overview
Pushing the Limits: Strategy
This public program shares adaptive strategies for managing environmental challenges — like extreme heat and water scarcity — that affect your homes and communities. With long term improvements in mind, we’ll generate ideas that can take root in your backyards. Wherever your home is, you can find partners, grants and long-term opportunities to build resiliency and adaptation strategies. 

 

Program Video
Flor Morales has always been ambitious and has always wanted to be involved in making her community a better place. Inspired by her mother and her community, she’s constantly seeking opportunities to improve her life and the lives around her. To make these types of improvements a reality, she builds long-term strategies for the future.

In the intensifying heat of southern Arizona, Flor is focusing on building cooler and healthier futures for Tucson families. Through a nonprofit organization, Flor organizes lay health workers called promotoras to support and educate underserved neighborhoods on matters of environmental health. Flor and the promotoras are helping families adapt to the heat by planting desert trees to offset rising temperatures, and constructing rainwater harvesting systems to store water. Flor works closely with families to manage material logistics, and she conducts workshops on rainwater harvesting and tree care. Naturally, when it’s time to build and plant, she’s out in the dirt, helping families bring a brighter future to life.

With these forward-thinking strategies, a yard flourishes and trees shade the house for an adapted, healthy, and resilient oasis.

To support your implementation of Pushing the Limits: Strategy, you can download this document, which contains:

• A list of additional suggested books
• A set of discussion questions that can be customized to your community’s interests

 
Marketing your Program
We recommend starting your planning and marketing at least 2-3 months before your program date. Please note that instructions for appropriate credit are included in the Marketing Plan Template which you can find in Professional Development Unit 4. At minimum, the following program credit line must appear in all published materials relating to Pushing the Limits:

“Pushing the Limits is a library hosted reading, viewing, and discussion program for adults in rural and under resourced communities, made possible by grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation.”