This Spring, as the trees grow blossoms that will soon bear new fruit, we are happy to share news of the collaborations blooming in our Invoking the Pause community. We selected from this year's dynamic candidates three Grant Partners who will receive funding to "invoke a pause" in 2013.

• A Creative Pause to Build a Narrative Strategy: Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)
• HighWaterLine: Eve Mosher, Heidi Quante and other collaborators
• Memorial for Winters Past: Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman
  

A Creative Pause to Build a Narrative Strategy: Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA)

This grant will enable GAIA to take a pause from the fast pace of its everyday work to develop a clear narrative strategy on the intersection between climate change, waste disposal, and economic resilience.  While the materials economy is responsible for up to 44% of global greenhouse gas emissions with its cycle of extraction, production, consumption and waste, the climate change debate typically doesn't highlight these intersections. During the "pause", GAIA will convene frontline community leaders and environmental policy advocates, together with a communications consultant, to build a messaging strategy for these issues from a holistic approach that sparks change. They then will use this framework to develop skill-shares, organizing tools, and new media tools to bring a solutions-based analysis of waste into the national U.S. climate debate.

HighWaterLine: Eve Mosher, Heidi Quante and other collaborators

HighWaterLine is a public interactive art project that uses a chalked line to help people visualize how rising water from mega floods would affect their living environment. The project was first carried out in New York City in 2007. When superstorm Sandy hit New York in 2012, the very area demarcated by artist Eve Mosher was flooded, giving a chilling demonstration of the project's relevancy.

The next phase of the project will take place in Miami, which is considered to be one of the most climate vulnerable cities in the U.S. due to its levels of urban development on low-lying areas and reliance on groundwater for human consumption. The "pause" will allow collaborators to travel to Miami and convene with educators at the University of Miami to design a curriculum around climate change before bringing the project to the city in December 2013 in conjunction with Miami Art Basel. In addition to the interactive art element, the project will involve students, local activists, and community members in workshops to help create proactive and locally driven strategies for addressing climate change challenges in Miami.

Memorial for Winters Past: Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman

The collaborative team of multimedia and radio producers Isaac Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman will invoke a pause to create a "Memorial for Winters Past," an immersive multimedia storytelling project that tells the tale of a lost natural world through personal experience, memory, and history of the seasons—specifically the New England Winter. Using sound walks, podcasts and online data visualization, the project will tell stories that cut through the media noise and rhetoric to create a sensory experience that helps us understand what the erosion of our natural environment truly means. The resulting soundscapes will be shared via an interactive website and public radio programs, creating an intimate multimedia remembrance of the world as it was, and one that is in danger of disappearing. By humanizing climate change data, the project aims to prompt a call to preserve what remains in our natural world while we have the chance.

Each of these collaborations brings a unique perspective for addressing some aspect of climate change challenges.  We are excited to see what blossoms from the seeds of possibility each new Grant Partner explores.