Environmental & Social Justice

We are pleased to announce that Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz was listed as one of Grist's 50 Fixers for 2021.

The UC Center Sacramento announced its sixth annual Emerging Scholars Award for Excellence in Research and Public Policy. The award recognizes excellence in graduate student research with a direct impact on public policy. Recipients of the Emerging Scholars Award receive a $500 prize and deliver an invited policy lecture at the UC Center.

Isa Gaillard is working with The Greenlining Institute's Environmental Equity team as a Program Manager for the community of practice project. For this project, the institute is partnering with Forth to develop a national community of practice that will include organizations across five states and will focus on advancing clean and equitable transportation for all. The community of practice format balances the community, networking, and learning components of an educational cohort while also maintaining the policy advocacy focus of a coalition.

In November 2020 Environmental Health News annouced their second round of Agents of Change in Environmental Health fellows, which includes Regan Patterson, a Transportation Equity Research Fellow at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. From the EHN website: Amplifying voices of next generation environmental health and justice leaders has grown in relevance and urgency as we face a public health pandemic, economic collapse, racial injustice, and increasing effects of climate change.

Candice Youngblood has received a $20,000 grant from Aerie to develop Youth on Root, a state-wide youth leadership program focusing on environmental health disparities. Youth on Root seeks to be a healing space and educational resource for high schoolers in low-income communities. The initiative was featured on Forbes magazine's website:

For decades, families across a swath of southeast Los Angeles County have lived in an environmental disaster zone, their kids playing in yards polluted with brain-damaging lead while they wait on a state agency to remove contaminated soil from thousands of homes. Now, the cleanup faces even greater uncertainty. A bankruptcy plan by Exide Technologies, which operated the now-closed lead-acid battery smelter in Vernon that is blamed for the pollution, would allow the site to be abandoned with the remediation unfinished.

Abstract

Nigel Golden presented the 2020 Ambrose Jearld Jr. Lecture on Diversity and Inclusion in July. His remarks focused on the importance of addressing the cultural and structural barriers to full participation by marginalized communities in STEM. Golden provided a framework for addressing the systemic issues that may explain and/or address those barriers.