Projects overview
Explore our work
Create the Change comprises a diverse array of projects that support our mission to develop a human sciences action and accountability framework. Explore our project list to see the areas where we are making a difference and creating tangible, impactful change.
Anthropocene
“Anthropocene” is a 90-minute immersive theatre performance by ASU’s School of Music, Dance and Theatre, combining storytelling, dance, media and sound to explore the climate crisis and excessive material consumption. The accompanying educational materials foster reflection, dialogue and action. Future plans will enhance national and international collaborations in environmental humanities and sustainability. Learn More
Storying Just Futures
Storying Just Futures (SJF) is a global humanities initiative that envisions a world where emerging young leaders use speculative storytelling, futures literacy, research, data collection, and collective agency to reimagine more equitable and resilient futures. Developed through more than a decade of humanities and sustainability work at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, SJF asks a simple question: What if communities and young leaders were not only consulted about the future, but co-designed and built it? Learn More
TierrArte
TierrArte is a community-centered, arts-based education and research project addressing environmental and social inequities and environmental risks in South and West Phoenix. Combining land (“tierra”) and art (“arte”), the program fosters dialogue, intergenerational collaboration, climate-resilient grassroots initiatives and creative, arts-inclusive problem-solving. The workshops will produce an archive of resources and an impact report. Learn More
Waste Cooperative
The Waste Cooperative promotes a circular economy for small-business waste by fostering buy-in to a decentralized waste management model. Using surveys, willingness-to-pay analyses and dialogue panels, the program will assess current frustrations and alternatives, producing a variety of deliverables including an open-source toolkit, a guidebook, a policy report and a roadmap with Local First Arizona for implementation.
Learning with Lands and Waters
Learning with Lands and Waters works to ensure the next generation of learners will have access to transformed educational models that support them in connecting with cultural and place-specific ways of knowing, being, and doing that are essential for adapting to and thriving in a rapidly changing world.
Stories for a Shady Day Fellowship
The ‘Stories for a Shady Day Fellowship’ connects the Canopy for Kids Program and the HeatReady Schools Initiative by empowering students to creatively envision a shade-rich Phoenix and explore its environmental, social, and economic benefits. Through artistic storytelling, students will build climate agency, strengthen connections to existing campus trees, and envision a future shaped by community-driven heat mitigation.
Rural Groundwater Resilience Workshop
This project uses a groundwater resilience workshop to explore how oral history, narrative mapping, and structured dialogue can deepen community engagement around Arizona’s rural groundwater challenges. Centering the lived knowledge of San Simon Valley residents alongside data, ASU’s Impact Water – Arizona is developing a replicable humanities-based approach to strengthen rural water resilience efforts statewide. Learn More.
Heat Visualization
This project bridges the gap between numerical estimates of heat risk and the lived experience of those impacts in the community. Drawing on community knowledge and ways of knowing, it seeks to add narrative and visual resources to communication regarding extreme heat. The goal is to develop an interdisciplinary storytelling hub that encourages sustainable risk communication for Arizona communities.
Recipes for 2060
Intergenerational Food Futures for Planetary Health brings together ASU Preparatory Academy students, ASU college students, and Mirabella at ASU residents to ask what recipes for care, justice, and planetary health should be passed on to future generations. Across four facilitated gatherings, participants share food memories, identify signals of change reshaping how we eat, and step into the role of Imaginary Future Generations living in 2060 to deliberate on the food systems they will inherit. The project culminates in the Recipes for 2060 Field Guide, an illustrated, community-generated resource that other schools, families, and residential communities can adapt for their own food futures conversations.
Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium
The Animal Studies Across Disciplines Symposium creates an interdisciplinary space that centers animals and more-than-human relations as critical to questions of environmental justice and planetary health. Beginning in ASU classrooms and culminating in an annual academic symposium, the project fosters a collaborative network of scholars, students, animal professionals, and community members from across the world committed to advancing more just and hospitable multispecies futures.
Climate Jam
The IndieCade Climate Jam harnesses the power of games to help people move from awareness to action. The program brings together game creators, students, scientists, educators, and artists to work together to create interactive experiences that make climate science accessible, foster empathy, and inspire meaningful change. This year’s theme is Plant a Seed. Through mentorship and interdisciplinary collaboration participants design games that cultivate curiosity, resilience, and agency and invite players to imagine futures worth building together. The Climate Jam leverages games as powerful tools for planting ideas, growing communities, and nurturing a more just and sustainable future.
Cultivating a Mycelia (Te Matakupenga) Network
This project seeks to build on the initial “Indigenous Mycelium Gathering” and turn it into a digitally enabled global Indigenous support system. Te Matakupenga is the Māori name for a fungus known as the white basket fungus. Building on the foundational success of our 2025 convening, which brought together 20 mostly Indigenous and biomimicry leaders from across Turtle Island, Hawaiʻi, the Andes, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) for a global gathering to support Indigenous communities, we are moving from a state of “spore germination” to “mycelial formation and development.” Our goal is to map and strengthen this global Indigenous network, identify the nodes of partners, and how they can grow resilient and become regenerative stewards for regeneration. Learn More
From Heat to Water: Storytelling, Community Care, and Living in a Changing Desert
This project invites Watts College students to explore how heat, water stress, and environmental change are reshaping community well-being and public-service work in the desert Southwest. Using zine-making as a community-centered practice, students will connect personal reflection, visual storytelling, and collective authorship to issues central to public service professions, such as housing instability, mobility, health inequities, infrastructure strain, resource access, and community care. Grounded in social and environmental justice and centering Indigenous worldviews, the project positions heat as an embodied entry point for understanding water stress, environmental change, and everyday life in the desert. Completed pages will be compiled into a collectively authored zine shared in print and digital formats.
Past Projects
Climate Community Hub
The Climate and Community Hub advances climate justice by centering Indigenous knowledge. The programming highlights cultural resilience and ecological practices, and includes public events at ASU’s West Campus guided by Community Fellows. Six workshops will integrate interdisciplinary academic research into community-rooted approaches. Learn more
Community Science Leaders
This project provides a free, open-access toolkit and an interactive online workshop for educators, promoting youth-led climate action. Featuring a program guide, sample curriculum and curated resources, these resources help build educator confidence to support young community science leaders as they engage with contentious issues. The materials are accessible via the National Informal STEM Education Network.
Cultivating Civic Virtues
This project addresses ideological divides that simultaneously threaten democracy and planetary well-being. Featuring a spring keynote by Daryl Davis and two Constructive Dialogue Institute workshops for faculty and students, the project cultivates teamwork skills, moral courage and evidence-based practices. Participants are empowered to engage across differences and foster understanding in their communities. Spring Keynote!
Entanglement Collection
The Entanglement Collection develops pedagogical and facilitation materials to foster dialogue and highlight connections between planetary health and human wellbeing. Researchers are creating an ASU index to disseminate these resources via professional platforms, emphasizing participant and student engagement, tailored practices and community-building through workshops and shared problem-solving exercises. Learn More
Environmental Justice Oral History
This project explores environmental racism, inequality and social movement responses by creating 2–5 oral histories of environmental justice leaders in the United States; student trainees will refine interview transcripts for public release. The work will benefit communities, educators, researchers and the broader environmental justice movement by preserving voices and expanding collective understanding.
Pep Rally for Trees
Pep Rally for Trees incorporates celebration into an arts-centered project that builds community trust around climate adaptation in Maryvale, Arizona. Partnering with Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response, it features a pep rally-style event that gathers local collaborators, teaching tree care and resilience while transforming planting into a shared ritual of play, care and connection.
Re-imagining Workshop
Re-Imagining explores how collaborative imagination and storytelling can overcome cultural barriers to planetary health, advancing ASU’s Charter and the Global Futures mission. Through workshops, online learning resources and publications, these workshops foster imaginative capacity and futures thinking. Its self-assessment process measures the impact on behavioral change through curricula, public engagement and scalable tools.
Rematriating Science
Rematriating Science revitalizes the Indigenous and feminist roots of science, emphasizing care, kinship and ecological stewardship. Phase 1 produced multi-sensory materials, showcasing women-led and Indigenous research in biodiversity and restoration. Phase 2 will co-create a traveling exhibit through participatory workshops that highlight intergenerational learning, collaborative problem-solving and integrated approaches to climate and conservation challenges.
Restoring Moananuiākea
Restoring Moananuiākea engages 36 South Pacific communities to protect 15.5 million square miles of ocean, honoring ancestral connections and inspiring global reciprocity. Over three years, it will produce policy briefs, case studies, digital resources and an advocacy playbook while also building a 250+ member trans-Pacific network for community-led conservation and planetary health.