Designing Hope: Telling the Story of Envision Resilience

Climate change stories can often feel about either catastrophe or statistics. But the work of Envision Resilience is all about hope, imagination and possibility. For the second year in a row, I’ve had the privilege of seeing the work they do and telling their story.

Envision Resilience brings together students, designers, planners, and local communities across New England to ask a powerful question:

What could a resilient future actually look like?

Rather than approaching climate adaptation through fear, the organization creates space for communities to envision hopeful, livable futures, where humans work with nature rather than against it. Architecture and design students are brought into this program to meet with local community members and through that engagement create design proposals that tackle some of the communities biggest problems in the face of climate change.

The result was a seven-minute film designed to distill an incredibly layered, year-long process into something emotionally engaging, visually immersive, and easy to follow.

And that distillation process is where I feel my strengths as a filmmaker shine the most.

More Than Documentation

The real challenge in documentary filmmaker is meaning-making. I collected hours and hours of footage — interviews, community meetings, working sessions, conversations, and countless small moments. By the end, there were hours upon hours of material — and I was making a 7 minute piece.

The hard part wasn’t finding good moments. It was letting go of them.

Editing a project like this requires ruthlessness in the best sense of the word: identifying the emotional spine of the story and protecting it. Tough decisions about wonderful side stories, sweet moments and tangents had to be pruned and cut.

Otherwise, even the most meaningful material becomes noise.

What excites me most about projects like this is shaping complexity into clarity — creating films that don’t just inform, but guide viewers emotionally through an experience.

The story of Envision Resilience itself is multilayered. It’s education. It’s community organizing. It’s climate adaptation. It’s speculative design. It’s public engagement. It’s hope-building.

The challenge was finding a structure that could hold all of that without overwhelming the viewer.

Building Trust Before Building Stories

One thing I deeply respect about Envision Resilience is their commitment to relationship-building.

The organization doesn’t simply arrive in a town, drop in outside ideas, and leave. Their team spends extensive time getting to know each community long before students begin designing anything. They meet with residents, town officials, workers, and local stakeholders to understand both the visible and invisible realities of a place.

That process became an important part of the story itself.

In Bath and Harpswell, I witnessed conversations that were thoughtful, nuanced, and deeply human. People spoke not only about infrastructure and climate threats, but about identity, memory, economy, and belonging. About working waterfronts. About the changing coastline. About preserving the spirit of a place while adapting to an uncertain future.

Those conversations gave the student work real grounding.

By the time I filmed the Northeastern students in Boston the designs no longer felt abstract but connected to actual people and landscapes.

That connection matters.

Because the purpose of Envision Resilience isn’t implementation. These proposals are visionary by design. Their role is to spark dialogue, expand imagination, and help communities see that adaptation does not have to mean resignation. It can also mean creativity.

The Difference a Second Year Makes

This was my second year working with Envision Resilience, and that familiarity changed everything.

That deeper understanding allowed me to make stronger storytelling decisions from the very beginning — not just in the edit, but while filming itself.

One of the most rewarding parts of long-term creative collaboration is that over time, you stop merely documenting an organization’s work and begin to understand its heartbeat. I could make creative decisions that were on point without needing oversight and guidance - leaving the Envision Team to rest assured they could trust me to do the work I'm good at doing. I became a trusted part of their team, someone they knew would represent their company, as I was interacting with many of their partners.

Not only does the resulting film feels more focused and emotionally cohesive, but the process of making it was better too. They told me it was the best film of their project they’ve had yet!

Why This Work Matters to Me

As a filmmaker, I’m increasingly interested in work that helps people feel connected. I think a lot about why we take photos and videos of things. And I think it’s about sharing. You want to be able to send that photo to someone and have them understand what we felt when we were taking that photo. It’s not about the photo - but the emotion and bid for connection behind it: do you see what I’m talking about?” It asks. The problem is, we’re not all great photographers or communicators. But that’s my job.

And while the final film runs just seven minutes, it represents an entire year of listening, observing, filming, shaping, refining, and searching for the clearest emotional throughline possible.

 And the most rewarding part is that the connections that telling this story makes can help inspire others to see things in a new way they didn’t think possible. And that is the goal of Envision Resilience: to plant the seeds of ideas from a new generation. 

Watch the full film here