I’ve witnessed, whether in Tanzania or Korea or as locally as my home city, Los Angeles, the power of universities and students creating institutional change. While at ICMA, I’ve continued my passion for education by finding synergies between my background in higher education and youth development with CityLinks and other projects at ICMA. As some may know, ICMA has a strong portfolio in youth development internationally, particularly with its youth crime prevention programs in Latin America.   It’s been remarkable to see, though, in the past couple of years, ICMA expanding students’ roles from being just the beneficiaries to being the major drivers in public reforms, both in the U.S. and abroad.  Examples include the Alliance for Innovation and the Green Generation Program in Jordan, a university program raising awareness amongst engineering and architectural students on the relationship between their profession and environmental sustainability.

This year, with CityLinks, specifically with climate change, I’m excited to see the education sector, especially universities, become a major component of our activities. Check out how universities have already began to transform the field of climate change! 

- AASHE the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education

AASHE is a membership-based organization of colleges and universities working to advance sustainability in higher education institutions across the country. Activities include AASHE Annual Conference, North America's largest campus sustainability conference; professional development workshops and webinars; and a Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS), a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure their sustainability performance.

- Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN)
The Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN) is a consortium of individuals and institutions from universities and research organizations dedicated to the analysis of climate change mitigation and adaptation from an urban perspective.  Activities include knowledge-sharing and information exchanges, conferences/symposia, and biennial assessment reports of mitigation and adaptation research and practice in cities around the globe.

- Energy Action Coalition
The Energy Action Coalition is a North American non-profit organization made up of 50 partner organizations in the U.S. and Canada that runs campaigns to build the youth and student clean energy movement and advocate for tangible changes on local, state, national and international levels in North America. Energy Action's flagship campaign, the Campus Climate Challenge, was launched in 2006  and is now being run on more than 700 colleges and universities across the country, and more than 550 of those campuses have made institutional commitments to become carbon neutral.

- Climate Education Community University Partnership
In June 2013, the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University launched a Climate Education Community University Partnership, a coalition of colleges and universities throughout the Gulf Coast region committed to reducing pollution in underserved communities, enhancing natural disaster response, and raising awareness of climate change impact on air and water quality.