The University of Washington Resilience Lab and the Campus Sustainability Fund have joined together to award grants to UW projects designed to cultivate sustainability, compassion and resiliency; to engage hardships, setbacks and failures with empathy and vulnerability; to foster connectedness, belonging and community; and to embrace both common humanity and diversity within the human experience. Students, staff and faculty from all three campuses have applied for seed grants to fund research, workshops, retreats, activities, faculty-invited speakers and other events tailored for students, faculty and staff in support of these aims.

The range of proposals demonstrate the need and collective interest to realize sustainability and compassion-building work. In all, students, faculty and staff submitted 42 proposals from 31 different departments/programs across all three UW campuses. From that group, 20 grants were made to fund the ideas of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students representing 18 departments. Funded projects are intended to benefit the broad UW community at all three campuses.

“The creative ideas people had to build connection and support well-being was just inspiring,” said Anne Browning, director of the Resilience Lab. Projects range from cultivating mindful leadership in faculty, a podcast series focused on indigenous well-being in Urban Seattle, the creation of sustainability-centered curriculum, all with the intent of creating more sustainable and resilient communities.

The University of Washington Resilience Lab and the Campus Sustainability Fund have joined together to award 20 grants to UW projects designed to cultivate sustainability, compassion and resiliency; to engage hardships, setbacks and failures with empathy and vulnerability; to foster connectedness, belonging and community; and to embrace both common humanity and diversity within the human experience. Students, staff and faculty from all three campuses applied for seed grants to fund research, workshops, retreats, activities, faculty-invited speakers and other events tailored for students, faculty and staff in support of these aims. Together the Resilience Lab and the Campus Sustainability Fund awarded a total of $38,575 to individuals and groups.

The range of proposals demonstrate the need and collective interest to realize sustainability and compassion-building work. In all, students, faculty and staff submitted 42 proposals from 31 different departments/programs across all three UW campuses. From that group, 20 grants were made to fund the ideas of faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students representing 18 departments. Funded projects are intended to benefit the broad UW community at all three campuses.

“The creative ideas people had to build connection and support well-being was just inspiring,” said Anne Browning, director of the Resilience Lab. Projects range from cultivating mindful leadership in faculty, a podcast series focused on indigenous well-being in Urban Seattle, the creation of sustainability-centered curriculum, all with the intent of creating more sustainable and resilient communities.

See the full list of funded projects on the Resilience Lab's Seed Grants page. Below is the list of projects funded solely by the CSF on the UW Seattle campus for a total award of $31,575.

Amount Awarded: $1,100
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

The UW Center for Child and Family Well-Being (CCFW) has invited David Treleaven to facilitate a one-day workshop on trauma-informed mindfulness practices.

Amount Awarded: $2,999

This initiative brings together a group of College of Built Environment (CBE) faculty to explore the relationships and synergies of three themes that inform our theory and practice—resilience and well-being; systems thinking; and biophilic design—as a potent means by which to enrich CBE faculty, pedagogy, and students in not only what our students need to know, but how their learning process reflects these interrelated concepts towards greater compassion.

Amount Awarded: $750

Capillaries works within the genre of narrative medicine, a movement which invites healthcare providers and patients to reflect on their experiences using writing and art and to develop appreciation for the inherent humanity in all people. We are expanding awareness of and participation in narrative medicine at UW, encouraging undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff –from all departments, not just in medicine –to share their stories with us.

Amount Awarded: $2,390

The project will bring people together at an event where it’s safe to share opinions, generate ideas to improve the campus culture, and learn new concepts. Since the existence of disability is a normal part of the human experience, and most of us will be impacted by disability in our lifetime (in ourselves, our family, our friends and colleagues) the project seeks to embrace both the common humanity and diversity around us. The events, knowledge base article, and supported replications will further campus understanding of disability identity and that diversity includes disability.

Amount Awarded: $1,450

Our project aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals of good health and well-being, quality education, reduced inequalities, and peace, justice, and strong institutions. Mental health is important and is challenging to prioritize when in school, as other responsibilities seem to take precedence. We want to share these stories to uplift students and let them know that they are not alone when they experience challenges or setbacks that impact their education. We want to help students spread positivity, understanding, community, and most importantly, support.

Amount Awarded: $2,000
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

This project utilizes the biannual UW Food Systems Seminar (NUTR 400/500) to support student learning and dialogue about food systems amidst the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, which together amplify the need for health and food equity. This seminar will showcase researchers and organizers working at the confluence of these pandemics for positive and impactful change. Sessions will highlight challenges as well as transformation, hope, and potential for resilience and equity to root across the food system.

Amount Awarded: $2,218

Amount Awarded: $750

The proposed method to address this question is to create a heat density map highlighting where people identify as a healing space for them on campus. I want to administer a mapping survey where students, faculty and staff are able to identify places on campus where they seek refuge during the work/school day, before and after their time spent here. This type of survey data can then be aggregated to create a specific map. I will also aim to ask questions for how people are using the space itself.

Amount Awarded: $3,000
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to nearly 14,000 confirmed cases and over 600 deaths in King County. Furthermore, people of color are dying from COVID-19 at disproportionate rates in comparison to the white population. Washington State Governor Inslee issued the “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” order to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2. However, this mandate does not apply to custodians who are considered essential workers. To protect the health of the University of Washington Seattle Campus community, 259 custodial workers continue to work, cleaning and disinfecting various campus areas.

Amount Awarded: $861

Indigenizing Urban Seattle is a podcast that contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and resiliency from an urban Native lens. It serves as a platform to amplify urban Natives’ voices and perspectives in the environmental discourse. We focus on urban Natives currently residing in Seattle—a hub for urban Native resiliency, environmental activism, and solidarity movements.

Amount Awarded: $3,000
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

The goal of this project is to better understand how food systems and traditional health care services can work together to support the needs of food-insecure families. The Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic (OBCC) is a community health clinic located in the Central District of Seattle that provides low-income and predominately BIPOC families with free or low-cost medical, dental, mental health, and nutrition services.

Amount Awarded: $1,675

This project will utilize low-cost and open-source technologies such as the Raspberry Pi single-board computer and near-field communication to create a modular interactive exhibit for use by oral history projects. Inspired by other community-based oral history kiosks, this project will expand on their work to create a ready-to-install software package with accompanying modular kiosk designs so that any oral history or public history organization can create an interactive exhibit that features their work with very little monetary investment.

Amount Awarded: $750

The project is going to be dope. Being able to better understand how folks at UW use space, and especially what elements and factors within a space draw them to use a particular space can tell us a lot about the ways in which UW can strive to be more healing. Through research we know and understand how valuable nature and place are, and we don't know what is important to the people using UW's campus quite yet.

Amount Awarded: $3,000

This collaborative project is built on a longstanding partnership between UW’s Pipeline Project and Neah Bay Elementary School and has been developed to address a community-identified need. The result is an exciting project that will focuses on encouraging Neah Bay students to envision their futures. The goal will be to not only have Native students see themselves pursuing higher education, but learning, as early as fifth grade, of career paths that could ensure their being able to live and thrive in Neah Bay after graduation.

Amount Awarded: $2,750
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

“On The Ground” would serve as a public record or social history of the work that has been done on the ground (or ground-adjacent) at UW. People can access an archive and learn from a directory of photography, personal anecdotes, and interviews, ranging topics from cultural history to current movements in and around the UW community. OTG will feature stories on Black, Indigenous, or minority undergraduates, graduates, and faculty in and around campus, who will share their experiences with the system and their frontline work in the movement for justice within various disciplines.

Amount Awarded: $2,000

This project aims to provide a safe healing space as well as a space to strengthen community for Queer and Trans people of color (QTPOC) through a 2 night 3 day camping trip in the North Cascades National Park. Queer and trans people of color have been historically excluded from spaces such as the outdoors and through this project we aim to connect the QTPOC community with the outdoors. Many studies have shown the incredibly positive emotional and physical effects that being outdoors has—especially in places like the North Cascades— on someone’s health and wellbeing.

Amount Awarded: $3,000
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

This project is co-led by a group of graduate Students of Color at UW, Kaleb Germinaro, Kayla Chui, Jessica Ramirez, and Dr. Shaneé Washington, a faculty member in the College of Education, who volunteer at various community learning spaces outside of schools. One of these spaces is Nurturing Roots, a 1/4-acre urban farm that dedicates itself to cultivating healthy food options by growing organic produce and engaging with community members through farm tours.

Amount Awarded: $3,000

The RepairCycle is a mobile, on-the-spot garment mending service and experience that brings the UW (and Seattle) community together around the universal aspect of clothing—offering a functional service while creating connection and dialogue through a shared activity. By empowering creative and easy-to-learn mending skills, we are working to transform our local community’s relationship with clothing. Ultimately, we believe that garment repair is not just a viable option, but should a delightfully designed experience.

Amount Awarded: $700

The “Resilience and Compassion @ Odegaard Pop-Up Events” will engage students in forming community around compassion and resilience, diversity, equity and inclusion, and holistic student wellness. The proposed event series will have a different focus each quarter that ties directly to the theme of resilience, compassion and sustainability:

Amount Awarded: $3,000

UW-Seattle’s Expository Writing Program (EWP) helps prepare over 5000 students each year with critical literacy, research, writing, and communication capacities that are essential for successful participation across the academy and in public life. Our program seeks to help students engage in writing as a means of social action; develop ethical communication practices; and understand and be responsible for the consequences of language use for diverse communities. Building on our program’s longstanding history of engaging undergraduate students in public and community-based writing courses, w

Amount Awarded: $3,000

Historically, community gardens have served as a means of accessing fresh produce when prices are prohibitively high, such as during times of war, recession or, as we’re seeing, pandemic. However, in a city marked by staggering rates of displacement and homelessness, prices on natural, organic, and healthy food are consistently inhibitory regardless of the larger context. This is especially true for the over 200 University of Washington students and 1,100 young adults in Seattle struggling to obtain food daily.

Amount Awarded: $1,500

Our goal is to develop online content for the UW First Year Programs website that shares information about self-compassionate parenting in the transition to college. Content will be focused on parenting skills supportive of self-compassionate responses to challenges, grounded in the three core components of self-compassion: mindfulness, connection to a common humanity, and self-kindness. Specifically, we seek to address the following two aims:

Amount Awarded: $2,990
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

The aim of this project is to better understand how frontline communities define climate resilience and identify perceived factors that support or undermine resilience. Frontline communities are communities most affected by the impacts of climate change, and are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and lower-income compared to state averages.

Amount Awarded: $750
Project Status: Active: Planning phase

As graduate students in the Division of Art History and future educators, researchers, and museum professionals, we believe that we must be attuned to questions of diversity and its implications on our field. The art historical canon encourages prioritization and hierarchies within scholarship and museum displays. We aim to create an inclusive and actively anti-racist art history, by seeking out, researching, and teaching the work of artists and scholars that are often left on the margins.

Amount Awarded: $1,400

WAMM is a student-run directed reading program that pairs undergraduate women interested in a mathematics-related field with Ph.D. students from the Applied Mathematics Department at the University of Washington. The pairs meet every week over the course of a quarter to work through a project decided upon during the first meeting based on the mentee's interest. Projects typically involve a combination of reading texts or papers to learn new mathematical ideas, analytical work done by hand with pencil and paper, and numerical experimentation using a relevant programming language.