Climate Storytelling: A Community-Engaged Workshop
NYU students, faculty, and researchers, as well as local community members, are invited to join us at NYU Tandon's downtown Brooklyn campus for a three-hour workshop led by The Moth focused on storytelling — how to craft and share impactful stories.
The Moth, an NYC-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the craft of storytelling, will lead participants through a series of exercises to develop their own "3-Minute Story Seed" to help them grow a true personal story about work, climate, or life. Regardless of whether the story is about challenges facing your community or challenges your research aims to address, we hope you can join this workshop and learn how to share it with impact.
This workshop is organized by Manny Patole, Industry Assistant Professor at NYU Tandon’s Center for Urban Science + Progress; Catherine Cramer, Advanced Science Research Center Civic Science Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center; Manisha Desai, Professor and Executive Director of The Center for Changing Systems of Power at Stony Brook University; and Nicole Kennard, Research Scientist II within BBISS and Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research at Georgia Tech. All of the organizers have been working together as part of the NY Climate Exchange Community Engaged Working group.
About The Moth
The Moth is an NYC-based non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the art and craft of storytelling and to honoring and celebrating the diversity and commonality of human experience.
About the Organizers
Catherine Cramer works at the intersection of data-driven science and learning as it pertains to the understanding of complexity and its application to data and network sciences. She develops tools and programs for the teaching and learning of complex network and data science, with a focus on underrepresented communities. She is a Rita Allen Foundation Civic Science Fellow at the Advanced Science Research Center at City University of New York. She is also Co-Lead of the Community Engagement Core for the Global Center on Climate Change, Water, Energy, Food, and Health Systems (GC3WEFH) in Jordan, working to provide access to data analytics education to diverse communities there as well as in the US. She is a founder of the Network Literacy and Network Science in Education initiatives and is on the Board of the Network Science Society, and is co-editor of the Springer volume Network Science in Education.
Dr. Nicole Kennard serves as the Assistant Director for Community-Engaged Research within Georgia Tech’s Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. She supports faculty across the university in building meaningful and co-creative research partnerships with local communities to address pressing sustainability and societal challenges. As a Research Scientist II at GT, Kennard also leads her own community-engaged research in sustainable food systems, focused in the Southeast U.S. She works toward building resilient, community-focused food systems and uplifting local agriculture, agroecology, and food sovereignty as solutions to the complex, intertwined challenges of food insecurity, climate change, and land degradation. She uses a combination of quantitative methods (lifecycle assessment, mapping, soil health and ecosystem service assessments) and qualitative methods (in-depth interviews) to support this systems-level research. She is currently working with local partners to build a food systems network map for the City of Atlanta.
Dr. Manisha Desai is the Empowerment Trust Endowed Professor of Global Citizenship and Executive Director of Center for Changing Systems of Power at Stony Brook University. With colleagues at Stony Brook, she is engaged in climate justice work through community-engaged and arts-based research methodologies with Erase Racism and Long Island Progressive Coalition on Long Island and with Swayam Shikshan Prayog in Maharashtra, India. She brings reflections of these methodologies to the Global Network for Research and Action for a new eco-social contract. She is a senior research associate of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. She has served in many leadership capacities including as President of Sociologists for Women in Society and received several awards for her scholarship and mentoring, including the American Sociological Association’s Jesse Bernard Award (2025) for scholarly, mentoring, and service contributions to sociology that demonstrate a broad feminist impact; the Sociologist for Women in Society's 2015 Distinguished Feminist Award; and the 2016 Faculty Mentor Award from the Compact for Faculty Diversity in the U.S.
Manny Patole, Industry Assistant Professor at NYU Tandon's Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP), focuses on applied research at the intersection of community resilience, economic development, and urban sustainability. He serves as a core member of NYU’s Environmental and Racial Justice Network, NYU Climate Change Initiative, and the New York Climate Exchange Community-Centered Research Working Group. Externally, Manny is a board member of the Municipal Art Society of NYC and serves on the steering committee of the American Planning Association’s Water and Planning Network. His work extends nationally, working with Professors Sheila Foster and Clayton Gillette on Co-City Baton Rouge, a collaborative urban revitalization initiative that fosters equitable, community-driven governance models. Passionate about translating research into action, he actively engages in community projects addressing climate resilience, urban infrastructure, and economic empowerment. With multidisciplinary expertise in engineering, law, and planning, Manny remains dedicated to advancing inclusive, community-centered urban futures.
Related Events
Dr. Nicole Kennard will also deliver a talk as part of the Fall 2025 Urban Science Research Seminar Series hosted by the Center for Urban Science + Progress on Tuesday, September 23, 2025. More information and a registration link is available on Luma.
Visitor Information
This event will take place at the Center for Urban Science + Progress, located on the 13th Floor of 370 Jay St. Please visit the NYU Tandon website for directions and a campus map. Advance registration is required for campus access at NYU for external guests.
About NYU Climate Week 2025
This event is organized as part of NYU's Climate Week, which brings together influential leaders from government, business, and academia to champion change and accelerate climate action.