It's been one year since we started

We completed the Discover phase at the end of May, having held workshops with staff from the County, City, UVA, partner agencies, and community organizations. Additionally, we reviewed extensive notes from community engagement conducted during other recent planning processes like AC44 and Cville Plans Together.

In June, we received a competitive Environmental Justice Government-to-Government (EJG2G) grant of just over $460,000 from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This grant enabled us to create the Climate Resilience Cohort, which will provide subgrants to 10 community-based organizations (CBOs) that serve disadvantaged community members. CBO grantees will help center the needs of our most vulnerable community members in the Resilient Together strategies. We look forward to our first workshop with the participant organizations this month.

Over the summer, we completed the Define phase, which included three steps: First, we identified themes from the information we gathered during the Discover phase. Second, we used these themes to draft guiding principles and long-term goals for Resilient Together, which will continue to be refined during the next steps. Third, we researched over a thousand strategy options from around the country and curated a list of the most locally relevant for consideration in the Design phase. In the coming months, we will look to you and the community to help us identify and refine the best resilience strategies to pursue in the years ahead.

Read our One-Year Progress Report to learn more about our process, what we heard so far, the project vision, guiding principles, goals, and next steps.