our shared history and future, with the goal of educating the public, measurably influencing public opinion, and inspiring collective action.  Part of the purpose of content and communication over the next 3 years is to help strengthen the environmental movement with more opportunities to learn from indigenous knowledge.  They will create an online/digital museum both for the public and as a resource for educators and advocates.  The Museum will launch, promote, and grow an online natural history ‘Uncollection’—so-called because objects and artifacts are presented without being extracted from community and location—an online exhibition of visuals, interpretive writing, and other interactive digital media created with our Indigenous community partners and other journalists, scholars, and documentarians.  Finally, they will produce new digital media projects about frameworks for relations to science and nature, community-led environmental struggles, and paths forward to address the climate emergency.

---

OCCIDENTAL ARTS & ECOLOGY CENTER – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

OCCIDENTAL ARTS & ECOLOGY CENTER (OAEC)

As record-breaking droughts and unprecedented wildfires intensify across the west, California’s climate adaptivity is being tested like never before. When we make space for them to thrive, North American beaver (Castor canadensis) can play an essential role in our efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change by defending the landscape from wildfire, creating water resiliency in drought, and sequestering carbon. However, these ecosystem engineers are often treated as a nuisance, routinely killed or disregarded for their ecosystem benefits. Building off a decade of beaver advocacy, education, and policy work, we are doubling down on our Bring Back the Beaver Campaign efforts to uplift, protect and restore beaver as a key climate ally in California and beyond.  Our campaign is working to create a culture of beaver stewardship among individual landowners, communities, tribes, agencies, and decision-makers in order to reduce the number of beaver killed and shift how agencies perceive and manage this keystone species across California.

---

THE PRISM SPECIES PROJECT – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

THE PRISM SPECIES

The Prism Species Project is a partnership of creative engagement, programming, and publishing and a potential exhibit with the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Museum of Comparative Zoology Collections created by author Terry Tempest Williams and visual artist Christina Seely. Through an in depth communion with specimens of non-human life, these physical collections of minerals, plants, and animals will be transformed from inert objects to storied presences that have much to tell us about the past and the present in the face of climate collapse. What if these ‘cabinets of wonders’ could speak to us from the future? What qualities might they show us as necessary for our survival?For example, in the wake of a retreating Great Salt Lake, brine shrimp cysts can become dormant for fifty years and burst forth alive when conditions for life become favorable once again. This is a Prism Species.

If we can develop a practice of being attentive to the skins, stories, and life cycles of another species, how might this liberate our thinking when it comes to unexpected ways of adapting to the climate crisis? Evolutionary speaking, the animals have been here before facing former ice ages and droughts, heat waves and meteor strikes that changed weather systems and brought on extinctions. Within the leaves and coats and scales of many colors – we believe we can find a new source of mentor-ship through the location of these “prism species” that will help us find new adaptive strategies and stories to help us move forward with grace and spiritual acuity as we face climate change together in the name of all species, not just our own.

The foundation of the project will be built out of the research and development of this experiential exhibit made up of a constellation of artworks using sound, sculpture, photography, video and storytelling. For example, using a sculptural arrangement of specimens of different species that amplifies adaptive relationships in an ecology of place. A slow moving video of the textural surfaces of specimens in their archival spaces, still lives in motion, with a storyteller’s voice creating new myths of wisdom and understandings in relationship to climate collapse. We can imagine a sonic composition made up of bird, animal and insect calls activating a deeper sensorial relationship to our more than human kin. We also imagine a conversation between photographic renderings with literary expressions across the spectrum of the non-human and human realm, alongside the scientific and spiritual realms of knowing and unknowing. The exhibition will build a language out of interrelated pieces that consider the ecological and existential implications of what it means to be a singular adaptable species woven into a complex tapestry of many living energies working together to survive planetary changes. As in any tapestry each thread pulled or adjusted distorts and eventually affects the clarity and stability of the weave.

These encounters with “Prism Species” will ideally hold many lenses of considerations, multiple interpretations: information discovery, destructive forces, loss, disappearance, erasure, extinction, metamorphosis, revelation, renewal, continuity, and a window into The Sacred – allowing us to sit with and befriend both the synchronous and the unknowable uncertainty of these times.

Prism Species have something to teach us – liberating us from a staid way of viewing museum collections. They are so much more than merely a survey of life on the planet. They are a catalogue of consciousness, even our own. They offer us a chance to remember what we have forgotten – that even in times of loss and uncertainty, the world is still so beautiful. The world we thought dead is alive with possibilities and wild wisdoms when re-imagined, listened to, and dreamed into another way of being. We can begin to see the world differently through a sensory experience of engagement with other species. We are a part of nature, not a species separate from other species. We are intrinsically bound as fellow beings on Earth, the only home we will ever know. To be close with ‘the more than human world’ is our innate desire to relocate a kinship we once had, a kinship that remains among Indigenous Peoples.

---

RAINFOREST FOUNDATION US – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

RAINFOREST FOUNDATION US

With more than 30 years of on-the-ground experience, Rainforest Foundation US (RFUS) is one of the leading organizations in Central and South America that prioritizes social justice and indigenous rights as preconditions for enduring tropical forest protection. In addition to supporting legal tenure, communal land governance, and advocating for the protection of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) rights, RFUS works with IPLCs to monitor and defend their territories through the use of technology using a specific methodology, results of which were recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We call this program Rainforest Alert, because it is based on bringing near real time satellite data to indigenous communities and helping them work with local law enforcement to address the threats to their communities.  RFUS aims to expand and replicate across the Amazon its proven, evidence-based, and cost-effective Rainforest Alert methodology, which enables indigenous peoples and local communities to significantly reduce deforestation in their territories. Starting in 2022, and over the next five years, RFUS intends to expand Rainforest Alert to communities in other Peruvian provinces, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Guyana, as well as other countries In Central And South America. The ITP grant will help bring together key players for annual weeklong convenings to review the program and strategize for its growth to ensure that Rainforest Alert can be successfully scaled up and replicated in Peru and beyond.

Rainforest Foundation US also works with ITP Grant Partner TIMBY.  Read about their work here.

---

TIMBY – 2022-2024 CLIMATE CHALLENGE COHORT

TIMBY

Timby (This is My Backyard) is a set of digital tools and training developed to help community groups and organizations build evidence-based investigations, legal cases and impact related to climate change. With the help of ITP, Timby is now in use in over 40 countries and 22 languages by online and offline users, via the Timby Mobile App, Dashboard and Content-Creation System.  As Timby groups build out their projects, they want to integrate more data into their system. This includes reports from anonymous contributors as well as information scraped from the internet that could be scientifically, politically, socially or financially relevant to their cause. For example groups in Ivory Coast on climate-related drought might want to open reporting to the experiences of all farmers in the country and scrape data from media reports, global databases and satellite feeds to build their cases.  

We propose to use this grant to start to transform Timby into a full climate information management system. This is a progression of the work we’ve been doing with the help of ITP, including the addition of analytics and machine learning into the system in our most recent grant cycle.

Specifically, we will use the grant to: