University of California, Santa Barbara
PAE-19: Community Sustainability Partnerships

In Partnership with the County of Santa Barbara, City of Santa Barbara, City of Goleta, City of Carpinteria, and the Community Environmental Council, UC Santa Barbara hosted its first regional sustainability summit in fall 2011, bringing together local municipalities and environmental organizations to discuss regional solutions to pressing environmental issues. As a follow-up to this summit, UCSB has set up networking tools through LinkedIn to encourage collaboration in sustainability throughout the year. The goal of the South Coast Sustainability Summit is to encourage local partnerships. As an example, UCSB has partnered with the County of Santa Barbara on Climate Action Planning through sharing a membership to the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives or ICLEI. Both entities use the Climate Action Planning Assistant (CAPA) software application to project future emissions and evaluate potential mitigation measures. We anticipate similar synergies to form as a result of this on-going local conference. Please see the summit agenda at: http://www.sustainability.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/South-Coast-Sustainability-Summit-Program.pdf

UCSB also has over 50 outreach programs with the surrounding community. Some examples of those programs are listed here:

Kids in Nature:
http://www.ccber.ucsb.edu/education/kin/
This program partners UCSB's Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Ecological Restoration (CCBER) with two of Santa Barbara’s elementary schools to enrich the learning experiences of underrepresented and under-served youth in our community with a year-long, dynamic combination of hands-on, inquiry-based, classroom activities, interactive custom-designed computer simulations, and field trips. The course meets California State Science Standards through various themes and topics that change annually, ranging from sustainability to phenology, with a main focus on developing an understanding of the natural world and how humans impact it.

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) partners with Los Marineros, an education program of the Santa Barbara Natural History Museum, to provide the Kids Do Ecology program, http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/nceas-web/kids/
Scientists from NCEAS and UCSB work with local fifth graders guiding students through the design, implementation, analysis, and presentation of an ecology experiment. Kids Do Ecology also maintains a website in Spanish and English that provides ecological information and an interactive "Ask An Ecologist" section. The Kids Do Ecology website is accessed by students and teachers globally as well as locally.

In 2011, the combined programs of Marine Science Institute (MSI) and Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary (CINMS) served nearly 35,000 students through programs which promote environmental stewardship of our oceans in the Channel Islands, the Santa Barbara Harbor, and the REEF facilities at UCSB’s Campus Point. http://www.msi.ucsb.edu/education/outreach-center-teaching-ocean-science-octos

A more complete list of K-12 partnerships can be found here: http://www.ia.ucsb.edu/ps/k12.aspx