The (AZCRC) will help build resilience and address climate issues in Arizona’s communities through environmental education, outreach, and volunteer coordination projects. Members will work with host sites such as public land management agencies, city and county governments, nonprofit organizations, and education institutions to help advance these goals across Arizona. Trainings can be delivered to visitors, recreators, students, homeowners, community organizations, and the general public. Environmental education has been shown to have a breadth of positive impacts, ranging from improved passion and interest in learning to growth in confidence, autonomy, and leadership.
Structure
Managed by commission subgrantee. Role of the commission is administrative – AmeriCorps TTA and monitoring. Commission was also helpful in connecting the subgrantee to additional funds from CA Volunteers Foundation. Commission will also work with subgrantee toward ongoing program and partnership development.
State connections
None at present.
Resourcing
None are workforce development. A $500k formula grant for AmeriCorps programming through the Arizona Governor’s Office of Youth, Faith, and Family is matched with a $945k investment from California Volunteers Fund. Previously, we’ve collected match from individual sites to supplement our AmeriCorps funding.
Members in Program
55 part-time members for FY24-25
Living Allowance
35200
Member development
We do a simple orientation with members and most of their training is decentralized, coming directly from host sites. We’ll also do a six-or-so-part speaker series on climate issues, including environmental education/science communication, carbon reduction, waste reduction, forest ecology, environmental policy, and water conservation. Finally, we have a $500/member allocation in our budget for professional development.
Climate metrics
EN3: Number of individuals receiving training in environmental stewardship and EN3.1: number of individuals with increased knowledge of environmental stewardship. Those are the selected outputs and outcomes for AmeriCorps; a recently-hired data coordinator in our department is devising a way to capture additional outcomes.
Inter Program Coordination
This NAU Program started with AmeriCorps State Formula ARP dollars in March 2021 as the Environmental Literacy Corps. Funding from CA Volunteers Foundation allowed for program expansion as well as a significant increase to the member living allowance, which is now at the maximum for all position types.The Commission supports two additional conservation corps programs with just over $1 million, however they have not been apt to ‘rebrand’ under ACC. We recognize their efforts as peripheral to the ACC work, though not officially contained under the umbrella.Additional State AmeriCorps programs also contribute some efforts toward ACC-aligned work, though the full program may have a different focus area. For example, under the focus area of education the UA Cooperative Extension has some members who serve with Arizona Project WET (water education for teachers & students) developing water stewards through STEM activities. In the future ACC-aligned member positions within non-environmental programs may be tagged as an ACC affiliate position, but we’re still thinking through that.
Branding Approach
Presently, we are branding the Arizona Climate Resilience Corps at NAU as our ACC program. This may shift in the future as more programs/organizations/agencies would like to be involved.
Employer role
A huge one — they’re our partners.
Post Service Outcomes
Post-program employment; this is a work in progress, as post-program tracking hasn’t been a part of our operations in the past.
