As a second-year PhD student at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), Caroline Beckman is hoping to answer some big-picture questions using a systems approach and learn more about the drivers of climate adaptation. She was inspired to better understand these topics because of the work she did before coming to SEAS. 

Beckman completed her undergraduate degree in earth systems at Stanford University. The program sparked an interest in how climate change is impacting communities in the U.S. West. Through the resources and opportunities provided in the program, Beckman gained hands-on experience with the San Francisco Bay Area’s frontline communities and saw firsthand some of the environmental justice and equity issues that impacted the area. The experience inspired Beckman, and when she graduated from Stanford, she hoped to further the connections to people and places she had formed over the years through local climate adaptation and community engagement work.

With this in mind, Beckman started a position with the grassroots nonprofit organization Climate Resilient Communities (CRC) as an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellow just on the other side of the highway from Stanford’s Palo Alto campus. “When I first started, it was just me and the executive director. It was a really small organization,” Beckman said. “Because of that, though, I had the opportunity to try everything and see which roles suited me the best.”

Beckman served as a program manager and developed projects that included distributing free air purifiers to residents, connecting low-income homeowners with weatherization and energy efficiency services, and increasing community participation in local and county climate adaptation plans. She also convened one of CRC’s first Climate Change Community Teams, a group called Climate Ready North Fair Oaks (CRNFO).

CRNFO is a coalition of residents, local organizations, faith and business leaders, and government representatives in North Fair Oaks, an unincorporated area in San Mateo County, California. These local leaders became involved with CRNFO because they were already championing change in their communities and started asking questions about how climate change has impacted their neighborhood. Because CRNFO was an existing coalition when she started this role, Beckman saw herself more as a “convener” than a “manager.”

“I coordinated the group’s meetings and brought people together to let dialogue happen,” Beckman said. “I never came in with an existing agenda but instead supported the conversations of the community members.”

Because North Fair Oaks is unincorporated and thereby a responsibility of a county, not a particular city or town, it can be challenging to collect accurate and comprehensive climate and population data that is specific to this frontline community. Beckman and her team cite recent publications from the Stanford Future Bay Initiative that suggest that “parts of North Fair Oaks are 10 degrees hotter on average than in neighboring Atherton.” Without the quantitative data to push for government planning, implementing policies and programs to manage the impacts of climate change is a challenge. “There isn’t a mayor or any form of municipal government, so a lot of things slip through the cracks, and in a lot of ways, they’re on their own to deal with management and infrastructure challenges,” explained Beckman.

One issue that was brought up in the monthly meeting with North Fair Oaks community leaders at CRNFO was the extreme heat and impaired air quality that was impacting the area. Because buildings and infrastructure were not built to accommodate these kinds of weather events centuries ago, the issue is having an ongoing negative impact on many local residents. The community struggles to deal with the heat, which can lead to extreme human impacts such as death and ongoing compound health risks, especially in areas where extreme heat and low air quality occur simultaneously.

Although the county had existing locations with air conditioning that could be used for heat relief, such as a library, many of the community members that struggled with managing heat waves had mobility issues, kids, pets, or another factor that prevented them from accessing these centralized cooling centers. The CRC team developed a prototype Mobile Air Conditioning Unit (MACK) intended for neighborhood residents for whom cooling was inaccessible. Beckman sees this project as a creative way to address the underlying infrastructure issue in North Fair Oaks and to make cooling technologies accessible to those who struggle to access existing resources. “We are trying to envision new ways of distributing infrastructure and resources to help people stay cool and healthy with clean air in their own homes.”

The CRC team navigated many challenges when developing the MACK. The most prevalent of these challenges was in acquiring funding for the project. “We tried to get it funded several times and were never quite successful,” said Beckman. “It was one of those things when I left work and came back to school that was nagging at me because it was really important to so many people. When I came to U-M I thought, ‘okay, how can we leverage some of these new resources now that I’m here and bring them back to the people that I was working with?’”

Taking action, Beckman applied for the Rackham Public Scholarship Grant Program to help support the MACK project. The grant stood out to her and her team because of the emphasis placed on blending research and practice. It was also important to her that the funds would be used to “either directly or indirectly inform practitioner community work.” The grant program met the needs of her team as well because the scope of the project shifted as Beckman was starting her PhD program. “The grants we were initially trying to go for were big grants, like $100,000 or more, to be used to test this product,” she said. "We pivoted our approach to launch a pilot model and apply for smaller funding sources to allow us to test the proof of concept and justify applications for bigger grants in the future.”

With funding secured, the team transitioned into a building and testing stage where they talked to as many people about their project as they could to ensure the best possible product. At U-M, Beckman focuses mostly on the project management side of operations as well the communications and reporting components of the work. As a team member focused on the community and social aspects of this project, Beckman has spent a lot of time thinking about how the team will distribute the technology.

Initially, the MACK was going to be installed in residents’ homes using a point person from each neighborhood already struggling with a lack of air conditioning. This point person’s home would function as a hyper-localized cooling center and serve as a community gathering place for residents, which Beckman and her team were pushing as a way to encourage community engagement and network building for further community resilience. Community members provided quick feedback to this proposal, however, citing the already existing overcrowding issues in these neighborhoods, and proposed a checkout system for the MACK, similar to a library book.

The pilot product was built at the end of June 2024, and a week later the first big heat wave of the summer struck. Working quickly, the team mobilized the air conditioning unit at the offices of El Concilio of San Mateo County, an organization that worked closely with CRNFO, and was able to perform the first round of testing. The MACK worked almost exactly as envisioned, cooling quickly and efficiently. After the initial first round of success, the team made some adjustments to the product to make it easier to mobilize in multiple types of locations and rented it out to a local day laborer center for longer-term testing. The center is serving as a home base for the MACK, but it is also available to be checked out and used daily in secondary locations. 

When summer came to an end and heat waves became less frequent, Beckman’s team checked in with the people who used the MACK throughout the summer.

“We did some interviews focusing on how it’s been working, whether it needs additional design tweaks, and whether it needs additional or varied marketing and communications,” said Beckman. “As a team we will evaluate what we learned from this pilot season and what we need to change for next summer and how we could potentially use this same idea during the cold season as well.” She is also hoping to gather insight on how housing the MACK at the day laborer center may have contributed to information sharing about this initiative and community engagement and input on future aspects of the project. 

Reflecting on her time with this project, Beckman shared some of her main takeaways from working with a small-scale, community-based organization. “Community work is always such an iterative process,” she said, “and things come up that stick out as being important that weren’t even on our radar when we started the project.” Beckman also emphasized that working in the nonprofit space is often accelerated due to funding timelines and grant applications, so it is important to be intentional about why the project is getting done to stay grounded in the initial goals of the work. 

Beckman’s takeaways weren’t limited to the broader challenges of nonprofit and community work, but were also specific to her own professional development and role in this project. She defines one major challenge of this work as “recognizing what I bring to the table. Even though I have a lot of love for this community, it’s not where I am from so I had to define what service looks like for me and grapple with the ethics of coming into this community from an outside perspective,” she said. “The convening role was perfect because I didn’t have a say in where the conversations were going, I just brought people together and listened. My job was to try and find ways to make those ideas happen and use the privilege of being at an organization and of who I am as a person and the skills and connections I have.” Beckman notes that her connection to U-M and the many resources being a SEAS student comes with are something else she now brings to the table in these conversations.  

At U-M, Beckman is seeing her work experience and academic goals converge. She was able to see clear throughlines between the dense academic theory she was reading and her prior on-the-ground work. This project is allowing Beckman to apply the readings and high-level learning she’s doing in school to work that is directly helping people. “I love this project because I love the people, and I think the work is important. It’s that perfect blending of academically moving my research interests forward, and [at the same time], thinking about a more targeted example of the broad concepts that I'm reading about all the time.”