"One of things I think about is the opportunity to take a house like that and to have a group of older people and a caregiver stay in the same house. A caregiver, perhaps with a small family, [can] stay on the third floor, and then have the residents stay on the other floors.... This wouldn’t be a high level caregiver... but someone who could be a custodian to a group of people and help them. We have got a lot of houses like that in Dover-Foxcroft. We could do great things. But it requires an addition of money. It requires culture change, thinking about communal living as we age. Most people in Maine are very independent and it is hard for people to think about that action." - Lesley Fernow
"I worry a lot about the more vulnerable people in our communities. I worry a lot about the poorer families in our communities. We have elderly patrons who come into the library with incredible respiratory problems that are made worse and worse by how colder and colder it gets every single year. We have entire populations of people who don’t live here for four to six months out of the year because it is too cold for their bodies to manage.... I notice our homeless populations and the fact that if they don’t have a shelter to stay in, then there are people freezing to death. That doesn’t just happen here, it happens in cities and it happens even in places with far more homeless care than we have available here.... I worry a lot about the fact that climate change affects vulnerable people. Because they’re vulnerable, I think it affects them first and I think it affects them the hardest." - Elyse Kiehn
"So this is a photograph of the window dressers window construction.... This year, 60% of our clients were low income clients who receive these for free.... Many of the homes that I went to needed a lot more than window inserts. They need doors, new windows, the house to be propped up, stairs, they need food, and they need lots of other things.... I took this photograph to demonstrate the fact that some of the solutions that we are going to look towards in the future are community solutions... because this improves the health of people. We were talking about climate and environment, but, actually, if people are cold, just like if people are hungry, when people are cold and people are hungry, they can’t live lives that are healthy and safe, and they can’t really live their lives in the best possible way." - Lesley Fernow
"And there's also the other aspect of the community garden [which] is feeding people, the whole food security thing. Campus is doing a really good thing. They have a food pantry for students isn't it? Students and their families and stuff that's -- during the summer, stuff that they grow, or that we grew when I was a student there, we distributed to different halls where students could take whatever they needed. And sometimes they offer classes or lunch-and-learns about all -- like here's zucchini, here's easy ways you can make it or different recipes. I think there was one about canned goods. But yeah, it's really something special." - Kaitlyn Norwood
"Historically, minorities, people of low socio-economic status, have been assigned the least desirable places to live. We've crammed all of the Penobscot people onto this island. If you go down to Miami, the Haitians were actually put outside the city, because that was far less desirable. Now, with sea level rise, the wealthy people living on the coast are moving inland, and so buying up the properties of those Haitian communities, who now have no place to go. We look at the South Pacific Islands, it's so clear, or some of the islands in the Carolinas, where there are either Indigenous or African-American heritage, those types of communities have been sort of stuck out there, and they're losing their islands. And so, as I said, this picture was meant to symbolize that." - Linda Mosley
CHANGE is a climate change research project directed by Dr. Kati Corlew and is dedicated to reaching a better understanding of peoples' perceptions of climate change. Our research was conducted using a qualitative research method called PhotoVoice. PhotoVoice, is a method “by which people can identify, represent, and enhance their community”. (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 369) Our participants met in focus groups to discuss the research topics, and then went out into their communities to take photographs according to their conceptualization, values, and priorities regarding the topic. They then selected photographs to present and discuss in a final focus group (Gleason & Corlew, 2019). By placing participants’ photos, stories, and conceptualizations at the center of the study, we hope to expand the exploratory nature of this research to include themes outside of current climate change conceptualizations. For more information, please visit our Main Page.