Facing Climate Disaster Together through Community-Designed Curriculum

By Abby Reyes, Director of UCI Community Resilience

As climate vulnerable communities in California prepare for accelerating climate disasters, Facilitating Power and UCI Community Resilience lend participatory training curriculum through an effort called Alt-CERT.

What is Alt-CERT? The Alt-CERT curriculum is both a response and an antidote to the limitations of FEMA's Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) training. Alt-CERT responds to calls from disinvested communities to address community-identified limitations of the federal curriculum through greater focus on understanding the causes and consequences of the climate crisis, practicing community-driven mutual aid, building the power of communities that are left behind in conventional disaster preparedness and response, and directing resources toward community-led climate disaster preparedness, response, and recovery in disinvested communities.

How did Alt-CERT get started? Over the last few years, Facilitating Power and UCI Community Resilience teamed up with many others to support 12 community-academic partnerships throughout California through a learning cohort called CAPECA. CAPECA aimed to accelerate equity-focused climate resilience research, planning, and action among place-based teams of resident leaders and their academic allies. The cohort learned values, methods, and practices of participatory action research, popular education facilitation, and community-driven climate resilience. One of CAPECA's cross-cutting research outcomes was that resident leaders observe their communities to be underprepared and under-resourced for climate disaster response. CAPECA participants identified the need for better and more community-relevant climate disaster emergency response curriculum. Select CAPECA participants from Santa Ana then gathered leaders from seven additional climate vulnerable communities who echoed and expanded upon these observations. In response, we initiated Alt-CERT. 

How are we building Alt-CERT? First we formed a curriculum design team that includes six apprentices from CAPECA together with a community advisory comprised of resident leaders from eight additional California climate vulnerable communities. Curriculum and advisory team members come from Bakersfield, Coachella, East Palo Alto, Oakland, Pacoima, Salinas, San Joaquin Valley, Santa Ana, Santa Rosa, South San Francisco, and Stockton. The Alt-CERT curriculum design team is  building a 10-module, popular education-based, multi-lingual curriculum. Our team members from Santa Ana, California,  will pilot the curriculum in Fall 2025 with up to 25 resident leader participants. The pilot participants will be drawn from those most involved in Santa Ana’s community resilience center planning process. 

After learning from the pilot, we will convene an Alt-CERT trainers’ training in Spring 2026. The trainers’ training will enable community-based teams and community-academic partnerships from climate vulnerable communities throughout California to opt in to bring Alt-CERT back to their home communities for adaptation and implementation. 

What shifts could become possible with Alt-CERT? Through statewide Alt-CERT implementation, we aim to strengthen resident leaders’ capacities to engage FEMA’s CERT and the conventional state apparatus for climate emergency response, helping to fill existing critical participation gaps from our most climate vulnerable communities during these perilous times.

Alt-CERT is part of a larger effort between UCI Community Resilience and Facilitating Power called the Bridge Project. The Bridge Project aims to build civic infrastructure for equity-focused and community-driven climate resilience. Our approach is to build tools like Alt-CERT into the services of resident-led and community-based organizations that operate in relation to local and state government units charged with advancing climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.