Ten Strands is partnering with UndauntedK12 to focus on initiatives that center on decarbonizing school buildings. Our partnership also works to ensure school infrastructure and grounds are resilient and support student health, safety, learning, play, and development in a time of rapidly increasing extreme weather.
Current efforts include the launch of the Climate Ready Schools Coalition, which supports California policymakers, state and local agencies, and district leaders to adopt, resource, and implement nation-leading policies, as well as an advocacy campaign to raise funds for a Statewide Master Plan to coordinate county, district, and local actions to align with state decarbonization and climate resilience goals.
In the spring of 2022, a group of education, climate, health, youth, and labor leaders began collaborating to share policy priorities and develop common state policy and budget asks in support of climate-ready schools for California’s most vulnerable students. Since the initial working group meetings, the Climate Ready Schools Coalition has grown from a handful of organizations to over thirty diverse groups representing various perspectives on education and climate policy.
The Coalition is now a statewide group of education, climate, health, youth, labor, civil rights, and business leaders and organizations with a mission to ensure that California’s public school buildings and grounds are developed as sites of ecological resilience and sustainability in this era of rapid climate change—securing students’ health, safety, and learning through extreme weather events, environmental hazards, and other disruptions.
The Coalition recently published a report, Climate-Resilient California Schools: A Call to Action, which explores the challenges of climate change from the perspective of children’s health and education. In partnership with the Action Lab for Planetary Health at Stanford Medicine’s Center for Innovation in Global Health, the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools, Stanford University’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research, Ten Strands, and UndauntedK12, the report lays out a California Master Plan for Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Schools, a transformative and cost-effective $150 billion investment to align California’s TK–12 system with its statewide public health and climate mitigation goals. Without this master plan, we risk doubling down on learning loss, youth anxiety, and school closures—crises already made worse by the pandemic.
Learn more about the Climate Ready Schools Coalition here and read the report here.
