Now that climate change is a priority in politics, UM students have a solution

Seven students spent the spring semester learning to put aside their differences and create a bipartisan solution to climate change, which they presented to South Florida politicians last Sunday evening at the Newman Alumni Center.

The Civic Synergy Deliberation Program is a partnership between the Hanley Democracy Center and Civic Synergy, an organization founded by three MIT students who want to bridge the political divide.

It takes a select group of students from different socio-economic, geographical and political backgrounds, and over the six weeks of the program they are tasked with learning to deliberate, find common ground and ultimately create a policy proposal for the benefit of Miami Dade County.

This year the topic was the fight against climate change. West Miami Mayor Eric Diaz Padron; Carlos Curbelo, former U.S. Representative for Florida’s 26th District; South Miami Vice Mayor Lisa Bonich; WLRN correspondent and University of Miami professor Tom Hudson; and UM Professor of Political Science and Elizabeth B. White Endowed Chair Dr. Raymond Orr witnessed seven of the university’s brightest present their social policy proposals.

Two teams of students worked together to come up with a proposal to combat the ever-growing problem of climate change in Miami-Dade County.

The first proposed policy aimed to minimize climate gentrification, in which high-income individuals move to lower-income areas due to flooding and other problems caused by climate change.

The team included Trenton Campbell, a freshman majoring in political science and public administration; Atha Pol, a senior majoring in political science and international studies; and Sofia Avila Delgado, a junior majoring in political science.

This problem is common in Miami as higher-income people begin to move inland due to concerns about flooding due to climate change. This increases property values ​​in the area, making it difficult for lower-income residents to continue paying their rising taxes.

Their solution to this problem is to fund climate education programs at career and technical education (CTE) and trade schools throughout the Miami area. Most of these schools contain a high percentage of lower-income students. Therefore, implementing climate education into their trade programs would prepare them for the changing labor market.

The second proposed policy was to create a public partnership between Miami-Dade County government and local area climate organizations.

The team included Madison Graham, a freshman majoring in political science; Matthew Adelman, a junior majoring in political science; Emanuel Clemente, a senior majoring in psychology and political science; and Naomi Castellanos, a sophomore majoring in political science.

They want to set up employability programs with climate-sustainable companies and organizations committed to combating climate change.

These programs, which would be established and hopefully funded by Miami-Dade County government, would provide students with internships teaching them how to work in sustainable business.

Sustainable companies would become more important in the economy as they gain more skilled workers, and hopefully this growth would reduce the effects of climate change.

After the presentations, the judges wondered where the funding for both programs would come from, and were also looking for more concrete solutions to mitigate climate change at this time.

“Working together, these very unique and diverse groups of students are coming to realize that the partisanship we have been taught is a cornerstone of American politics is much easier to overcome than we think,” said Emily Danzinger, student program director for Civic Synergy . , said. “And that makes them realize that they can have a much bigger impact on the political process than they ever thought.”

Danzinger is a junior majoring in political science, international studies and communication studies and came up with the idea to collaborate with the two organizations after completing a spring 2022 program with Civic Synergy and learning about the creation of the Hanley Democracy Center.

Now in her third semester, Danzinger directs the program in collaboration with Hanley Democracy Center director and UM political science professor Greg Kroger.

The two have been working to get this program started since the Hanley Democracy Center launched in early 2023 and they couldn’t be more pleased with the results.

“It’s such an incredible experience to see these groups come in in the first week, not knowing anything about the others,” Danzinger said. “Then they work together over a relatively short period of time to come up with such comprehensive and multivariate policy proposals that appeal to so many different facets of American society.”