The Community Resilience Expo is a culminating event for the HEART Force curriculum, where students will share what they’ve learned about real-world resilience strategies. The Expo event is meant to be an opportunity for students to share their learning with an authentic audience and participate in a community-level conversation about resilience. If the community isn’t talking about resilience currently, the Expo can be an opportunity for students to start the conversation.
Expo Overview
The HEART Force Expo curriculum is built towards one question: “How can we help make our community stronger if we experience a [wildfire, drought, or flood]?” During this culminating project, students hold a public event to share about their action project or increase awareness of the hazard in their community.
Depending on the amount of instructional time available, there are several options to create a sequence of lessons that works best for your classroom. The HEART Force Unit Overview gives a roadmap of lessons available and provides several example instructional calendars for different time frames.
The culminating event for the HEART Force Curriculum is the Community Resilience Expo. The Community Expo can be done several different ways; please choose an option that works best for you and your students.
Additionally, the HEART Force Team at CIRES Education & Outreach is available to assist you in making community connections, thinking about logistics, and helping however we can. Modest funding for each school Expo is available from HEART Force; please contact the CIRES E & O team if you would like to request funding for your expo (ciresoutreach@colorado.edu).
Below are some resources and suggestions to make your expo a success!
Contacting Community Experts
The primary goal of the Expo is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with authentic community conversation about resilience. We suggest reaching out to community experts as soon as possible in the HEART Force unit planning process (up to two months in advance).
If there are resilience planning efforts currently underway in your community, and you have a community expert who is willing to work with your classroom, ask the community expert how your students can participate in the conversation. For example, you could invite the community expert into your classroom to kick off the Expo sub-unit by explaining resilience efforts currently underway, and leave students with several key issues or questions that need to be addressed. Next, the expert(s) could review students’ ideas and give them feedback, and attend their final presentations. Or, the expert could invite students to present their ideas at a city council meeting, a county commissioner meeting, or a planned community engagement event.
Experts you could reach out to include:
- County planning and development office staff
- County planning commission members
- City/town planning department staff
- City/town or county office of emergency management staff
- Public lands (USFS, BLM, etc.) staff
- City/town community experts on resilience or sustainability
Here is a sample email that provides a template to begin the conversation.
If you are unable to find a community expert that wants to engage with your classroom, several alternatives are provided in the curriculum for students to work and research independently.
