Director, Community Organizer, Board Member, and Co-Founder of CCR!
Maggidah Pamela Bea Wilson Vergun, Ph.D., M.P.A. is the director and founder of CCR, a board member, and serves as our lead community organizer.
Since 2014, Pam Vergun has been developing and overseeing programs that lead the way in involving youth, parents, and other adults of all ages in climate activism. She founded Climate Change Recovery (CCR) with her family and created the CCR program Youth and Adults Acting for our Earth (YAE!). Her children, Miko and Isaac, were the first youth leaders. Building upon her experience in program design and evaluation, YAE exemplifies the ability of youth, families, and adults to support each other in taking action and provides the necessary training to get more individuals and families involved in the global climate movement. Pam has an amazing side gig as the project manager for Elders Promote the Vote (EPTV) with the nonprofit program Elders Climate Action through election year 2024. She will be helping to lead this effort that works to create intergenerational collaborations to get elders and others who care about the climate to become regular voters and advocates to preserve our planet for all people, future generations and all life!
YAE empowers youth and adults—ranging from grade 4 through elders—to teach themselves and others to speak out on behalf of climate science and justice in free one-day trainings. Parents empower other parents to begin acting to address the crisis together with their children and communities through parent meetings and building teams of families who can strengthen each other by having fun and keeping hope alive while addressing the crisis. YAE is designed to provide a consistent and powerful experience across regions that: is easy for communities to get started, can be adapted to fit local circumstances, weaves together people and organizations from many backgrounds, and builds public speaking and other leaderships skills in the youth and adults who participate. YAE trainings have happened in 4 states so far and have reached students in 5 states and 3 countries.
Dr. Vergun brings to her climate work a decade of program assessment and support in education, health care, and other fields, as well as several years spent working with an international nonprofit, Plant for the Planet, as Executive Director, Board Member, and Program Coordinator. A Climate Reality Leader, she has also served as a Climate Reality Mentor.
A UCSC alumnae who majored in language studies, Pam went on to receive a Master in Public Administration and International Affairs from Princeton University and an MA and PhD in social psychology/ organizational sociology from Stanford University. Pam trained and was ordained as a Maggidah, a traditional path of teaching and storytelling that draws upon Jewish and other wisdom traditions. Pam is working to fundraise for CCR from a variety of sources and to further refine and seed this community-based youth and parent climate training around the U.S. and beyond, using a permacultural approach to climate activism and organizational development.
If you would like to learn more about her background, please see her resumé. Her C.V. is also available upon request.
For information on speakers fees and availability for Dr. Vergun, email her at vergun@ alumni.stanford.edu.
http://bit.ly/CCR-Climate-Change-Recovery-Pam-Vergun-YouTube
Climate Change Recovery 