Our research claim:

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When community mentors Invest their time to Connect with students, they can Act together to jointly Respond to real problems of place.   In the process, all stakeholders are Empowered, and communities become more resilient.  KTFR is aligned with the United Nation’s 1996 Habitat Agenda’s on the Rights of the Child, which calls for participatory processes with youth to create better conditions in cities and towns, especially when it comes to disaster planning and management. 

 

The KTFR Program Addresses the following Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) Problems:

 

• The dearth of youth-based DRR programs or how to implement them.

• The problem of Educational Vulnerability— increased risk of harm from a hazard, arising from a lack of access to or awareness of potentially mitigating knowledge and resources.

• Often ineffective public science and disaster risk communication messaging (Paton & Johnston, 2001).

• The problem of public complacency— the belief that people have that they are safer than they really are in the face of a threat like a hurricane (Wang & Kapucu, 2008).

• The lack of a meaningfully engaging STORIES in the field of hazard risk reduction messaging (Stewart, 2018).

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KTFR is grounded in best practices for achieving 1) effective public science communication, 2) community engagement and resilience capacity building, and 3) culturally responsive, place-based, standards-based science teaching. 

 

Since 2016, we have been designing and developing  innovative STORYMAKING TOOLS, all designed to meet our City’s call to action to improve access to information about flooding hazards in vulnerable communities.  Through a combination of  critical thinking, creative making, testing, and sharing of ideas and artifacts, students are positioned as resources of knowledge about their vulnerability to extreme weather events.   They learn to make scientific claims based on evidence they gather and vet with community STEM mentors.   We believe this I.C.A.R.E. approach can become a model for other similarly flood-impacted communities in the United States. We hope many "I's" who care will join to become WE, who move forward together, becoming WEATHER-Smart, Place-Wise, STORM SURGE-smart, PREP-smart, and Water-Safe.