Grants

The Initiative provides grants to SCU faculty members to conduct research on environmental justice, especially involving a community-based approach. 

The application due date for our next round of grants will be in January 2025. For reference, see our April 2024 request for proposals.

This project studies the increasing threats to levees from natural hazards under climate change, particularly as they affect disadvantaged communities. The research focuses on Pajaro, CA, an unincorporated community in Monterey County that experienced catastrophic flooding in March 2023. Through a community-engaged process including photovoice, workshops, and interviews, the interdisciplinary research team will explore the perspectives of this community impacted by historic injustices and climate risk. The study will help to develop alternative risk and climate resilience frameworks guided by community voices and environmental justice principles. This grant was co-funded by the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

This community-based research will collaborate with local ethnographers and 50 women foresters organized by the Centre d’Appui à la Gestion Durable des Forêts Tropicales (CAGDFT), a local community partner. The study will illuminate how women can select tree species that have cultural, economic, and environmental value for restoring forests to withstand climatic hazards and erosion, and reduce the long journeys that women travel to obtain goods and services formerly provided by the forest. The project will assess what an African indigenous religious approach can bring to the UN’s Life on Land sustainable development goal, taking a holistic and intersectional view of development provided by cultural and theological wisdom about community forests. Jesuit School of Theology students will help to analyze the interview data, which will be published in a journal article and used as a teaching case. This grant was co-funded by the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

This project supports the purchase, cultivation, digitization, and public interpretation of Native plants for SCU’s Forge Garden. This work will support Ohlone cultural knowledge sharing and public education about land stewardship, cultivation, and uses of plants for traditional practices like basketry and food preparation. Ohlone youth will engage with plants during an annual summer cultural camp, while SCU students and community members will learn from interpretive materials featured at the Forge, including in-person signage and a stop on the Thamien Ohlone augmented reality campus walking tour that is currently in development.

The Youth for Justice Project fosters youth sociopolitical development via art and advocacy action projects. Through participatory action research with students at a Jesuit middle school in downtown San José, youth are supported in their understanding of intersecting environmental justice issues impacting their quality of life. The goal of the YJP is to center youth in efforts toward actualizing sustainability for systems-impacted communities in the Silicon Valley.

Access to water is essential for life and health, yet the distribution of water in the Philippines remains inequitable. In partnership with Alternative Indigenous Development Foundation, Inc (AIDFI), this project seeks to understand the transformative effects access to water has on physical, financial, and social health in remote borangays (villages) in the Philippines.  The grant will support the research partners to supplement quantitative survey data with qualitative data that will provide a more rich and nuanced understanding of the effects of access to running water.

This project will examine climate justice issues in Tanzania, where vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by high levels of poverty and reliance on rainfed agriculture. The research will investigate how smallholder farmers are affected by and react to climate change, and how adaptation is mediated by social differences. In particular, women and men experience climate change differently, with adaptive capacities varying by access to resources, knowledge, and institutions. This grant will support the research team to conduct scoping activities, explore research collaborations with Tanzanian institutions and researchers, identify community partners, and visit potential sites with varied agro-ecological systems. This grant was co-funded by the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship.

This project will leverage connections to local community gardens and urban farms to help fight food insecurity and raise awareness of the nitrogen cycle’s role in food production in collaboration with engineering students in ENGR 1L - Introduction to Engineering Lab.  The grant will help support the School of Engineering to reimagine its first-year curriculum to focus on sustainability and grand challenges for engineering, creating new student research opportunities that offer a multidisciplinary perspective and include human-centered design to address environmental challenges and their social and societal impact. This grant was co-funded by the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship

This study uses surveys to investigate how people with disabilities prepare for climate-related disasters. Together with community partner United Spinal, the project will work to rectify the disproportionate impact of climate change on disabled populations by addressing the current lack of disaster preparedness among people with mobility disabilities by studying the impact of providing disaster kits and education outreach.

Power outages are very costly. Investment in grid modernization will save the U.S. economy billions of dollars, but this investment doesn’t seem to be equitably shared. This community-based research project assesses loss of electricity in low-income communities and strategies to help these communities to benefit from reliable and affordable clean energy.

The project involves conducting a research-practice partnership with beginning STEM teachers and their students to critically examine and take conscious actions on climate and environmental issues. This partnership will support students to act as rightful youth experts in examining and exposing environmental injustices experienced by students’ local and global communities.

The Youth for Justice Project is an afterschool program in downtown San José that supports preadolescent youth in developing their sociopolitical citizenship through a critical ethnic studies art-centered curriculum. The project supports middle school youth in their understanding of racial and environmental justice and centers youth voices within communities experiencing systemic inequities.

This project will augment a student-developed website illustrating how current racial segregation and COVID-19 trends in San Jose, CA are shaped by redlining practices. Through outreach with community organizations we aim to further develop this interactive tool to meet the education and advocacy goals of organizations working at the intersections of environmental justice and public health.

Extreme heat harms communities in unequal ways, with people who are vulnerable most affected. There is limited evidence about how heat affects people who are unhoused. Our community-based research assesses (1) heat exposure for people living in homeless encampments in San Jose; and (2) strategies that people who are homeless use to cope with extreme heat.

The purpose of this project is to formulate a participatory research process with parents to collect data from students at Gardner and Washington Elementary schools who participate in SCU’s Center for Sustainability Garden Clubs and Garden Labs. The grant will allow for students and parents to work together with SCU partners on a community-defined project related to environmental justice and healthy living in their community.

This project supports the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe’s efforts to restore traditional landscape management practices via its Preservation Foundation. We seek to recover traditional ecological knowledge—including information on plants, animals, and gathering places—from early anthropological field notes to contribute to the environmental health and sovereignty of the contemporary tribal community.

Reclamation promises to reinforce coastlines against rising seas, but it also threatens to draw people to the coast, compounding risks and displacing existing communities. In this project, we partner with Walhi, an environmental advocacy NGO, to document the effects of reclamation on wealthy and poor coastal communities in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

This community-based, environmental justice project invites children/youth/families from Santa Maria Urban Ministries programs in the greater Washington neighborhood of San Jose to imagine themselves as artistic creators and protectors of the climate. Participants shape research questions and goals that are culturally and neighborhood-specific, investigate relevant scientific concepts/findings/solutions, express their feelings and visions through higher-order thinking in the visual and performing arts, and present their creations, discoveries, and advocacy plans in the first youth-led tUrn Climate Creativity headliner at SCU.

This study uses interviews to investigate how disability identity and information seeking affect the range of potential responses to climate change. It will help to rectify the disproportionate impact of climate change on disabled populations by addressing the current lack of research on how people with mobility disabilities prepare for and deal with environmental change.