Callaham, Shannon

Communities who experience disproportionate climate change impacts tend to be excluded from resilience planning. Those efforts typically follow top-down processes within established governance practices that are inaccessible to marginalized folks and reinforce inequalities. Regenerating the commons includes creating opportunities for everyone to meaningfully shape community resilience decisions and experience related benefits. Resilience planning that shifts power into communities and focuses on social vulnerability can affect how people survive and thrive in a climate changed world. The Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) 2.0 program is an attempt to change the status quo in resilience planning by bringing new voices into decision-making power, recognizing their labor, addressing root causes of vulnerability, and investing in social infrastructure. It aspires to build capacity for equity-focused community engagement within teams of municipal staff and community liaisons, and ultimately build social capital and community cohesion. My research investigates implementation of this state grant program in several western Massachusetts towns. I am using document review, participant observation, and interviews to understand the MVP 2.0 process as written, how different towns navigate it, and how individuals make sense of their experiences in it. I seek to understand how those experiences explain relationships between engagement approaches, mediating factors, and process outcomes. I am interested in the conditions that allow for community empowerment and how a model like MVP 2.0 can shift conditions that hold systems in place. In a practical sense, our findings will help municipalities reflect on their work during MVP 2.0 and plan for future community engagement. They may be informative for designing future iterations of the MVP program and for other municipalities or offices of community engagement. The findings will also contribute to the participation, resilience, and climate justice literatures, by adding perspectives on equity-centered resilience and community engagement approaches in smaller towns and rural settings.

Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a small city that has witnessed significant social, economic, and environmental changes. Energy systems, too, have been transformed, shaped by environmental injustices, community resistance, and disinvestment. Within this context, the Holyoke Community Energy Project emerged as an open platform, inviting local residents to build shared knowledge about energy systems and explore pathways to a decarbonized future.
The four-year project offers a space for community members, many of whom have historically been excluded from energy-related decision-making, to engage, share experiences, and voice their needs for a just energy transition. Funded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), this project is a partnership between the UMass Amherst Energy Transition Institute (ETI), Neighbor to Neighbor Holyoke, and OneHolyoke Community Development Corporation (CDC). The goal is to ensure the benefits of this transition are accessible to all.
In the spring of 2024, the team recruited the first cohort of Energy Justice Leaders. From April to October, these leaders gathered monthly for workshops covering topics like personal and community energy use, the relationship between health and wellbeing with energy access and quality, efficient and less polluting technologies, and community-driven energy solutions. They also delved into the history of energy systems and activism in Holyoke.
Using anthropological research methods, the Energy Justice Leaders strengthen their collective knowledge about the challenges of the energy transition and the potential of collective actions to address them. This presentation will share an overview of the journey and engage attendees in one of the Energy Justice Leaders activities that was intended to support them in envisioning a just energy transition in Holyoke. Attendees will be asked to consider and arrange energy transition action cards on different scales (e.g., individual to collective benefits) in a facilitated discussion. The activity ends with a conversation on concrete next steps associated with each action.