Showcasing California's Innovation and Leadership in Climate Resilience
VX News here features a conversation between Resilient Cities Catalyst founding principal Sam Carter and California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, Yamilett Carrillo of the San Diego Foundation, and Darbi Berry of the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative. The panel took place at the inaugural Resilient California Summit in Sacramento. The speakers examine how cross-border partnerships accelerate California’s climate adaptation work through three initiatives: the 17-region Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership on heat, drought, and wildfire; the San Diego–Tijuana Binational Resilience Initiative; and RE:BEACH Oceanside, an international design competition to address accelerating beach erosion. Read the conversation below.
Sam Carter: …The topic today is California's leadership in climate resilience. You could take that one sentence and unpack it lots of different ways, but we want to think about both information coming into California and information flowing out of California, and why this kind of learning, practice and flow of information is essential for California doing the work that it does. We're going to talk about three different projects that my organization is a part of, all of which leverage international practice and knowledge in order to deliver better results for Californian communities.
I'll start by introducing myself. I'm Sam Carter, a founding principal of Resilient Cities Catalyst, a nonprofit. We're based in New York, but we work all over the United States, and we also work internationally—we have projects on five continents. We've been doing this work since 2019. We're a spinout of the Rockefeller Foundation, where I worked for a number of years, and we largely work at the intersection of philanthropy and government in order to catalyze action on climate and resilience.
Let me introduce our three speakers. We have Secretary Wade Crowfoot—if you were at the plenary, you just heard his great remarks. Thank you, Secretary Crowfoot, for being here. He's our partner on the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership, and he leads California's Natural Resources Agency. We also have Yami from the San Diego Foundation. Among many cool projects that she does with her colleagues there, she leads the Binational Resilience Initiative, which we're very happy to work on. And then Darbi Berry from the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative; we've partnered with Darbi and her team on many projects in Southern California. We're very happy to have you here.
To kick us off—and we're jumping script here, because we don't have the introductory slides—can you talk a little bit about your organization, where climate resilience as a concept sits in your agenda, and how you approach and think about that work?
Wade Crowfoot: Sure. I come from state government, as Sam shared, and hopefully you all know how ambitious state government has been on building resilience and driving toward carbon neutrality, thanks to three successive governors who have prioritized this, and to legislators. There's just a ton of alignment on this. It's not if; it's really how, and how fast.
From where I sit, this whole proposition of international collaboration is about not reinventing the wheel. Climate change is manifesting differently in different places, so yes, we absolutely have to customize and localize solutions. But there are good things happening around the world, we have to move fast, and we have to use the best ideas possible. I'll share some examples of California learning from places like Athens, Greece, and Santiago, Chile, on extreme heat, or states in Australia on wildfire. From my perspective, this conversation is all about how we are stronger together: how we work across borders, learn from each other, align resources—sometimes even technology solutions—and ultimately apply those in the places we work and live to protect ourselves.
Yamilett Carrillo: I'm Yamilett Carrillo, or Yami. I work at San Diego Foundation, a community foundation that has been working for over 50 years in San Diego County, and we are all about resilient, equitable communities. We have a very long-standing environment program where we support local nonprofits doing work on the environment, scholarships, education—everything our community needs, we are there to serve.
Four years ago, the foundation decided to answer the call that Sam and Darbi made to create a binational resilience initiative and work across borders to try to solve for our region's vulnerability. The border is right there—an international border that separates San Diego from Tijuana—but our oceans are all connected, as are our kelp forests, our Tijuana River watershed, our biodiversity, our cultural resources and our people. Over there, we sometimes cross the border twice in a day. So it's all about building resilient ecosystems that make healthier communities. I'll stop there.
Darbi Berry: Hi, everyone. Again, my name is Darbi; you see my pronouns. I have the privilege of leading the San Diego Regional Climate Collaborative, a 16-year-old [TK — Collaborative was established in 2011 (15 years); confirm "16-year-old" with Darbi] organization specifically focused on supporting cities, public agencies, nonprofits and that community of practitioners to advance climate action planning. We were actually a program that spun out of the San Diego Foundation's environment program years ago—so when Yami says long-standing, she means many decades.
Yamilett Carrillo: It's on the wall in the foundation if you're ever in there.
Darbi Berry: The San Diego region is really unique. If you've ever had a conversation with me, you've probably heard me preach about it, but we are a tri-national region. We share a border and we share communities, but we also have the highest number of Indigenous and tribal communities in our county of anywhere in the contiguous 48. A lot of those Indigenous communities' histories transcend the border as well. So for us, we have to work in a multinational context at all times in order to speak to solutions that fit our communities.
Sam Carter: Great, thank you. That gives you a flavor of who they are, and I'll be coming back to them with questions in a minute. Since we don't have slides, I'm going to give a quick summary of the three initiatives we'll be having a conversation around—mostly to baseline some information so we can all engage in the conversation together and fill in any gaps as we go.
I want to start with an international partnership called the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership, on which Secretary Crowfoot has been a real leader. He and the government of Catalonia dreamt up this partnership—three or four years ago?
Wade Crowfoot: At New York Climate Week in 2023.
Sam Carter: We whipped it up together, and RCC serves as the secretariat. What we recognized—and what folks in regional and subnational governments recognize—is that they have a unique role to play in the climate leadership space, and Mediterranean regions in particular are bearing a huge amount of the impact from climate change.
By Mediterranean regions, we're not just talking about the areas around the Mediterranean Basin—North Africa, Southern Europe, the Middle East. It's regions that have this particular climatic condition. It's only 2 percent of the world's land area, but it's 600 million people and about 10 percent of global GDP [TK — Sam: please confirm source for the 10% GDP figure]—huge centers of culture, huge centers of population. And they're overexposed to issues like heat, drought and wildfire.
By figuring out these common issues and common exposures, the theory of the partnership is that we can move faster by not reinventing the wheel—learning from each other, picking up from each other. And because it's global—it includes Australia, Chile and South Africa—we have the Southern Hemisphere, so there's learning that can happen across seasons as people experience these different events. You can actually accelerate the learning by taking advantage of that.
There are different things we try to do through the partnership. One is to circulate knowledge through convenings: we have an annual meeting where we bring government leaders and practitioners together to share knowledge and learn from each other. We also fund each other, as a group, to do pilot projects, and we raise funds from philanthropy to deploy for rapid prototyping. And we're trying to create a language and a discourse around the particular and distinct needs of Mediterranean regions. Part of the advantage of forming a partnership and calling out this unique problem is that you're putting words to it and creating a platform for advocacy. You're able to draw attention to it and, hopefully, resources, knowledge and partners.
It's 16 regional governments—actually, now 17. We just admitted Sardinia into the partnership [TK — Sardinia's admission not yet publicly confirmed; verify with RCC]. I'd say 30 to 40 percent of them are right around the Mediterranean Basin, and the others are scattered around other corners of the world: California and Baja California [TK — audio reads "Bajasor"; confirm Baja California vs. Baja California Sur] in this corner of the world; two regions in Chile, Santiago and Biobío; the Western Cape in South Africa; three regions in Australia—South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales; and in Europe, Central Greece, Sardinia and Emilia-Romagna in Italy; Occitanie and Région Sud in France; and Catalonia in Spain. And in Morocco, we actually have three regions: the Oriental, Rabat and Tangier [TK — use official names (Oriental; Rabat-Salé-Kénitra; Tanger-Tétouan-Al Hoceïma)?]. Everyone brings something different to the table, and we'll talk a little more about learnings from that.
Yami mentioned the Binational Resilience Initiative. As she called out, there's this administrative boundary that cuts east-west between Southern California and northern Mexico, Baja California. It exists on maps, but obviously there are flows of people and environmental overlap between these regions—there's a bioregional condition that spans the border. So in order to actually do the work of climate resilience, you have to engage across the border; you have to think about the whole system.
One of the things we recognized, and why we recommended that the San Diego Foundation take up this challenge, is that research and projects on a lot of different coastal issues were being developed completely independently of each other. You had teams of Mexican researchers over here and teams of California and U.S. researchers over here. They would meet at conferences and share knowledge, but there wasn't enough joint research actually being done. There were all these structural impediments, from research funding to the practical realities of existing in different institutions, and we thought philanthropy could have a really important role in pulling those threads together—hence the leadership in establishing this. There's been a bunch of work on coastal issues, but you're starting to expand to other topical areas as well, so there's a lot of interesting knowledge from that, and Yami will be able to share about some of the grants and research.
The third project we're going to talk about is an international design competition. We've been working with the City of Oceanside and a variety of philanthropic partners to try to solve the problem of beach erosion and stabilization. Many different forces are contributing to Oceanside's beaches washing away. It used to be that the city could do a nourishment project and it might last four or five years. Now it lasts three to six months: you put sand down on the beach, and it washes away.
It's not all sea level rise and coastal storms. The city has built right up to the edge, like many of California's communities. They've taken steps like hardening the edge of the harbor and the jetty, which impedes the flow of sand through the system. There are river dams. And they've cut off the sediment supply from the bluffs by building right up to them; bluffs normally erode, and that creates sand. All those factors are working against sand having a natural place to live as it flows down through the system. The net result, when you tack on sea level rise and increased coastal storm activity, is that the beaches are eroding faster than ever before.
The Fifth Climate Assessment that came out yesterday [TK — confirm release date; the 25–75% range matches the 2023 USGS (Vitousek et al.) beach-loss study—confirm the Fifth Assessment cites it] says that by 2100, 25 to 75 percent of California's beaches are going to be gone, most of that in Southern California. So there are these cumulative impacts that are going to keep threatening places, and Oceanside is very much the point of the spear where this is landing.
The city was searching for what it could do to stabilize that beach, which would allow hotels to keep operating and allow people who live there to use the beach. Oceanside is also a transit hub—one of the big east-west train lines, so you can get from inland to the beach for about $2.50 [TK — fare garbled in audio ("$2, 250"); confirm]. That's a really important resource for the whole region. So if Oceanside loses its beaches, there are all these negative impacts.
We worked with the city to design an international design competition to invite in other perspectives on what could be done there. It was a huge participatory engagement process and a multi-phase design process. The winner proposed two artificial headlands and an offshore artificial reef with lots of natural and nature-based features. We're now finishing the design, and the environmental impact study is going in later this month, which is very exciting. The project went from being a pipe dream that no one thought would ever happen to the Coastal Commission actually giving a grant to do the baseline monitoring, and it's now being celebrated as a model project for the state.
That gives you a little background on what we're going to talk about. The specific question I have for each of you is this: It would be a lot simpler not to work internationally—administrative boundaries, language boundaries, all those things. What is it about working internationally that makes all that work worth it? Why do you have to look to international partnership in order to do the work of your agency or organization? We'll start with Wade.
Wade Crowfoot: I'd say because we are all experiencing this for the first time, and we're all figuring it out in real time. We are in a race, but we're not in a race against each other; we're in a race against time.
What we realized with MCAP, the Mediterranean Climate Action Partnership, is that we were dealing with the same things. I would go to these international convenings and have meetings with other governments, and they would know about California because we're visible and big. But I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know that Chile has horrible wildfires. I didn't know that the Western Cape in South Africa is so water-stressed during droughts. I didn't know that Australia was on a journey with its Indigenous communities to bring back traditional practices. As we started talking, we said, wait a minute—we're dealing with, not the same, but similar challenges. What if we got together in this experiment to see if working together on these topics helped us each move further and faster than we would otherwise?
So we selected three things—drought, heat and wildfire—and we focused on those. We realized that we're all busy with day jobs in our governments, and this would never fly unless we had some glue to hold us together. So we raised money, with Sam and RCC as our secretariat—essentially the organizers of this—and big thanks to Sam for his philanthropic connections to help with that.
Then we basically said, look, we're going to give this a try for a year, and we're going to sign an agreement. There's some benefit—you could say a political PR benefit—to signing an agreement at a big international convening like a Conference of the Parties, saying that we, as Mediterranean climates, have to take action. So that was a piece. But as you know, sometimes these international MOUs are symbolic and not very substantive.
So we checked that box, but then what was really cool, exciting and ultimately encouraging is that we rolled up our sleeves, got the smart people in our governments who are facing each of these challenges together, and put them in a room—mostly virtual—to ask: What do you want to work on together? How do you want to share experiences? What do you want to learn from each other? And lo and behold, in the first 18 months, what we got back from our technical and program people is that there's a lot of value in this.
It expresses itself in different ways. It's not one big shared project. Sometimes it's expertise, or phone-a-friend; other times, it's getting a policy model or an investment model. There are all these different ways it's materializing. And for us in California, it's exciting, because we have to be a little bit selfish. We're not going to spend our time on something that's purely symbolic. We have a job to do: we have to build resilience as fast as we can.
So that's really the value proposition of MCAP. We're still building it out; there are fits and starts and a lot of lessons learned. But what's exciting is that there's momentum. Governments are showing up, and we're able to put points on the board and really identify the ways we're working together. We think it's one of the first bioregional global partnerships—that's kind of a fancy word, but the idea is that we're organizing ourselves in different parts of the world based on what we're facing. So we're excited, and we'll see where it goes.
Yamilett Carrillo: In the case of the San Diego–Tijuana, or Cali-Baja, region, we cannot do it alone. You can be mighty California—and California is so beautiful; that corner of California is the most beautiful I've seen, though I admit I haven't seen the whole state. But one of the things we realize is that our communities on both sides of the border are facing the same challenges. Our marine ecosystems face the same challenges. The Tijuana River crosses the border. Our families cross the border, and we are so interrelated in that area. We cannot do it alone.
At the same time, we have to recognize that there are differences in capacity and in funding, and that's where philanthropy realized we have a job to do; we have to step up. Northern Mexico has very little funding but bigger challenges. To create resilience for one side of the Tijuana River watershed or one coastal area, we have to make sure that everybody is part of the solution, and that's what we're trying to do with our program: building collaboration across borders, and showing the world that California can lead but cannot do it all alone when our communities face the same challenges and the same vulnerabilities.
What the San Diego Foundation has been doing with the Binational Resilience Initiative is funding—I see some of our community partners here. Each project has to be presented by both a U.S. nonprofit, academic institution or local government and a Mexican nonprofit, academic institution or local government. They work together from the get-go, from the building of the proposal. We evaluate them, but we also identify needs. We can support research, but that's not enough. We can support community engagement, but that's not enough. We need to support youth—like Generación SEA [TK — audio reads "GenC"; confirm reference is BRI's Generación SEA youth academy] over there. And we also need to support the Kumeyaay people, whose ancestral lands the border bisected. That's the type of work we're doing. We cannot build resilience for just one side of the community; we have to build resilience together and for everybody.
Darbi Berry: One of the things that always comes to mind in this conversation is a phrase a lot of us as practitioners say: think global, act local. I think that's really important, because it is a global challenge, and we don't always have the solutions. There are a lot of other ways of thinking, knowing and being that can invite different opportunities.
In the context of the beach project, what has been so important is that you need to cultivate an atmosphere of experimentation. In this moment we're facing with climate, we really have to be open to an atmosphere of experimentation—an atmosphere where we don't know the answers, and where some of the solutions and proposals we put in might not be the perfect fit. Our adaptation practice is evolving and changing, and inherently, a lot of the solutions we're proposing are maybe antithetical to some of our existing government and structural systems. So looking to international partners and international leadership is really helpful to move past some of those barriers once we cultivate that experimentation.
The other thing that's really important to note is that local governments are really easily bullied into seeing other people do cool stuff—and I think that's a really good tool. You can put that on my tombstone. It's been really helpful for some of our local leaders who may have been a little hesitant about some of these bigger questions and bigger, more ambitious projects. We looked at the Sand Motor in the Netherlands as an example of a big, audacious project: if they can do it, why can't we? It's a really effective tool, when used appropriately, to help local governments move past that barrier, and that's an important value we can bring with our international partners and those international leadership voices.
Sam Carter: I'll observe that, as a New York–based nonprofit, we often felt like we were entering foreign territory when we came to California. People looked at us like, "What do you have to teach us? We know what we're doing here." It took various leaps of faith and trust building in order to collaborate effectively with California partners.
That leads into my next question. These types of partnerships, or working internationally, aren't necessarily the natural or typical way your organizations are set up. There are folks here from local government, nonprofits, different types of agencies and the for-profit sector: How did your organization have to behave a little differently in order to take on this type of international work? First the question for CNRA, or any other aspect of California government; then San Diego Foundation; and then Darbi, you can speak from the perspective of the City of Oceanside, but also your network role.
Wade Crowfoot: I'll start by emphasizing Darbi's point around being open, but also really being biased toward experimentation and new approaches. These climate impacts are scary, discouraging stuff. If we can unleash creativity and new ideas—I love the idea of this international design competition—we can get people excited about solving this. There's amazing stuff out there.
Our governments move slowly, particularly in California, and there are historic reasons for that. But in a lot of ways, on resilience, we have to move faster, and we have to embrace some experimentation and new ideas.
I'll just say briefly that beavers are one of them. I think I see Brock back there, so you've triggered me. For decades, our biologists believed that beavers were not native to parts of California. In fact, they were made extinct so early—before the Gold Rush, there was the fur rush—that they were gone. It was our Native partners, actually, who were saying, no, beavers were here. It took some experimentation from our Department of Fish and Wildlife to ask what it would look like to relocate beavers into these different landscapes, and it took a leap of faith to listen to scientists like Brock [TK — likely Brock Dolman (OAEC WATER Institute); confirm full name] and others. And lo and behold, it's transformational. Beavers are ecosystem engineers—the mascot for nature-based solutions. Slow it, spread it, sink it: I learned that from Brock. So, point being, experimentation is super important.
I also think a precondition of these partnerships is some level of humility and learning. California is a big state, a rich state, and a place that takes itself really seriously. So oftentimes, people are expecting us to come in and be arrogant and poor listeners. Coming with humility—whether it's San Diego with Tijuana, state government with tribal governments, or our region with other regions—is super important. There's a ton we're learning, and there's a ton where we're essentially behind the curve. I'll be the first to say that in certain areas, we have a lot to learn, not only from our tribal partners but also from other governments around the world, including governments that have far fewer resources than we do.
Yamilett Carrillo: And sometimes when you have fewer resources, you become even more creative, because you don't have any other option. That's what we realized in the region where I'm fortunate to work and live. Philanthropy also has a role to play. It's very difficult for small, emerging, grassroots community nonprofits to identify sources of funding. And one of the things we learned—as he said, humility—is that it was upon us, as philanthropy, as the community foundation, to go look for solutions and create bridges that enable organizations to work across borders.
We are taking on the challenge of identifying how to fund across borders in a way that doesn't trigger money-laundering laws, for example. How can we create a standardized measurement system for water quality along the Tijuana River when two-thirds of the river is on the Mexican side and they work in metric units? We work in different units, and we have different labs for water quality samples, things like that.
So what we decided is to put out an open call for proposals. The three of us and other people here help us review probably around 45 binational proposals every year we open a public call, and probably 35 percent of those are top-scoring proposals that we want to support and just can't [TK — Yami: confirm 45 proposals/year and 35% figure]. We're realizing from the philanthropic perspective that we need more partners at the table and more funding, and it's upon us to create the enabling conditions for communities to work together and collaborate. The goodwill to reach out across borders and find solutions together is right there. They just haven't—as all of us haven't—seen outside the paradigm of finding funding for working together.
That's part of my role: identifying partnerships, sometimes doing matchmaking, introducing organizations across borders—and, at the same time, believing that they know those solutions better than philanthropy or local governments can, because they're on the front lines. We support those types of community efforts. And I believe that we can solve issues even as complex as the Tijuana River or the New River together.
Darbi Berry: The only thing I'd add is that some of the projects and questions we're answering have to have different answers than the ones we know. The challenge of working with a local government and an international firm, or doing an international design competition, is that you're inviting that new conversation to flourish. That's really important, because we've been stuck on some of these projects for so long.
It's not new that Oceanside's beaches are eroding away. This is a long-standing problem. There have been 20 years of trying to navigate a conversation with the Army Corps around the San Luis Rey River mouth opening. That's not a short amount of time. That's where these international partnerships provide a lot of cover for local governments as well, to try to do things a little differently than our standard practice. We can use the cover of: we're working with an international partnership; we need to be flexible; we're inviting different ideas and conversations to the table. I think it helps us break down the layers of bureaucratic walls that have been built up over time. We joke that California is the state of bureaucracy, but it's important to invite different conversations to help us break down some of those barriers that maybe don't need to be there anymore, and work through them in a productive way. That's where the international conversation comes in—it provides that cover and that social discretion.
Sam Carter: Part of what your comments and stories speak to is the competitiveness and culture of excellence in California. You act, feel and demonstrate that you're out on the edge, showing what good looks like. A lot of the laws and policies that are sometimes holding back rapid development were lovingly crafted in a world-leading set of policy maneuvers in the '70s, and that's something to be really proud of. But they need to be renewed and rethought as you go forward, and that characterizes your work.
I'm going to ask one more question, and then I'll invite folks to join the conversation. On the theme of international leadership and how California can benefit from international ideas and partnerships: What's something you're really proud of that was the result of this type of international collaboration—or something your organization or agency feels the world could really learn from or benefit from? Is there anything in your work or portfolio that you feel could contribute back to the conversation?
Wade Crowfoot: I'll share one, because it's been an interesting conversation with Australia and other parts of the world: this journey we're on to fully embrace traditional ecological knowledge and build a new future with California Native American tribes. I think it's a really powerful model—not because we've been successful; it's very much a journey.
The governor, three months into his being elected eight years ago [TK — Newsom's apology to California Native Americans was issued June 18, 2019, ~5 months after his inauguration; confirm phrasing with CNRA], did what no other governor had done: he issued an unconditional apology to California tribes. He read the inaugural address of California's first governor, which put a state-sanctioned bounty on the killing of Native women and children [TK — verify characterization of Gov. Burnett's 1851 address before publication]. It was that level of brutal self-honesty, followed by a really earnest and sustained effort to change the way things are. It makes me proud that we're at a resilience summit in Sacramento in 2026 where the plenary reflects tribal leadership—and not in a way that feels token. We have really taken this to heart. There are things we're proud of, including ancestral land return and co-management. To me, it's a powerful model of governments recognizing that they get things wrong and taking a journey to move in a much different direction—a paradigm shift. That's been an interesting conversation with Australia, whose state and national governments are in a very different place with Indigenous communities there.
I'll say one more thing. If you're sitting here today thinking, "Well, I don't really work internationally," I bet everyone in this room can strengthen their work across boundaries. Whether you're doing a play space [TK — audio reads "play space initiative"; identify the LA extreme-heat program referenced]initiative on extreme heat in urban Los Angeles, or good fire in the North State, or really whatever, there are lessons to be learned from people doing this work outside of your place. We heard that in the panel. There's so much potential for cross-boundary collaboration—maybe it's community-based organizations learning how to protect vulnerable rural communities' water during drought. So yes, international, but also state to state, and even local to local, or community-based organization to community-based organization. None of us has the answers, and we can all benefit from learning from others outside of where we do our work.
Yamilett Carrillo: One of the key things we discuss in BRI whenever we evaluate proposals is that we're looking for nontraditional stakeholders and nontraditional climate solutions. We all know there are around 300 environmental nonprofits in San Diego, for example, out of roughly 13,000 [TK — confirm 300 of 13,000 nonprofits in San Diego County]. But if we want to solve for our communities' health and environmental injustices, we cannot just stay within the environmental community. We have to foster collaboration across stakeholders, especially nontraditional ones. Right now, we're supporting pediatricians to hold a binational forum on health in Tijuana.
We're also connecting the City of Oceanside, which has the Pure Water Oceanside project. They were part of a binational watershed solutions forum in Tijuana two weeks ago, connecting with Tijuana water managers to understand how they do it at a budget level that is more similar between Oceanside and Tijuana than between the City of San Diego and Tijuana. They were proposing new tours, visiting each other's water treatment facilities, trying to build an understanding together of how we can do things together.
When I see those types of connections, and they just continue the conversation, philanthropy sometimes doesn't need to be in the room anymore—and that's perfectly okay. As long as we create the table, make the connections and open doors, we're letting innovation come through that door and flourish naturally among people creating new connections. That's something we're looking forward to supporting in our Cali-Baja region.
Sam Carter: I want to call out one thing before Darbi responds: I do think there's a unique role for philanthropy in facilitating that type of international exchange, which can be very difficult for organizations to do on their own. It's risky; oftentimes you're using a muscle you haven't used as much, and philanthropy can provide that kind of support.
Yamilett Carrillo: In four years, BRI has been able to support 68 binational projects, with close to 40 organizations on each side of the border receiving funding [TK — SDF's site lists 30 collaborative projects and 50 CBOs as of Feb. 2026; reconcile with Yami]. At the same time, one of the key things we've seen is that there are many more highly meritorious binational projects that we haven't been able to fund, and we're committed to finding funding for more of them, whether coastal, marine or in the Tijuana River watershed. We're looking to expand, and we're connecting with other donors across borders, including Mexican foundations, to identify how we can pull together more funding to solve the issues in our region. And it couldn't have happened if San Diego Foundation, or any other philanthropy in a region, hadn't taken the risk to go out there and say, "I don't have those solutions, but I can support, enable and create enabling conditions, and you can solve it for the community."
Sam Carter: One more call-out, since they're not here: we had a colleague from the International Community Foundation who was going to join the panel and couldn't make it at the last minute. I want to call out that there's a Mexican philanthropic partner that co-manages the Binational Resilience Initiative, and Angelica [TK — surname and title of ICF colleague]couldn't be here. Sorry, Darbi—step on in.
Darbi Berry: You asked what I'm proud of, and Yami spoke to a lot of it. But it's amazing to me that we're in this room in 2026 able to talk about these three projects specifically—especially because Sam and I have been in these conversations for the last six and a half years trying to mobilize them. I'm sure a lot of folks in the room resonate with this: climate takes a lot of work and a lot of time. Big, audacious implementation and infrastructure projects like these take a long time to get to this point.
Both the Binational Resilience Initiative and RE:BEACH Oceanside spun out of a convening that Sam and I hosted back in the summer of 2020 [TK — confirm: the San Diego Coastal Exchange?]. Now, in just a short amount of time relative to the labor involved, BRI has deployed over $4 million [TK — confirm cumulative BRI grantmaking] in funding to these organizations. And for RE:BEACH Oceanside—building a new program, mobilizing that funding, getting funding from the Coastal Commission as an endorsement of moving forward, and moving the leadership within the city—that has been really important, and it's something we should all be proud of. What I'm really proud of is seeing folks willing to step into that role of risky leadership and say, "I'm going to say yes to this project, even though we don't know where it's going, because it feels like the right direction."
Sam Carter: I hadn't thought about it like that. That is cool—we're doing stuff. Let's open it up to you. There's a mic stand here. Does anyone want to come up and ask a question, or share an experience working internationally that might be relevant to this conversation?
Stephen Bigler [TK — confirm spelling/affiliation; audio garbled]: Kudos to Indigenous thinking; I can't wait to hear more about it. I'm Stephen Bigler, from New Orleans, so we know about water. My question is about crossing boundaries. I heard a lot about physical boundaries and physical infrastructure. Is there also any effort to build cultural infrastructure, social infrastructure, educational infrastructure—and the intersection among all of those, which I personally feel is at the core of nature-based and Indigenous thinking—bringing all of this together as a complex adaptive system?
Wade Crowfoot: Thank you for the wisdom of that question and the inference that we have to work across many different boundaries. At least in our government world and our agency, we tend to think about physical boundaries and physical challenges, and you're so right. We're here focused on resilience—building the adaptive capacity of communities. Yes, it's about certain projects that happen or don't happen, but it's also about the strength of the community: the strength of togetherness and connection, looking out for each other. Whether you call it social infrastructure or cultural infrastructure, it has to be part of this. In California, we recognize that, and we're making progress, with more to come. A couple of new friends came up to introduce themselves and said that public health isn't as engaged [TK — audio reads "not essential"; confirm intended word] as it needs to be—we have thousands of nurses, for example. So yes, this has to be part of building resilience in California, and I know there are some tracks on it here.
I'll also say that something we've historically done really poorly is treat all these challenges as separate: water resilience, wildfire resilience, heat resilience. The average person doesn't experience these separately. The reason we treat them separately is because we've divided our work separately. We have to reverse-engineer what we're working toward—not only how to strengthen families and communities, but how to protect people from cascading and overlapping impacts.
Darbi Berry: On crossing borders and boundaries in the social context, a lot of what we do is build up people capacity. One of the challenges has been helping folks understand who's available to support, and helping build those relationships. "Projects move at the speed of trust" is something we say as practitioners a lot, and our team works really hard to be that trust buffer and trust builder, so we can extend that trust beyond those boundaries and help folks build relationships faster. What's been really effective with some of these projects is having that person in the middle who holds relationships with a lot of different people and can extend an arm and say, "We're going to move a little fast, but it's okay, because I'm here. You trust me, and I trust you, so you should also trust this person I'm bringing into this space." That extension of trust and capacity is something we all need to do better at.
In the climate space, there's no gatekeeping in climate action. We shouldn't be holding these things as secrets. We talk about solutions all the time—I think because we don't get a lot of wins in climate, quite frankly. We don't do a good job of gatekeeping because we don't know how; we're just so excited: "Can I show you this cool thing I did?" But that's really good and really healthy, and it's going to help us transcend some of those boundaries and invite more people into the conversation.
Yamilett Carrillo: Just to close: when we're able to build and enable social infrastructure and connections, we never know exactly where it will lead us, but it will be a much better place than where we are—that's for sure. And second, once you build social infrastructure, everything else will find a way to fall into place, whether you have to amend, update or create new memorandums of understanding between countries or across borders, or just find ways to send money across borders so that people and organizations can work together on water quality measurements along the river. We're finding ways to connect Kumeyaay people who don't have visas and cannot cross into the U.S., creating connections online so they can build—or rebuild—their coastal connections, customs and stories together, even if they cannot be together in person as they would wish. That speaks to how, once we build the social infrastructure, we can find a way on the economic, infrastructure, online and legal side of things.
Tristan Partridge: Thanks—I'm interested in everyone's fascinating work. My name is Tristan Partridge. I'm executive director of the North American Center for Post-Growth Research, based in Santa Barbara, California. I'm particularly interested in MCAP, because we're working closely with colleagues and allies in Catalonia—specifically Research & Degrowth International, who have, I think, the world's best MOU with a city government, the City of Girona, about 100,000 people. They're redesigning city policies, taking a bioregional approach and implementing post-growth visions and policies.
My question is: How do you adapt to these very different political realities? Absolutely solidarity across borders, global solidarity—but very different political realities. Is it about sharing strategies that work here and finding out how they adapt elsewhere? How do you incorporate brilliant ideas that might be happening in Biobío, Chile, but that may not have a place in the political structure here? How do you navigate those political translations?
Wade Crowfoot: Thank you for sharing. One hope I have for MCAP is that we're not only building connective tissue between governments in Mediterranean regions, but among organizations—whether scientific researchers, because we shouldn't be reinventing the wheel and we should be supporting each other, or big thinkers like yours, asking what the future of the economy looks like on a resource-constrained planet. So keep watching MCAP, because if we grow over time, one of our aspirations is really to build that connective tissue.
It's challenging. Some of these governments are so confusing to us, and they're so confused by our government. Catalonia, for example, has had a separatist government in charge, and then a government aligned with the national government. Parliamentary systems obviously have governments that are more dynamic. So I build a really close relationship with my equivalent in a place like Catalonia or Biobío, and then when I come back nine months later, they're gone. That's a challenge. And what flies in one place doesn't fly in another, so it's imperfect. This policy transfer, as I call it, is as much an art as a science. I think the key is having enough interaction and connectivity to stay with each other long enough to really understand each other's work. We've now been to these convenings in different parts of the world, including the Western Cape and the Barcelona-Girona area. There are certain things where I say, that would never work in California—but there are seeds of ideas that I bring back and incorporate.
Sam Carter: I agree with all that. On top of the political realities that shift and change, there are real structural differences between these places: different sizes of economies, different legislative authorities, different executive authorities. As we've been managing this sometimes unruly network, we've adopted an attitude that diversity is good. It provides a natural experiment in what kinds of policies can work in different types of places. And even as political cycles happen, there are opportunities for some regions to step up and engage more, and then pull back.
We have a co-leadership model with rotating, staggered co-chairs, so every year a new co-chair starts. And there are different ways regional governments can engage. Some are ready to do more out-front political outreach—to have their governor, secretary or minister hold a stage and deliver a message. Some just want to put their fire people in a room with other fire people and share information, and that's okay. We recognize that different governments are going to be ready to engage at different levels, and there's value in all of that. So we try to have a structure flexible enough to allow all those types of network activity to happen.
