When Dartmouth President Sian Beilock visited Miami earlier this year, she paused to recognize someone in the room. “We’re producing global leaders on this issue,” she told the gathering, before calling out David Duckenfield ’88, chair of the Rockefeller Center Board of Visitors and a founder of Miami Climate 365, whose work, she said, exemplifies what happens “when we connect across generations, across ideas.” It was a fitting tribute to an initiative that has become one of the more compelling stories in American climate action, and one with unmistakably Big Green roots.
A City That Was Always the Opening Slide
David Duckenfield spent years traveling the world, watching a pattern emerge. “As a State Department official, I attended climate conferences around the world where Miami was always the opening slide,” he said. “I came home convinced that if the world was focused on Miami’s vulnerabilities, then Miami needed a stronger way to work together. That’s what Miami Climate 365 is all about.”
The result of that conviction is Miami Climate 365 (MC365), a collective impact initiative launched in December 2024 with support from the Knight Foundation. The initiative brings together residents, institutions, businesses, and civic organizations across Miami-Dade County to address the region’s most pressing climate threats, extreme heat, flooding, and sea level rise, through sustained, year-round collaboration. Miami-Dade is among the most climate-vulnerable counties in the United States, and MC365 was designed to meet the scale of that challenge with something the region had been missing: centralized coordination.
“I founded Miami Climate 365 because I believe Miami already has the talent, innovation, and passion to become the world’s leading model for climate resilience,” Duckenfield said. “What we needed was a backbone that could connect people, align efforts, and turn great ideas into collective action, 365 days a year.”
The initiative’s flagship event, Miami Climate Week, is emerging as a regional counterpart to the widely recognized New York Climate Week, mobilizing residents and organizations through workshops, forums, and volunteer efforts. Now in its second year, it drew the attention of President Beilock herself, who noted that it had brought together multiple Dartmouth alumni spanning generations, a detail that speaks to something intentional in how Duckenfield has built his team.
A Pipeline with Dartmouth DNA
From the beginning, Duckenfield has leaned on the Dartmouth network in building out MC365. Angel Aguilar ’22 joined as program manager, a hire that itself set off a chain of Dartmouth connections. Aguilar went on to recruit Cesar Hernandez ’27 as an intern, while Marcella Arsenen ’28 joined as a Winterim intern, both with ties to the Rockefeller Center. Gina Lam ’92 serves as an Executive Advisor and Producer, and Aliya Dhanji ’25 works as an advisory board liaison. The initiative also partners with the Dartmouth Climate Alliance.
“Dartmouth has always emphasized collaboration in service of something larger than ourselves,” Duckenfield said. “One of the most gratifying aspects of launching Miami Climate 365 has been seeing that spirit continue through the slate of fellow Dartmouth alums and current interns who I’ve brought on to the team and have stepped forward to help build a stronger, more resilient Miami.”
That spirit, of being trusted to contribute, not merely to observe, comes through vividly in the experience of Hernandez, a sophomore from the class of 2027 who joined MC365 as a Winterim intern.
“More Than a Line on a Résumé”
For Cesar Hernandez, “Many of the most meaningful connections I made trace back to the Rockefeller Center, whose support made the Miami Climate 365 opportunity possible in the first place,” he reflected.
What he found in Miami went well beyond a typical internship. Day-to-day mentorship from Aguilar and Duckenfield shaped how he approached real professional challenges: structuring sponsorship decks, conducting outreach to partner organizations, preparing for high-stakes meetings with the City of Miami mayor’s team and the Miami-Dade County mayor’s team.
“Without their advice and confidence in me, I would not have been able to contribute the way I did,” Hernandez said. “More than that, these relationships deepened my understanding of the Dartmouth network as something that shows up in concrete, consequential ways.”
He left Miami with practical professional skills, but also with something harder to quantify. “All of this, while I was living entirely on my own for the first time, in a city I had never called home,” he said, “which transformed the internship from a line on a résumé into an early, honest glimpse of what my professional career might actually look like.”
Hernandez was quick to acknowledge those who helped make the experience possible, including Jay Davis at the First-Generation Office and Bob Coates at the Rockefeller Center, who, alongside the MC365 staff, trusted him to rise to the opportunity.
A Model That Travels
What MC365 is attempting in Miami-Dade, building a coordinating structure that connects disparate actors around shared climate goals, sustaining momentum not just during annual events but throughout the year, is the kind of approach that climate advocates have long argued is necessary for cities facing compounding environmental pressures. Miami’s particular combination of vulnerabilities, demographics, and civic energy makes it a consequential test case.
If it works, it may be something other cities can learn from. That, in part, is the ambition embedded in the name: 365 days a year, not just one week.
For the Rockefeller Center, the MC365 story illustrates what a leadership pipeline can look like when it extends far beyond campus, when alumni carry forward not just individual competence, but a shared orientation toward collective action, and when current students are given real stakes in real work.
President Beilock, speaking in Miami, put it plainly: it is a perfect example, she said, of what becomes possible when Dartmouth connects across generations and across ideas.
In Miami-Dade, that connection is being put to work, one climate challenge at a time.