June 24, 6 p.m.
Zoom Access Below
Guests Welcome
Q&A Following the Presentation
Tucson may be known for its wealth of active citizens and passionate nonprofits, but how many of us know who they are — or what they do, especially when it comes to the work ahead on the climate and the many issues it represents. And how many of them know us?
Learn more and get engaged with the greater community of citizen educators and activists as Climate Tucson welcomes Nick Spinelli and Luis Perales of the Tucson Climate Project, a collaborative project combining Changemaker High School in Tucson and the AmeriCorps VISTA federal service program.
Last year Luis, CEO of Changemaker, and Nick, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer, set out to answer the question of who’s doing what and why by getting to the source: the people involved.
More than 220 interviews later — all of them contacted through word of mouth — Luis and Nick are preparing to publish a full report on the data and information they collected, collated and analyzed. That’s coming in July. In the meantime, both have plenty to say about what they learned and thoughts they have about the future. The upshot is encouraging: Don’t despair. We are not alone, even though it may sometimes seem that way.
Join us to hear more about the project, the methods, what the analysis reveals so far, and an assessment of the work ahead — and to ask questions of the two researchers who probably know more about Tucson’s activist community than anyone. Get inside their heads!
As they write in the project handbook, “With so much work happening, we found ourselves wondering how the environmental community is connected. What would a map of all those networks look like? (Perhaps a web? Or maybe a series of concentric circles?) That wondering, in turn, led to a hunch — there is a disconnect between environmental work happening in different sectors. Whether discussing local government, universities, nonprofits, or grassroots efforts, true collaboration and connection seemed like something worth measuring. So, with a seed of an idea, we set out to see what we’d find. TCP was the result.”
About the Tucson Climate Project
TCP is a needs assessment and network analysis of the environmental sector in Southern Arizona. Using snowball sampling, TCP conducted 218 open-ended interviews to learn more about community members, their work, and the relationships they’ve built with others. They’re using that data to create a report detailing what they learned about the sector, beginning with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, threats, opportunities) analysis. The preliminary TCP report was released in April 2021. The full report will be released in July 2021.
Visit and listen to the Tucson Climate Project podcast
Luis Alberto Perales, M.S., is a native son of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. He is the son of an immigrant mother and an 6th generation Tejano father. His rural upbringing along the U.S. – Mexico borderlands is the backdrop to his intimate relationship with land and cultural preservation. A transplant to Tucson, AZ and the Sonoran Desert, Luis has nearly two decades in the Old Pueblo. He is the Chief Executive Officer of the Institute for Transformative Education, co-founder of Changemaker High School and the K-20 Changemaker Campus, a two-time alumnus of the UA Department of Mexican American Studies, a two-time Export Fellow, and Green for All Fellow. For over two decades, he has directed his energies to the support and development of youth and their community. His expertise has led him to train and develop community from the institutional to the grassroots levels. Through a lens of regenerative cultural practice, he works with others to promote transformative education, health equity, justice, and environmental sustainability.
Nick Spinelli is also a Tucson transplant, born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio on traditionally Erie, Huron and Wyandotte lands. His ancestry is clearly multi-cultural: Italian, Sicilian, English, Irish, German and Russian.