Working Groups

Improving connections among UGA faculty and staff

Charge: Hold monthly Climate & Society informal brown bag lunch series for UGA faculty and staff organized around a theme. The goals are:

  1. to assist members to know one current members’ expertise and interests, and
  2. to expand connections on campus to include people from colleges and programs not already involved with the initiative.

Building new climate system connections

Charge:  Hold monthly topic-based “thinking outside the box” discussions among interested faculty, staff, and students on critical topics.  The goal is to build new research programs by making cross-disciplinary connections on the frontiers of key interest areas.

Building connections to stakeholders

Charge:  The charge of this group is to develop and foster connections between Climate & Society team members and outside stakeholders, including the public, schools, and local government.  The group will plan monthly development meetings or workshops centered on key climate issues to produce white papers, website resources, or other products that can be used to further educate stakeholder.

Bringing in outside speakers to enrich UGA community

Charge:  Bring outside expertise to UGA. The goals are to enrich our current programs and share information about UGA with leaders in the field of climate and society.

Charges:

  1. Anticipate, monitor and coordinate responses to strategic and relevant Request for Proposals (RFPs).
  2. Oversee networking activities by the Climate & Society Initiative, including participation in conferences and state and federal agency connections.

The goals are early identification of new funding and collaboration opportunities and provision of infrastructure for rapid responses to those opportunities.

Charge:  A steering committee comprising faculty and professional staff active in the Climate & Society Initiative provides advice and support to initiative director Patricia Yager. The immediate charge to the executive committee is to finalize and submit the proposal for a UGA Center for Climate & Society in Fall 2012.