
Latest Updates:
ClimeTime is returning for Fall 2024/Winter 2025! Click the button below to learn more about our upcoming Fall 2024 and Winter 2025 workshops, and to save your seat!
Thank you to everyone who made our Spring 2024 ClimeTime workshops such a success! We enjoyed such a wonderful turnout in both Yakima and Seattle and attendees were all so engaged the whole time. Many thanks to Oswaldo Wong, formerly with the Community Health Worker Coalition for Migrants and Refugees (one of our coalition member organizations) for capturing so many nice photos and videos for us in Yakima—some of which you can browse below. Stay tuned and make sure to check back here for more information.
What is Community Education?
Community education is a participatory strategy that integrates lived experiences and different forms of knowledge present in frontline communities with other forms of knowledge. Community education is also recognized as a form of popular education. It emphasizes the experiences of community members as a form of knowledge.
When individuals work together under a common goal to address common issues such as the current climate emergency, then a process of liberation begins through critical-collective action. At the core of community education is the realization that political action and community resilience rely on incorporating Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income narratives into learning opportunities.
At Front and Centered, we conceive of community education as a collaborative exercise to learn how to integrate a Just Transition framework into community-driven projects to promote resilience.
Our Community Education Goals and Objectives
- Co-create community-based learning and unlearning projects, resources, and opportunities.
- Incorporate the Just Transition framework into community-driven multigenerational solutions.
- Promote community action by connecting our coalition’s priorities to daily life experiences.
- Support community action rooted in a pluriverse of knowledges, critical and meaningful engagement, and community building.
- Facilitate learning opportunities to connect local-to-global movements.
Our Collaborative Model

Why Do We Need Community Education?
The current climate emergency, compounded by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and other social crises, highlights the inequalities and injustices in existing systems, including systems that contribute to educational inequities. BIPOC and underserved students tend to live in areas with higher pollution concentrations, leading to lower academic performances. These students also often contend with non-academic factors such as institutional discrimination, economic disparities, and family-related obligations that negatively impact their academic experiences.
We need fundamental transformations in our relationships with each other and nature. For these radical transformations to be effective, supporting more intergenerational efforts to unlearn, relearn, and co-learn skills to build resilience and co-create strategies to move from banking models of education to liberatory learning environments is necessary. It is not a literacy problem, but a justice problem.
Education is not restricted to schools and universities. This is why learning needs to be rooted in the experiences and realities of community members and not restricted only to institutionalized settings. Justice-centered education focuses on frontline communities’ voices, experiences, and realities to foster community-driven environmental and climate action responses.
Comparison of Approaches
Popular and Community Education
- Learning in action
- Bottom-up, negotiated, and inclusive
- All participants learn from each other
- Collective action guided by the reality and experiences of learners
- Develop social and cultural capital
- Critical reflection to challenge oppression and hegemonic ways of thinking
- Strengthen the capacity of community leaders
- WE: community perspective rooted in the common good
- Education for social change
- Education as the great equalizer
- Self-determination
Dominant Education
- Memorization and replication of knowledge
- Top-down; the instructor is seen as the legitimate source of power
- Pre-determined by institutional goals and standards
- Human capital development
- Normative learning to conform to hegemonic ways of thinking
- Strengthen the capacity of elite leaders
- I: individualistic perspective rooted in private good
- Education for individual gains
- Education as the great selector
- Subjugation
PROJECTS
- Just Hack: A Just Transition Challenge 2023
- ClimeTime
- Just Transition Lotería (this is a board game you can preview)
RESOURCES
Community Stories: Using photovoice to narrate the stories of our communities and our people
A learning guide in zine format, with information on how to run a photovoice project to document personal and community stories connected to environmental health disparities. Developed by Front and Centered and the Community Health Worker Coalition for Migrants and Refugees.
Grounding in Just Transition: Popular Education for the Frontlines
A series of trainings and materials developed by the Climate Justice Alliance and partners to explore, plan, and contribute to a Just Transition.
Movement Generation Curriculum
Educational resources on the Just Transition framework as well as environmental and climate justice.