How Does a Community CREATE Resilience?
Resilient communities consist of members that are knowledgeable about their local environment and connected to each other. The community understands its environmental risks, its assets and strengths, and engages all members in being able to prepare and adapt. It is the community that should drive the vision of resilience. To this end, Nurture Nature Center worked with youth, adults, and municipal leaders in three communities – Easton, Wilson, and Bangor, PA – to co-create a vision of community resilience, shown here in these murals that were created by participating, local artists active in each community.
The CREATE Resilience project is a 4-year multi-disciplinary collaboration to engage youth and community to increase knowledge of weather and climate science, the risks from local hazards, and strategies for hazard mitigation. Through community meetings, surveys, interviews, story-gathering and photovoice exhibits, forums, and community mapping exercises, NNC engaged the community in thinking about what resilience means. Three local artists who lived in the communities and participated in the events along with the other community members, took the data and insights gathered from the communities to create these murals as a lasting reminder of the importance of community connections, preparedness, and education. Bangor area artist James Gloria, Easton area artist Jackie Lima, and Wilson area artist Don Wilson gave voice to these visions of resilience in 2021 through the creation of these murals.
The CREATE Resilience project is led by the Nurture Nature Center, a non-profit located in Easton, PA, that strives to build community resiliency to environmental risk by leveraging the power of informal science education, engagement in the arts, and community dialogue. The project is funded through a grant from the Environmental Literacy Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Artist Don Wilson, Wilson, Pennsylvania
