Despite its increasing importance for sustainability, building widespread competency in the basic principles of climate literacy among the United States general public is a great challenge. This article describes the methods and results of a public engagement approach to planning climate change education in the Central Great Plains of the United States. Our approach incorporated contextual and lay expertise approaches to public engagement with a focus on supporting the self-determination of the specific stakeholder groups-rural producers, educators, and community members. An integration of results from the focus groups reveal that our approach was received positively and elicited a number of important themes describing stakeholders' concerns, interests, and needs pertaining to climate change education. Focus group participants were concerned about climate change, cautious regarding conflicting sources of information, and interested in learning more about climate science and climate change impacts. Across all stakeholder groups, participants consistently expressed a desire for trustworthy, personally-and locally-relevant, easy-to-access information that they could evaluate and use in applications as they saw fit. Although these findings do not yet provide a recipe for concrete educational programming, when viewed through the lenses of social, cognitive and educational theories, they suggest a number of important directions for future research and program implementation that are needed in order to advance the understanding of effective climate change education.

We describe a unique program, the Kansas Legislative Health Academy, that brings together state legislators from across the political spectrum to build their capacity in advancing policies that can improve the health of Kansans. To that end, the academy helps legislators develop new skills to deliberate the ethics of health policy, use systems thinking to understand the long- and short-term effects of policy action and inaction, and engage in acts of civic leadership. The academy also seeks to foster an environment of respectful open dialogue and to build new cross-chamber and cross-party relationships. Among the most important outcomes cited by program participants is the value of sustained, personal interaction and problem solving with individuals holding differing political views.