As the southernmost city in the Bay Area, Gilroy is located in Santa Clara County along Highway 101. Flanked by bountiful agricultural lands, the community’s pride can be found in the garlic crops they grow there. Gilroy faces significant climate risks including fire, flooding, and extreme heat. Severe flooding and wildfires have historically and recently caused serious property damage and economic challenges for local residents—a community that is also grappling with health issues caused by rising temperatures. For all these reasons, Gilroy lit up as one of Greenbelt Alliance’s Resilience Hotspots.
The Resilience Hotspots initiative is a blueprint for where we must protect communities that stand to lose the most in the face of climate change. We leveraged local community expertise and original, data-driven research to pinpoint Hotspots locations that are at greatest risk of overlapping climate hazards and equity concerns.
In the face of these challenges, communities who are bearing the brunt of climate impacts must be at the forefront in developing climate solutions. That’s why Greenbelt Alliance has been working with Gilroy residents and community partners for the past two years to increase community resilience and preparedness.
Through this work, Greenbelt Alliance is re-imagining traditional top-down models of climate action planning to empower and inform local communities, and share the tools for them to take action. In this ongoing process, we have learned some interesting lessons and insights about how to bring the community along in the planning process for resilience. Here are some takeaways.
1. Fostering Trusted Partnerships for Community-engaged Planning
Local governments, climate-oriented community based organizations, and nonprofits are increasingly recognizing the value of community engagement and community-led planning in creating more effective, place-based, and culturally informed climate solutions.
In the context of city planning, community engagement refers to strategic processes designed to include community members from all backgrounds in the planning process.
When done meaningfully and with equity in mind, this approach empowers community members to be decision-makers and centers the needs of the local community in every step of the planning process. Equitable engagement also works to ensure that the voices of low-income communities, people of color, and other historically marginalized populations are prioritized. Learn more about centering people and equity first on our Resilience Playbook.
Through the Resilient Hotspots initiative work in Gilroy, Greenbelt Alliance partnered with local non-profit CARAS to empower Gilroy residents to be advocates and leaders for climate resilience and action in their hometown. CARAS works with the Latinx population in South Santa Clara County providing youth programming, rental assistance, legal and immigration support, and more recently climate education resources. This partnership arose out of shared goals with respect to climate vulnerabilities and community health needs.
One of the most powerful and unique aspects that helps to ensure the planning process and outcomes maximize equity is that, for each hotspot, Greenbelt Alliance works with a trusted community partner before entering any community. This is incredibly important because our partners have deep ties with the community and are the experts on the ground. As part of the Resilience Hotspots initiative, Greenbelt Alliance and CARAS collaborated on launching an interactive Community Profile (available in English and Spanish) that identifies strengths and vulnerabilities, climate champions, joint goals, and next steps.
2. Implementing a Culturally-informed Approach
As we’ve seen on the ground, meaningful, inclusive, and tailored community engagement has the potential to not only create more just, effective, and sustainable communities, but can result in many co-benefits, such as increased community safety, social cohesion, civic engagement, and better public health outcomes for all. However, conducting equitable and inclusive community engagement is much easier said than done.
Best practices for equitable community outreach include:
- Hosting events in both the daytime and nighttime to meet people’s scheduling needs,
- Hosting events in the language of the community and working with a native speaker to lead engagement,
- Engaging community from the very beginning of the planning process rather than having community engagement be an afterthought or check-the-box process,
- Create accessible avenues for community members to provide feedback on engagement processes and receive information consistently,
- Always providing food, childcare, stipends, and other basic needs to help decrease barriers to participation,
- Partnering with trusted community organizations and leaders before entering a community, and
- Maintaining transparency on how community input will be used and incorporated into ongoing work.
Other key practices that must be considered when conducting community engagement include not only meeting with people when there’s a new project, but working continuously to build trust before a project kicks off and after a project timeline ends.
Community members want to know that local government, nonprofit staff, and researchers are not there to collect data and leave, but rather build trust with the community and help create lasting change. It’s also important to recognize lived experience as expertise, community engagement as a profession, and understanding of the existence of other ways of knowing beyond traditional western science, such as traditional ecological knowledge.
3. Meeting People Where They Are At
In January 2024, Greenbelt Alliance partnered with CARAS to host the Forum for a Greener Future at the Gilroy Public Library where residents had the opportunity to learn about the climate impacts facing Gilroy, engage in community visioning activities, and share their lived experience with climate change through a climate risk survey.
Here are some of the steps we took to ensure an equitable and accessible approach:
- the event featured Spanish and English translation services,
- local food catering,
- community partners were compensated for their time and expertise,
- interactive climate education stations, a raffle, and children’s arts activities.
CARAS’ youth leaders were directly involved, helped lead the event, and were fairly compensated for their time, knowledge, and contribution. Through the survey and visioning activities, many community members expressed a desire for community disaster preparedness information and for opportunities to learn about the climate impacts facing their community.
Here is a summary of some of the things they shared:
- Power outages during heatwaves
- No access to air conditioning
- Wildfire smoke has made it difficult to use public transportation
- More frequent blackouts
- Flooding
- Emergency preparedness workshops
- Support with creating family evacuation plans
- Access to basic needs (i.e. medicine, food, water, clothes, first aid)
- Improved community-wide alert system
- Housing/rental assistance
- How to reduce utility costs
- Multilingual community events
- Safe and better housing
- Stable power grids to ensure access to air conditioning during heat waves
- Community safe space during emergencies
- Economic opportunities for all
- More green spaces, recycled water, and emergency cooling/heating centers
- Well maintained and clean streets
The January forum was the first of an ongoing community conversation on climate impacts and community resilience in Gilroy. By working with a trusted and deeply rooted community partner such as CARAS, and engaging the community with humility and a commitment to honor their lived experience, Greenbelt Alliance is committed to laying the groundwork for long term capacity building and, ultimately, climate resilience in Gilroy.
From the engagement with Gilroy residents, we learned that there was an untapped interest for easy to understand and culturally-informed disaster readiness information. By hosting a follow-up community climate conversation, Cafe y Pan Dulces, we began the development of Be Prepared Gilroy, a community-oriented disaster resilience toolkit. The purpose is to provide Gilroy residents with key local disaster preparedness resources in one place and propose a roadmap to community disaster resilience.
A Continuous Conversation: The Be Prepared Gilroy Toolkit
In November 2024, Greenbelt Alliance and CARAS launched the Be Prepared Gilroy toolkit, an actionable resource that provides key local disaster preparedness resources in one place and proposes a roadmap to community disaster resilience.
The Be Prepared Gilroy toolkit is a direct response to Gilroy’s desire for more disaster preparedness resources and opportunities to learn about climate impacts in a way that reflects their everyday lives and culture. Download your copy today (available in English and Spanish).
