ICLEI USA launched the Colorado Resilience Engine (CORE) Internship Program with dual goals: 1) building capacity among Colorado local governments and 2) training the next generation of resilience leaders. With support from the CO-WY Ascend Engine, Innosphere, the National Science Foundation, and the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, the program placed five graduate-level interns with local governments across Colorado. Each host community identified a real-world resilience challenge that would become their interns’ project for the next 6 to 8 months. Learn more about these projects – and how the CORE interns are contributing to local disaster readiness, sustainability, and climate action efforts – in this blog series.
Grand Junction
Known as the largest city between Denver and Salt Lake City, Grand Junction is the key regional hub for Colorado’s Western Slope. Every step the city takes toward greater sustainability is influential across the region. This summer, Resilience Fellow Eloise Armour has seen the impact firsthand. For Eloise, seeing how broad that work is has been transformative. “Every aspect of our lives touches sustainability, business districts, mobility planning, agriculture, emergency response, county management, and waste management. It’s really helped me rethink what sustainability means.”
This summer, Eloise has been helping the city design a tabletop exercise on extreme heat for staff, building on data from a recent heat mapping project. The exercise will test how the city responds to a multi-day heatwave, an increasingly urgent risk for Western communities. Eloise draws from her past experience as a wildland firefighter and her training in the Incident Command System, blending it with the resilience skills she’s developing through her fellowship. “It feels like a full circle moment to see it all come together.”
She’s also learned firsthand how much impact dedicated individuals can have. “Working in sustainability for a city of close to 70,000 seems impressive, but the reality of it is that it is my supervisor, Andrea, putting in the work. It is a monumental task, and being able to learn from her has been such an eye-opening experience.”
For Eloise, resilience is both systemic and personal. It can look like a citywide climate plan or a neighborhood block party that builds connections before disaster strikes. “It has been so interesting being able to learn how to embed sustainability and resilience in all of the actions we push forward. I’m so excited to take this experience with me in the future.”
Through her work, Grand Junction is strengthening its preparedness for extreme heat, while Eloise is building the foundation for a career in resilience leadership.
