Newsletter 01: Climate and Community Resilience

joeyager
Jul 30
3 min read

Welcome to the first edition of the Design for Peace newsletter — a space to share stories of discernment, design, and experimentation around peace.

Design for Peace is dedicated to nurturing an ecology of peace in Cascadia. We do this by accompanying leaders as they reimagine and repurpose community spaces towards Shalom - an ancient vision for communities of peace where everything belongs.

If you're receiving this, it's because our paths have crossed before — through a Faith Land Stewardship cohort, the Preaching Peace table, a connection with the Tacoma Center for Urban Peacemaking, through our Climate Resilience webinars or through one of our partners like the Southwestern Washington Synod of the ELCA, Street Psalms or others. We’re glad you’re here!

Explore with us

Each month, we’ll share a short exploration about a concept, principle, or lens that informs our work at Design for Peace.

What is community resilience?

By Anna Czarnik-Neimeyer

This much is clear: we are living in a time of profound and repeated shocks to human systems that, for many, have helped the world to feel more stable, predictable and ordered. This reality becomes harder to ignore every time our ecosystem breaks another unprecedented record, when the news cycle reports another political earthquake, when our local institutions feel ill-equipped to adapt to a world in profound change.

How do we design for peace in such a time?

One of the ways that we are exploring this question is to focus less on strategic plans - that tend to make assumptions that our context will stay the same - and more on nurturing places of community resilience.

Resilience is a characteristic of a community that combines a variety of factors: Spiritual & Emotional resilience includes pastoral and spiritual support for mental health services; Material & Physical resilience ensures access to food, clean water, healthy air, warmth or cooling; Social & Relational resilience means knowing and trusting our neighbors, sharing our resources, and depending on interconnected networks to withstand challenge.

But there’s more here - we believe that beyond simply ‘bouncing back’ after a shock, nurturing resilience offers us the chance to ‘bounce forward’, to actively envision and cultivate communities of more dynamic peace than before.

This is the promise of building resilient communities!

Many of the partners we work with around this are local churches, who traditionally are comfortable offering “Spiritual + Emotional” practices like worship & pastoral care, and sometimes in “Material + Physical” practices like food banks, affordable housing, and warming shelters. For many, however, it is a growing edge for them to nurture the social & relational practice of knowing their neighbors deeply, understanding the needs & lives of people who live there, and building trust over time with the community outside the church.

Social and relational connection is crucial for climate resilience, unlocking resources that get tied up in closed systems, and moving them to where they are needed most. This is where we invest our energy with congregations, working with them to earn trust and develop accountable local relationships.

If you’re curious about building resilience together, we invite you to connect with Anna by sending us a message here: wedesignforpeace.org/connect

Stories from the ecosystem

Each month, we’ll share stories of where dynamic, sustainable peace is emerging in our communities, and offer invitations to deeper engagement. In this first issue, we’re spotlighting some emerging work around building local hubs of climate resilience and sharing glimpses of local teams designing for peace across our region.

Climate Resilience Webinar Series

This year, we hosted four webinars exploring the technical, spiritual, and social aspects of building contextual climate resilience hubs. Practitioners, artists, authors, and partners from across the Pacific Northwest discussed topics including: Solar Power, Indigenous Perspectives, Church Forests, and Feeding Ministries.

Watch these webinars to learn more about how your faith community could build climate resilience in your context. You can view the recordings here and at: wedesignforpeace.org/videos

Updates: What's happening in our ecosystem?

Climate Resilience Design Table forming: In Autumn 2025 we are gathering a table of practice for ecumenical faith communities in Southwestern Washington who are participating in the work of climate resilience in their own contexts, and are interested in becoming hubs of climate resilience in their communities. Interested in joining this year’s design table? Contact us here: wedesignforpeace.org/connect

Land Stewardship Cohort Launched: In May we kicked off our Land Stewardship Cohort with 8 congregations across Southwest Washington. These congregations join an ecosystem of 25+ communities in discernment, design and experimentation around how they might steward their land and buildings toward a future of Shalom. Learn more about Land Stewardship resources here: https://www.wedesignforpeace.org/landstewardship

Design for Peace Advisory Table formed: In June, our Design Team came together with a table of advisors for a working retreat. It was a meaningful opportunity to strengthen relationships, share insights, and dive into key questions around our ongoing development work. Learn more about the people who make up this part of our ecosystem here: https://www.wedesignforpeace.org/team