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IPCC , as of 2024: 
Fewer than 7 years to halt runaway warming

UNESCO to Education Sector, 2021:
Stop business as usual to focus on
*Climate Change
*Inequality
*Struggling Democracies
*Fragmentations 

DE4R:
How?  

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We believe that lifelong education rooted in the vital principles of life and agency is the most powerful lever we humans have to confront climate change and injustice.

"I used to hate school because it made no sense. Now I feel like I can use it to make a difference." --Esc. FMC Bayamón student, 2018

We know that Nature has given us everything we need to sustain life on our home planet. She is our best teacher.  

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We believe

*That great ideas can come from anyone

*That teachers are also learners and learners can teach

*That unified is powerful; uniform is not

*That youth-powered teaching is liberating for both teachers and learners

*That coherence among head, heart, hands and spirit; past, present and future knowing and being is healing

*That strong communities working together to disrupt harmful systems and to replace them with just and caring integrated decision-making and praxis are most likely to thrive both today and in the future.

 

We ask: How might schools and universities help students and their communities to uncover their living strengths and deploy their skills to thrive in our age of transformative challenges and climate disasters?  How can we co-create the infrastructure to help our institutions and systems to adapt to changing needs and demands?

 

We provide place-based face-to-face and virtual training and mentorship in regenerative learning, and community co-design thinking for youth and educators of all kinds (teachers, professors and community educators). 

 

We bridge research and practice in education and energize its role in whole community resilience and climate justice. 

 

The way we work: DE4R will not tell you what to do. We are not a 'one-size-fits-all-off-the-shelf-plug-and-play' school add-on. Using emergent and regenerative processes and frameworks based on research and developed over 36 years of practice, we work with you to surface your specific needs, help shape your vision, and support you as you co-create the deeply rooted and sustainable changes you want to see.  

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Maggie Favretti, Founder
  • DesignEd4Resilience founder
  • Award-winning educator
  • Visionary change catalyst and curriculum/program designer
  • Inspiring innovator and facilitator

Design Ed 4 Resilience includes close alliances with:

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ResilientSEE, a global alliance committed to rebuilding a resilient, sustainable Puerto Rico, Yanel DeAngel, Founder

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Pamela Silva Díaz, engineer and community-led designer

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Resilience By Design Lab, Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC, Dr. Robin Cox

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Christine Boyer, expert in k-6 design thinking and making.

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Javier Moscoso, student in Electrical engineering and energy justice, UPR-M, community mentors

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Alliance for the Mystic River Watershed, a collaborative learning and action community of four towns and two Tribal Nations

Maggie Favretti, a Yale-and Middlebury-educated cultural historian, has spent over 35 years happily helping her students to learn by engaging in life, now. Maggie has won scholarship and teaching awards from three professional historical organizations (WHA, AHA, OAH), a national organization of bankers (Sallie Mae Foundation Teacher of the Year), and a national organization of student leaders (21st-century Teacher of the Year).  She has been recognized by President Obama for her work in environmental education, and by the Sousa Mendes Foundation’s Freedom Award for her work facilitating the next generation of rescuers, Students for Refugees. Recently, she earned the US Coast Guard's JoAnnMiller Community Award. By far her greatest joy has been devising opportunities for youth and educators and communities to tap into their innate creativity, resourcefulness, and collaboration across disciplines, using "community co-design thinking" to solve complex problems in their own communities and beyond (www.city2pt0.org). 

 

Maggie was honored to be a special guest of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine during their listening tour about Measuring Resilience, to help them attune to youth and education issues. The best honor of all was to be invited to Puerto Rico by the American School Superintendents Assoc. to assist teachers after the tragic hurricanes in 2017.  As an expert in educational frameworks and collaborations (k-16+), Maggie uses co-design thinking to empower students and their communities to thrive by shifting the paradigm to youth partnership in making their world more sustainable, equitable, resilient and happy.  Her current research interests include regenerative learning communities and adaptation design, the ethics of time in leadership decision-making, anti-colonial practices in youth development, teacher and community empowerment, the roles of shared efficacy, creative confidence and civic courage in climate change adaptation/mitigation capacity, and the impact on and role of teachers in disaster response and recovery.

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In 2023, Maggie published Learning in the Age of Climate Disasters (Routledge), one outcome of a life of thoughtful learning together with nearly 10,000 kids, their families, and their communities. I plan to keep advocating for watershed and indigenous rights, teaching holistically, co-creating resilient regenerative learning communities, and planning for the next seven generations. 

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