Overview
Duke is committed to authentic, purposeful partnerships—particularly in Durham, the region, and across North Carolina—grounded in an understanding of community needs. By weaving community partnerships through all the pillars of the Climate Commitment and also integrating the work the Office of Climate and Sustainability (OCS) with that of the Office of Duke Community Affairs (DCA), Duke is driving forward integrated sustainability and community empowerment.
Snapshot of current/recent projects:
- SALA-Duke Summit on Climate and Sustainability: The 2026 summit supported Duke’s community engagement and economic mobility strategy by strengthening cross-sector partnerships that connect research, policy and community-led action. The summit served as a coordination and relationship-building opportunity to align public, private and community stakeholders around affordable climate‑smart neighborhoods, disaster preparedness, policy implementation, and institutional climate leadership that delivers tangible community benefit.
- Duke-Durham Partnership for Healthy Homes: OCS has partnered with Habitat for Humanity Durham on a program that provides home weatherization and storm water management to qualifying households in the Braggtown and Merrick-Moore neighborhoods that have been impacted by storms and subsequent flooding. This effort reduces energy costs for local homeowners while increasing community resilience against the increasingly tangible effects of climate change. Starting in fall 2025, this portion of the project will be implemented over two years, with exciting opportunities for students to engage in this important work.
- Durham City and County Sustainability Staff Collaborations: OCS works with counterparts in the City of Durham and Durham County to find opportunities for partnership on local community climate resilience priorities including food security, public transportation and residential energy efficiency. Collaborations with several DCA employees on topics including transportation and food security have been instrumental to OCS building broader community sustainability connections.
- Duke Center for Community Engaged Scholarship, OCS, and the Duke Climate Coalition student group are working with Durham Public Schools (DPS) to develop their first system-wide Sustainability Plan. This partnership enables DPS to accelerate sustainability projects that would benefit from additional capacity while enabling Duke to create meaningful educational opportunities for Duke students. This work is expanding into a Bass Connections course for 2026-27 to explore how Duke can develop a Student Environmental Consultancy, a structured, enduring mechanism through which Durham organizations can access pro bono sustainability consulting, and Duke students can gain meaningful experiential learning opportunities.
- OCS Green Devil Interns Working with Community Partners and DCA:
- Kind Kitchen Group: Spurred from a relationship that sparked at the Center for Community Engaged Scholarship launch, Sicily Johnson of Kind Kitchen Group has worked with Duke student interns for the past two years to support Kind Kitchen Youth Culinary Sustainability Programming. This year the internship will build on the young ag program that focuses on the school garden pilot established at Fayetteville Elementary during the 2025-26 academic year. Other partners include the Pratt School of Engineering, the Duke Campus Farm and Root Causes Serenity Community Garden.
- DCA Community Food and Resource Stewardship internship: This initiative supports expanding food recovery and material repurposing efforts to reduce waste and improve community access in Durham through hands‑on coordination, partnership engagement, and data tracking. The intern will work with campus and community partners to safely redirect surplus resources, contribute to impact measurement and storytelling, and gain practical insight into local challenges while advancing resource equity and circular systems.
- The School for Living Futures: During the 2024-2025 academic year, a Green Devil intern worked with The School for Living Futures -- an interdisciplinary, experimental project in Durham dedicated to creating new knowledge and possibility for our climate-changed future. The student served as a video and media intern to develop an archive of digital resources to make climate resources accessible to the public.
- Kind Kitchen Group: Spurred from a relationship that sparked at the Center for Community Engaged Scholarship launch, Sicily Johnson of Kind Kitchen Group has worked with Duke student interns for the past two years to support Kind Kitchen Youth Culinary Sustainability Programming. This year the internship will build on the young ag program that focuses on the school garden pilot established at Fayetteville Elementary during the 2025-26 academic year. Other partners include the Pratt School of Engineering, the Duke Campus Farm and Root Causes Serenity Community Garden.
- OCS Climate and Sustainability seed grants since 2022 have awarded $3.7M to support interdisciplinary research on climate resilience, health impacts, energy transformation, and environmental and climate justice. Examples include:
- Duke Climate Research Innovation Seed Program (CRISP) energy and resilience grants such as environmental, health, and justice impacts of mining critical raw materials and collaboration with local farmers in the Triangle to build climate-ready local food systems.
- Climate and Health Data Expeditions - This program brought together researchers from across Duke, using data analytics to focus on timely, transdisciplinary challenges, both existing and emerging, posed by climate change on human health. Several projects leveraged research and community partnerships to address environmental injustice and foster resilience.
- Environment and Climate Justice in the Carolinas grants - a collaboration with communities across NC to build resilience and focus on community-engaged research. Foci include energy equity, public health, community policy advocacy and addressing environmental degradation in minority communities.
- Duke Climate Research Innovation Seed Program (CRISP) energy and resilience grants such as environmental, health, and justice impacts of mining critical raw materials and collaboration with local farmers in the Triangle to build climate-ready local food systems.
- Climate Commitment Town Halls: In March 2025, OCS and DCA, in collaboration with the Undergraduate Environmental Union, hosted a student town hall. Both OCS and DCA presented on community partnerships and climate justice connections to Duke’s Climate Commitment (see slide deck here). Following the presentation, there was a robust discussion about Duke’s role in community partnerships, actions Duke could prioritize to uplift climate/environmental justice work, and ways to more strongly and strategically connect with students on these topics and Duke’s Climate Commitment broadly. DCA staff also participated in the fall 2025 Climate Commitment Town Hall to highlight current economic mobility work prior to the launch of HomeGrown.