wnc-resilience-project_logos

Join the Work: Building Resilient WNC Schools and Communities

The WNC Resilience Project, led by Open Way Learning, connects educators, students, and community partners across Western North Carolina to strengthen a learner-centered ecosystem rooted in recovery, resilience, belonging, and community strength.

CommunityShare is the project’s connection space. It helps teachers, mentors, local experts, and community partners find each other around real projects, local expertise, and student-centered opportunities.

Teachers can use CommunityShare to post classroom or school projects, ask for community partners, invite mentors, and find people who can support student learning.

Community partners, educators, and mentors can use CommunityShare to share what they can offer, such as expertise, feedback, field experiences, materials, guest lessons, mentorship, project ideas, or connections to local work.

This is a way to make the work already happening across WNC more visible, connected, and useful to students.

Sign Up
screenshot-2026-03-21-204620
OUR VISION
Connecting Real Work Across Schools and Communities

Across Western North Carolina, educators and community partners are already helping students learn through real questions, real needs, and real work. The WNC Resilience Project helps connect and strengthen those efforts so they do not stay isolated.

CommunityShare gives this network a shared place to connect.

Educators can post projects or change ideas and invite support from community partners, mentors, families, local organizations, businesses, artists, scientists, farmers, civic leaders, and other people with knowledge to share.

Community partners and mentors can post offerings so teachers and students can find them when the connection is useful. An offering might be a guest visit, project feedback, a field experience, a mentoring opportunity, a local problem students could help explore, or a resource connected to recovery and resilience.

The goal is simple: help students experience learning that is relevant, community-connected, and rooted in the strengths of Western North Carolina.

GET INVOLVED
Join the Work Happening Across Western North Carolina
untitled-design1
WNC Educators

Post a project, idea, or student need. Find community partners, mentors, field experiences, guest speakers, and examples from other educators across the region.

Use CommunityShare when you want students to connect their learning to real people, places, questions, and opportunities in Western North Carolina.

There is no cost to participate.

Sign Up
untitled-design
Community Partners, Mentors, and Local Experts
Share what you can offer to teachers and students. This might include your expertise, a local challenge students could explore, feedback on student work, a field experience, mentorship, materials, or a connection to community-based work.
You do not need to have a fully designed school program. Start with what you know, what you care about, or what you can make visible to students.
Sign Up
north-carolina-center-for-resilience-and-learning
p-20-logo
Got questions?

The WNC Resilience Project is part of CommunityShare’s National Learning Ecosystem Network, a group of schools, districts, and education organizations using CommunityShare to connect classroom learning with community knowledge.

For WNC educators and partners, this space is designed to support real projects, local mentorship, community-connected learning, and the growth of a learner-centered ecosystem across the region.

Contact Us

  • Students who have struggled all year to complete lesson projects were engaged, creative and thinking about how to solve problems in their community through this CommunityShare project.

    Educator

  • I never knew how cool glass blowing could be…I also loved learning how to write a business plan for my own studio one day. I know what I want to do when I get older.

    Student

  • Our goal is to close the representation gap for females and Hispanic youth in STEM fields. CommunityShare mentors help students begin to see themselves in those professions.

    Educator

  • It was truly moving to see my daughter's eyes light up as engineering careers unfolded in front of her on our CommunityShare field trip to the design studio.

    Parent

  • CommunityShare is an essential tool for curriculum planning. CommunityShare gives my students and me access to professional resources that make what they learn in school more meaningful, relevant, and memorable.

    Principal

  • ComShare is the bridge we have been missing between educators and the vast resources of experience and practical knowledge available in the community. It gives people like me an opportunity to invest my years of experience into the next generation of innovators, creators and leaders.

    Industry Partner