Western Washington has experienced several climate-related events over the last few years, such as the 2021 heatwave and flooding this past December. However, experiences of these events are not evenly distributed across the population. Frontline communities, including people of color and low-income communities, experience climate change and environmental hazards first and worst. Community organizations like Front and Centered, a coalition of community of color-led groups across Washington state that work towards a just transition, environmental justice, and climate justice, work to make sure frontline communities are equipped to advocate for their needs and build power.

Over the past year, I partnered with Front and Centered to create community education workshops to position members of frontline communities to imagine better climate solutions and explore water data. The first set of workshops in Spring 2025 were focused on participatory design about how technology might fit into a just climate future. We employed concepts from radical imagination that to fight for a world we want, we have to imagine and dream about that world. With about 10 community members, we first mapped challenges that community members already face or are anticipating, such as increasing natural disasters, loss of biodiversity, and exacerbating human health conditions. Then, community members sketched how a future where these challenges are addressed might look. For example, some community members drew renewable energy infrastructure instead of current extractive energy facilities. Last, community members ideated on how technology might get us to that future. Community members identified certain aspects of technologies that were important to the design, such as considering the local ecology, transparency, and government support. With help from the PCC Climate Solutions Fund, I was able to compensate community members for their time and present this work at my first American Geophysical Union meeting this past December.

From these workshops, I learned that community members were excited to get more hands-on experience with technology. With the help of fellow PhD student Nino Migineishvili, we developed a five-part series that ran this past winter in the Seattle area and online with over 35 attendees. To affirm frontline communities’ lived experience with water justice, I started with a photovoice exercise with community members. Photovoice is a participatory visual method of data collection that prompts participants to share their experiences and understandings through photography. From this, we talked about water challenges participants face like pollution and flooding but also cultural relationships with water. We linked this to other monitoring work being done in Washington through a presentation from Puget Sound Partnership to link broader regional work about water to community members’ daily lives. We covered topics about drinking water and did a hands-on activity with total dissolved solids sensors. Through these experiences, community members learned that there are multitudes of ways to collect data about water and also how they can own and store data. The workshop series concluded with a storytelling activity bringing together data from the photovoice, water quality sensing, and other activities. Through pre and post-surveys, community members shared that they were able to increase their sense of community, agency, and self-efficacy through participating in workshops.

Also, in follow-up interviews, community members expressed interest in bringing activities like photovoice back to their community and talking about drinking water quality with their families.

Interactions with workshop participants reaffirmed to me the importance of centering climate work on those already experiencing climate change. Community members were generous enough to share their stories of how intensified disasters, such as flooding, already impact their lives. I’ve also learned a lot about myself as a facilitator and researcher. Without funding from PCC, I could not have done this work. I am also grateful to the many people who have assisted in this work, including staff at Front and Centered, Nino Migineishvili, Katrina Radach, Samantha Chee, Ethan Hynes, Sierra Yee, Lindah Kotut, and all the community members who shared their time with us.

Amelia Lee Doğan. Amelia is a third-year PhD student in the UW Information School. Amelia’s doctoral research focuses on how frontline communities and climate justice activists in the Pacific Northwest use, understand, and reshape data and technology.