Awards Database

Partners: Borderlinks

• Award Date: Jul 2019
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Ongoing

Dr. Lee's professional and community-focused experiences shaped her values and vision as teacher, scholar, archivist, storyteller, and media-maker. Similar to the mission of the Haury Program, Dr. Lee's ongoing research centers social justice and the importance of community collaborations to increase the diversity of voices and stories that are part of the historical record. Dr. Lee founded the Arizona Queer Archives, Arizona’s first LGBTQ archives, for which has collected oral histories. In keeping with the principles of social justice media, Dr. Lee also trains community members on how to use the digital video equipment to collect oral histories within their own communities for the archives. Dr.Lee has also co-directed the Stories of Arizona’s Tribal Libraries oral history project that worked in collaboration with the Colorado River Indian Tribes, Ak-Chin Indian Community, Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, and the San Carlos Apache Nation to facilitate the recording of multiple histories related to the creation of their tribal libraries. Dr. Lee works predominantly in archival studies and media studies with a focus on what she calls dynamic and relational multiplicity so as to increase the diverse voices, stories, and bodies of knowledge as well as knowledge-making practices in media and in the archives to teach about the complex relationships in and beyond home communities to the world more broadly considered.

The Haury Faculty Fellowship would provide transformative funds to connect Dr. Lee's scholarship on storytelling back to social justice documentary filmmaking. Financial support would allow Dr. Lee to re-engage the film Aguamiel, which Dr. Lee started over ten years ago. Such an opportunity to expand the film into the Arizona/Sonora border region and to work with local communities to contribute to and collaborate on its final edit and outreach strategy is a part of Dr. Lee's greater work creating community archives with diverse populations as well as educating communities to produce their own multimedia stories and projects. Overall, Dr. Lee's work aims to amplify diverse voices to help build coalition around social justice and, importantly, Climate Justice, which is an area of study that links these projects to global equality, human rights, and historical responsibility.

Partners: University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology

• Award Date: Jul 2019
• Award Amount: $99,329
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Low-income, marginalized communities in southern metropolitan Tucson lack energy resilience and have not received the economic, environmental, and community empowerment benefits of the renewable energy economy. Few low-income families can afford the up-front costs or have the financial credit rating to obtain rooftop solar systems to lower their energy costs, and recent rate changes have made financing even more difficult. Many residents lack knowledge regarding solar technologies and have pre-existing vulnerabilities including poor housing and economic instability. They are caught in a wicked problem: they pay a higher percentage of their income for energy than others in Arizona yet have fewer opportunities to participate in solutions. Given that Tucson is predicted to get hotter, new options need to be evaluated for low-income families to reduce their energy use and yet cool their homes. Sonora Environmental Research Institute, Inc. (SERI) has been working in this community for over 14 years and will partner with the University of Arizona Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (BARA) to evaluate solar mini splits as a low-cost renewable energy option for replacing evaporative coolers and energy guzzling window air conditioners. Case studies will be developed from five pilot installations, evaluating energy savings and thermal comfort. The feasibility of a low-income loan program will be evaluated based on the results and community feedback. The program will serve as a model for other low-income communities struggling with solar installations, will increase solar energy development in southern metropolitan Tucson and promote systemic and transformational change.

Partners: Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC)

• Award Date: May 2019
• Award Amount: $600,000
• Duration: 3 years
• Status: Completed

The project A Student’s Journey will help UA Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center, SWEHSC, and Tohono O’odham Community College, TOCC, to develop and evaluate a year-round program to assist Tribal College and University (TCU) students to transition into four-year colleges successfully. Three cadres of students (60 total) will develop knowledge about environmental and social justice, skills and confidence to pursue four-year degrees and work experience in Tribal departments. Formative evaluation will create improvements over the course of the project. Student surveys will measure new knowledge and confidence about matriculating into baccalaureate degrees. TCU students can have a background or interest in many fields because the project will address those interests through the lens of environmental health and social justice. Guest lectures from The University of Arizona, other four-year universities, and Tribal departments will be arranged. Project activities include 1) recruitment, 2) preparation about choosing a career field for an internship, 3) a five-week summer internship program at the University of Arizona, 4) school year lessons to promote life skills and 5) a practicum experience working in their chosen career field within a tribal community.

Each cadre will have the opportunity to share their internship and practicum experiences in an event for fellow students and community members. Regular seminars and assignments will provide opportunities for students to reflect on the learning taking place. To promote self-knowledge and success tribal cultural understandings will be incorporated into lessons and activities, which consists of the culture, way of life, and values that are uniquely held and displayed by the Tohono O’odham. It is a lifelong journey.

Partners: UA School of Geography and Development, Manzo Elementary School, UA Community and School Garden Program and Community Gardens of Tucson

• Award Date: Jan 2019
• Award Amount: $12,713
• Duration: 3 months
• Status: Completed

Food Desert is a documentary voyaging into the dietary landscape of America modern. The film focuses on nutritional inequality, conscious sourcing, sustainable design and issues with centralized food systems. Our nation has the largest variety of foods, product quality and sourcing choice we’ve ever enjoyed. Yet this isn’t geographical consistent. In lower income communities, rural and urban, access to fresh and nutritionally dense food is limited or simply too expensive. For lower income families, the question of dinner is regularly answered with cheap, unhealthy meal options.

This project will connect with farmers, community organizers, nutritionists, researchers, chefs, nonprofits and others as we work to understand the state of America’s diet in 2018. We’re going beyond the traditional elements of production and supply to look at why certain communities have unreliable access to affordable, nutritious foods. In some areas, heavily processed meals are the cheapest, easiest and sometimes only option. Tucson is a desert city located in the rapidly warming Southwest U.S. region that has several organizations working directly to address the challenges of nutritional access and urban agriculture. Desert communities present unique challenges for those faced with geographic, economic or transportation hardships. For those people, both temporary and long-term issues can prevent easy access to affordable, high-quality foods. Food Desert is an initiative designed to change that. We will explore radical self-reliance through urban gardening, the power of being able to cook and how to use community organizations to empower people in the fight against food deserts.

Partners: Step UP to Justice

• Award Date: Jan 2019
• Award Amount: $88,518
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The Renter Education for Neighborhoods and Tenants Project (RENT) is a collaboration between Step Up to Justice (SU2J) and the Innovation for Justice program (I4J) at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. Designed to reduce eviction through early and effective tenant education and empowerment, RENT recruits and trains volunteer students from the University of Arizona (UA) to work with volunteer lawyers in offering community education regarding tenant rights and responsibilities.

RENT volunteers will triage tenants’ housing education needs across three categories of assistance: tenants who need information about rights and responsibilities at the start of a lease, tenants who need assistance in documenting and communicating a habitability issue to their landlord, and tenants who need assistance negotiating with their landlord regarding an impending inability to pay rent due to unforeseen financial crisis. RENT will leverage technology to enable tenants to draft meaningful communications with their landlords and encourage conflict resolution between landlords and tenants.

RENT will serve as a national model for how to elevate tenants’ voices and encourage collaboration between tenants and landlords before a situation escalates to an eviction, thereby reducing evictions and the collateral community consequences of eviction.

Partners: University of Arizona Center for Regional Food Studies, El Rio Health Centers and African American Coalition for Health and Wellness, Inc.

• Award Date: Jan 2019
• Award Amount: $ 101,710
• Duration: 5 years
• Status: Ongoing

This collaboration is between the nonprofit Dunbar Coalition, Inc., El Rio Health Centers, the Coalition for African American Health and Wellbeing, and the UA Center for Regional Food Studies. Funds will be used to design, implement, and evaluate a two-year health and wellness education project to reclaim traditions of cultivating food and herbal remedies that provided daily sustenance for people of African and Native American diasporas. The project will be based at Dunbar Pavilion as part of a wider set of resources already present. Individuals and families will be invited to participate in free or low-cost workshops and hands-on experiences.

Building on the research of Ors. Patrisia Gonzales, Jerome Dotson, Megan Carney, and others working at the intersections of community wellness, ethnobotany, and food activism, participants will explore food and herbal-based treatments, health maintenance, and spiritual rituals rooted in practices that once served to increase the likelihood of survival for colonized peoples in this region. We will use a collaborative medicine to reclaim and affirm diverse forms of treatment and prescriptions often co-opted and commodified by the biomedical, cosmetic and pharmaceutical fields.

The core belief guiding this project is that acknowledgment and affirmation of heritage practices can interrupt and redirect the trajectory of race-based epigenetic illness and poor health outcomes for people of color. Our hypothesis is that this approach will result in empowered project participants who are prepared to participate in, develop, guide, and direct positive personal and environmental health outcomes for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Partners: UA Compost Cats and Startup Unidos

• Award Date: Jan 2019
• Award Amount: $63,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA), UA Compost Cats and Startup Unidos won a seed grant for Waste Not: Borderlands Innovations in Food Waste Management, to engage communities in research and innovative solutions to food waste management challenges in Nogales, Arizona, and the U.S.- Mexico borderlands. Every year, 60 percent of all fresh produce in the United States (November- May) arrives through the port of entry in Nogales, AZ. Over 6000 tons of that produce, much of it still fresh, end up in the Rio Rico landfill. That surplus could be turned into value-added food products or fertile compost for use in household or commercial ventures. Meanwhile, Nogales, AZ (population 21,000), while rich in cultural heritage and community pride, continues to face ongoing economic challenges, limited workforce development, and talent flight. This project addresses these realities, creating real educational and employment opportunities for young people and real solutions to issues of food surplus in the region. It does this by 1) engaging 10-15 youth in ethnographic research, documenting narratives of cultural traditions around food waste, 2) creating business innovation opportunities, and 3) building greater community awareness of and engagement with the borderlands produce industry. It builds on strong partnerships and ethical practices of community engagement, foregrounding the importance of traditional knowledge to inform inventive solutions to pressing community needs.

Partners: Habitat for Humanity Tucson and City of Tucson Ward 3 Council Office

• Award Date: Jul 2018
• Award Amount: $59,327.95
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The project, “A New Habitat for Manufactured Housing in Tucson,” is a collaboration between the  University of Arizona’s School of Geography and Development, Habitat for Humanity Tucson, and the City of Tucson’s Ward council office. Our aim is to transform Tucson’s most socially and environmentally vulnerable manufactured housing (MH) communities into healthy, sustainable, and just places to live. This partnership has four  goals: (i) deepen understanding of the intersections between social (e.g. eviction) and environmental vulnerability (e.g. energy poverty) in MH communities through workshops, focus groups, and interviews; (ii) develop indices and maps to identify Tucson’s most socially and environmentally vulnerable MH communities; (iii) recommend policy interventions to enhance MH quality of life as well as the social and environmental resilience; and (iv) refurbish and build new homes for a candidate MH community. 

This project will construct a network of organizations working with vulnerable MH residents to dismantle barriers to the realization of social and environmental justice. In addition to new and repaired homes, leaders will produce peer-reviewed articles, presentations, and infographics that enhance understanding of the connections between MH and several forms of social and environmental vulnerability. The products of this research partnership will amplify the agency of marginalized groups by articulating the priorities of MH residents in planning and policy-making processes. This project will form the foundation of a long-term research program focused on housing justice in the Southwest and serve as a springboard to secure external funding from the Arizona Department of Housing and the National Science Foundation.

Partners: Arizona Western College

• Award Date: Jul 2018
• Award Amount: $130,852
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Ongoing

Wildlife-human interactions and insect pressure are common in rural areas where agricultural land has taken over wild habitat. Habitat loss forces displaced wildlife and insects to enter fresh produce fields seeking food, water, and shelter. Wildlife poses a risk to food safety by potentially introducing foodborne pathogens, while insects can decimate crops.

Yuma, Arizona is the Winter Vegetable Capital of the World. Historically, growers destroyed native habitat around their fields for food safety assuming that wildlife would leave. But studies have documented the opposite. As a result, new food safety regulations by FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act and Global Good Agricultural Practices call for the use of co-management of wildlife and agriculture. Biological corridors connect habitat so wildlife can live successfully on the edges of human-dominated environments. In the case of produce fields, agricultural eco-corridors do the same, supporting both wild animals and insects at field edges. Through habitat restoration around fresh produce fields, growers will support wildlife with a functioning, balanced mini-ecosystem, preventing wildlife and insects from entering the fields, thereby decreasing food safety risks, insect pressure, and pesticide use.

The UA Yuma Agricultural Center is working with the Arizona Western College to provide underserved students with internships to develop and monitor agricultural eco-corridors in Yuma where many students strive for science-based agricultural careers. They will gain valuable field experience, and through monthly meetings, students will explore current topics in agriculture, which will develop their critical thinking skills. They will also conduct outreach through public forums to involve the community.

Partners: Alianza Indigena Sin Fronteras / Indigenous Alliance Without Borders

• Award Date: Jul 2018
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Ongoing

Faculty fellow Patrisia Gonzales specializes in Indigenous ways of knowing and Indigenous medicine. She obtained her Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She has received various human rights awards and her work has been cited in various anthologies and scholarly endeavors. 

Doctor Patrisia Gonzales works creating Indigenous networks to increase connectivity and relationality, which are protective factors that allow people to adapt amid change, especially unwanted changes with unpredictable consequences. Her research focuses on key values that are the ground of many Indigenous systems and align with the model's aims to strengthen the "social floor": relationship, respect, reciprocity, responsibility, regeneration, and redistribution. 

This fellowship will help her to apply her expertise on Indigenous knowledge systems towards Indigenous alliances and networks among peoples impacted by the U.S.-Mexico border through the non-profit Alianza Indigena sin Fronteras that provides the Indigenous voice to border policies. The fellowship would strengthen the Alliance through youth action and, in turn, strengthen Indigenous youth by connecting them with elder Indigenous activists in applied learning projects that impact this bio-cultural region.

Partners: Southwest Folklife Alliance, Nogales Community Development,UA Libraries, Border Journalism Network, UA Anthropology, UA SBS-UNAM, Global Environmental Studies

• Award Date: Jul 2018
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Ongoing

Dr. González de Bustamante conducts research on the history and development of television news and media in Latin America (mainly Mexico, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Brazil); and violence against journalists in Mexico. 

As a journalist and historian, Dr. González is interested in creating an accurate and diverse record of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and its people, during the actual unprecedented economic, political, cultural, societal, and environmental change. Dr. González will use a community-based/civic engagement approach in Ambos Nogales to build partnerships with members of grassroots organizations in an effort to strengthen this binational community through the inclusion of underrepresented voices into the public discourse. This fellowship will help her to develop an undergraduate certificate in journalism and anthropology of the borderlands in which UA students will learn about the borderlands and become familiar with conceptual frameworks that will help them to understand and appreciate this unique region. High Schooler from underserved schools in Ambos Nogales will actively participate in producing their own stories about their community.

Partners: Flowers and Bullets, YWCA

• Award Date: Jul 2018
• Award Amount: $599,925
• Duration: 3 years
• Status: Ongoing

Access to nutritious, affordable food and a social and natural environment that support the health, welfare, and intellectual growth of children are the foundation of the University of Arizona’s Community and School Garden Program’s (CSGP), the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona’s (CFB) Community Food Resources Center (CFRC) and the Tucson Unified School District’s (TUSD) partnership. For over seven years we have worked together to secure the just distribution of resources and opportunity and a healthy environment in which to thrive through the provision and support of school gardens. We jointly seek funding from the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Social and Environmental Justice (HP) to strengthen and extend the geographical reach of our intertwined efforts toward social and environmental justice. With HP funding we will more widely broadcast our outreach model in support of Title I schools (educational entities with high numbers/percentages of low-income students) that operate beyond our current service area. This expansion will be premised on securing additional personnel, developing a new training model, and implementing new programming in order to support existing and new school gardens, train teachers in garden-based and ecology curriculum, and develop a strong and independent teacher/school network to sustain initiatives implemented beyond the three years of HP funding. We will employ the experience we gain from the expansion of our current efforts to submit for publication a popular book that describes our collaborative model and how others around the region and country might use it to benefit the same low-income school populations our partnership serves.

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $13,750
• Duration: 11 weeks
• Status: Completed

In order to maximize educational outreach and improve local social justice work, New York City-based writer Gabriel Schivone proposes a unique dual-genre project exploring how the expansive Central American private security industry relates to transnational migration through the Sonoran Desert corridor. Author Gabriel Schivone aims to interview Guatemalan migrant/refugee communities in Tucson, and then travel to Guatemala City to interview U.S. Embassy officials and their top-approved private security contractors spanning British, American, and Israeli conglomerates. These interviews will be the basis of a graphic novel.

Schivone uncovered this topic while researching his forthcoming book Making the New Illegal: How Decades of US Involvement in Central America Triggered the Modern Wave of Immigration by Prometheus/Penguin Random House, with a foreword by Agnese Nelms Haury Chairperson Noam Chomsky. Now Schivone seeks to focus his next book on this topic while utilizing the materials to support community organizing. Schivone works comfortably in multiple genres fusing academic research with sci-fi graphic fiction series for local young adults. His data set will be used to create composite fictional characters in the series, distributed to local TUSD and UA communities. 

Through his UA faculty and community partners in Alliance for Global Justice on Tucson’s southside, Schivone strengthens community engagement capacity, gets maximum exposure to a vast cross-section of Tucson audiences that may not otherwise be aware of the issues. His project leaves its mark by informing public audiences as well as social justice organizers alike and thereby improving critical work. In this interview, Schivone talks to the Journal of Palestine Studies about the multi-billion-dollar surveillance technology industry and how U.S., Israeli, and Mexican state and corporate entities collaborate in the “laboratory” of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Learn more about Schivone's work. 

Partners: Sister Jose Women's Center

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $102,550
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The Hermanas Building Confidence, Readiness, Empowerment, Action, Transformation and Employment for Women ("Hermanas CREATE') project promotes social inclusion and well-being of chronically homeless women through an established partnership between Sister Jose Women's Center (SJWC) and the University of Arizona's Southwest Institute for Research on Women (UA-SIROW). SJWC tends to the care and nurture of homeless women in a welcoming and safe environment, where women receive direct services (e.g., food, clothing, a shower, shelter) to meet basic survival needs, and take respite from the challenges of homelessness and extreme poverty. Hermanas CREATE is a novel program of social justice that provides an income source for women as they begin the intense personal work of charting their path to a sustainable life through active participation. Hermanas CREATE also provides an opportunity for cohorts of women to work together to remove obstacles to entitled benefits, experience personal growth and build self-confidence, practice wellness and make healthy choices, all in a trusted and familiar environment that seeks to empower rather than extend dependence. Their work seeks to: (1) Increase understanding of needs and strengths of chronically homeless women in Tucson, Arizona, through a yearly community needs assessment. (2) Inform about the complexity of the experiences, and needs and strengths of women by developing a gender-informed White Paper that will provide a community-wide resource; and (3) Implement Hermanas CREATE to expand SJWC services and programming as a forum for social justice.

Partners: Iskashitaa Refugee Network

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $39,964
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

This project aims to increase food security and enhance food justice for resettled refugees in Tucson and is being implemented through collaboration between the UA Department of Nutritional Science (NSC), Iskashitaa Refugee Network (IRN), community and homeowners associations, refugees, volunteers, and UA Students. The purpose is to work towards greater harvesting efficiency and sustainability, increase community harvests, maximize partnerships and local involvement. The main goals are: 1) Improve environmental justice in Tucson through pro-active neighborhood involvement and a systematic outreach program, 2) Improve social justice for refugees in Tucson through participation in IRN activities, 3) Improve organizational project planning, monitoring and evaluations (PME) capacity or IRN staff/interns/volunteers.