We're honored to receive a Bay Area Metro Award for our work with Resilient by Design bringing young people's ideas into a regional climate resilience challenge. The new joint MTC and ABAG awards program honors positive impacts on the Bay Area’s mobility, affordability, resilience and community and recognizes efforts that make the region a better place to live, work and play.

Elena Moore, a current sophomore at Swarthmore College, completed an externship with us in January. Supported by Swarthmore alum and our Assistant Director Mandy Eppley, Elena interviewed CC+S/Y-PLAN staff on the impact of last year's Y-PLAN Resilient by Design Youth Challenge - read on to learn more!

Get ready because Y-PLAN has very exciting events coming up! After a semester of research and design, Y-PLAN students will be presenting their proposals covering topics like combating housing insecurity and homelessness; creating a college going culture; building climate change resilience in the Bay Area; and much more!

What role does food play in urban communities? Why do some residents have more easy access to healthy, fresh food than others? What are the best strategies for Richmond to ensure its residents have access to healthy food? Richmond High School Health Academy Y-PLAN students explored these questions and more while designing proposals to revitalize Downtown Richmond and provide more jobs by improving access to and information about farm fresh foods for everyone.

Y-PLAN is not only an acronym, Youth - Plan, Learn, Act, Now!, it is also a pun. Why plan? At its core, Y-PLAN guides students through the process of digging deeper into the questions of why. Why do we plan? Why are conditions the way they are in one part of the city and not another. Why not vision and plan for a more equitable future? One of the first activities that introduces students to these questions is mind mapping.

Get a glimpse into a Y-PLAN site tour through the eyes of the UC Berkeley mentors supporting Kennedy High School's IT Academy seniors as they visited Richmond’s Point Molate, San Francisco's Union Square, and the offices the Resilient by Design HOME Team's Mithun architecture and design firm.

What is natural and what is artificial? If they, as an agile group of teenagers, struggle to cross a busy street, what would their younger siblings do? If sea level rise claims part of their city’s land, who will suffer first? Read about the way Skyline High School Y-PLAN students grappled with these questions and more, with the support of the Center for Cities + Schools, the Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge's ABC Team, and the City of Oakland, on their site mapping and inspiration tour on February 15, 2018.

UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities + Schools and the Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, kicked off the spring Y-PLAN Youth Challenge on Tuesday, January 30th at the Bay Area Metro Center in San Francisco.

This blog was written by Resilient by Design describing their exciting partnership with Y-PLAN. "Resilient by Design is excited to partner with the UC Berkeley Center for Cities+Schools (CC+S) through the evidence-based Y-PLAN educational methodology and to be involved in the collaborative effort to create a unified vision for a resilient future for the Bay Area."