Awards Database

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $4,960
• Duration: 2 weeks
• Status: Completed

The Nonviolence Legacy Project/Culture of Peace Alliance will bring Dr. Bernard LaFayette, Jr. to Tucson to provide his unique historical perspective and first-hand knowledge of our country’s Nonviolent Civil Rights Movement and explore its application to environmental and social justice issues of concern to individuals and organizations in Tucson and Southern Arizona. As a Freedom Rider and co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a leader of the Selma Voter Rights Campaign, and National Program Administrator for Martin Luther King, Jr., Bernard LaFayette has spent his life carrying out instructions received from Dr. King on the evening before King’s assassination, that “the next movement must be to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence.”

Opportunities for collaboration among University of Arizona departments, cultural centers, and community-based organizations will be a primary focus of activities we are arranging prior to and during for Dr. LaFayette’s time in Tucson, including:

1. A Level I Kingian Nonviolence Institute to be offered as an Alternative Spring Break activity to train and certify students and faculty from the University of Arizona, as well as a diverse array of community members;

2. A public presentation for university and college students, faculty, and the Tucson community focused on nonviolence as a powerful organizing strategy for addressing social justice and environmental justice issues;

3. An intensive consultation session with individuals and organizations involved with environmental and social justice programs funded through the Haury Program to address challenges in community organizing and social change efforts.

Partners: UA Department of Sociology and NAU Department of Anthropology

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $37,862
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

The goal of this project is to reduce exposures to hazardous indoor air pollution from improperly burning wood and coal for heating on the Hopi reservation through the development and implementation of a DIY Healthy Heating class. There are numerous educational materials designed to teach people how to change behavior for health, but experience shows that relationships and engagement are key to successful long-term impacts on home health with people living on tribal lands. The project is focused on 1) Research on sources of alternative fuels, where Hopi people can obtain these fuels and how, and the feasibility of adopting these new alternatives, 2) Develop the DIY course and accompanying materials and deliver it, 3) Pilot test and evaluate the DIY course with a small sample of Hopi community members and evaluate the pilot data, and 4) Implement a dissemination plan including the development of PSAs.

Partners: Howard University, UA Department of Geography and Development, UA Department of Sociology

• Award Date: Jan 2018
• Award Amount: $20,000
• Duration: 4 months
• Status: Completed

The visiting associate, Tracy Perkins of Howard University, will spend four months in the Southwest working with Tracy Osborne and Brian Mayer of the University of Arizona. Perkins is creating a digital archive of a 1990s era campaign against a nuclear waste landfill to make them available to a broad audience. The project highlights the role of five tribes along the lower Colorado River in the landfill’s eventual defeat. 

Partners: UA College of Medicine and El Rio Clinics

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $50,420
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Tucson Village Farm, a program of UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Pima County Cooperative Extension, is an education-based farm that reconnects youth to a healthy food system, teaches them how to grow and prepare fresh food, and empowers them to make healthy life choices. Working with UA College of Medicine and El Rio Health Clinics, TVF is beginning a new program, "Farmacy". TVF works with at-risk families to engage them in farm-to-table, hands-on nutrition education and culinary programming. This collaboration provides families with the opportunity to significantly reduce their risk and their children’s risk of developing nutrition-based diseases by incorporating healthy foods into their diets.

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Faculty fellow McMahan, assistant research scientist with the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS), expands his work at CLIMAS to build a portfolio of projects operating at the intersection of his interest in climate/environmental risks (climate, pollution, and land use change), community based participatory methods including citizen science/monitoring and participatory mapping, to engage with communities on their environmental concerns, and to use web/data visualizations to communicate results within and outside community networks. These projects allow him to use/teach data visualization techniques (to community members, participating students, science classes in the ARAN community network), and to demonstrate compelling ways that we can communicate environmental impacts and scientific findings while building community collaborations and a research team of students.

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Faculty fellow Williams, director of Women in Science and Engineering (WISE), directs her fellowship to a collaboration with Sara Tolbert from the UA College of Education to implement an action-research project aimed at better understanding the relationship between politicized environmental science education (e.g., pedagogical approaches grounded in attention to issues of inequality and social justice) and science identity, motivation, and self-efficacy among students from groups traditionally under-represented in the sciences.

Partners: A.Y.U.D.A, INC., Red de Promotoras Paso del Norte and SERI

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $53,517
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

This project aims to increase resilience to the public health risks of dangerous extreme heat episodes in the U.S.-Mexico border region. The team focuses resilience efforts and resources on marginalized residents in underserved colonias of San Elizario, TX, and among expectant mothers. Colonias are characterized by a lack of public services and basic infrastructure, such as potable water. The team focuses on extreme heat environmental justice, because: residents of colonias and expectant mothers are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, risks are amplified by \ substandard housing and infrastructure, and heat risks are projected to increase. The collaboration will co-develop, implement, and evaluate a certified heat-health risk-training program and neighborhood network building strategy; develop and evaluate low-cost interventions to reduce negative heat-health impacts to residents and expectant mothers; and organize a prototype border-wide learning network, to improve heat-health preparedness. The team will produce bilingual training curricula, educational materials, project reports and evaluation— communicated to stakeholders and partners. These efforts will promote increased capacity to address heat-health risks, cross-fertilization of ideas between partners and among prospective learning network communities—to strengthen the capacities of populations at risk to heat waves, and improved understanding of heat-health risks and risk communication leading to more sustained and longer-term impacts including improved public understanding of risks, and reduced vulnerabilities to heat waves.

Partners: San Xavier District Tohono O'odham, Pascua Yaqui Nation, TUSD, SUSD, San Xavier Mission School, Indigenous Strategies, PCC, Modern Reflections

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $599,971
• Duration: 3 years
• Status: Completed

The overall vision of STEM RISE Arizona (Renewing Initiative & Sustaining Environment) is to endow students with a culturally relevant, project-based learning experience through which they gain a relevant understanding of math and science concepts to break math barriers which can prevent educational and economic opportunities. Developing the necessary math skills opens the door to advance math courses by 12th grade. These opportunities and skills will increase the number of underserved youth placing into higher prerequisite math courses required in STEM fields including environmental majors at Pima Community College and the University of Arizona, reduce the number of underserved youth testing into remedial math, and to inspire underserved Native American and Hispanic youth to pursue STEM studies and careers including those in environmental fields.

Partners: UA James E. Rogers School of Law

• Award Date: Jul 2017
• Award Amount: $99,788
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

This 2-year project will introduce YWCA, UA and community leaders to alternative development models, including the principles used by BRAC International, the world’s largest non-governmental organization (NGO), in order to pilot a strategy that has the potential for community wealth building, environmental sustainability and greater resilience for the people of South Tucson and beyond. the evidence shows that conventional development models fail the Southwest Doughnut test. New models are needed. BRAC International, ranked the #1 NGO in the world in 2016, is working on multiple continents in communities very similar to South Tucson to reduce poverty and improve livelihoods, break the cycle of poverty, and empower marginalized and vulnerable people. But BRAC has yet to penetrate the North American continent. This project will bring BRAC’s entrepreneurial experience and knowledge to bear on our region’s most pressing challenge.

• Award Date: Mar 2017
• Award Amount: $24,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Alison Deming, Professor, Department of English at UA College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, is a poet and essayist and writes about nature and science. In 2014, the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice granted professor Deming a Distinguished Chair award.   

In 2015, professor Deming launched the Gran Manan Field Studies in Writing Program to bring students from the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program to Grand Manan Island in the Canadian Maritimes to work on research and writing to create place-based literature that explores how the arts and literature can contribute to our understanding of environment and climate change. In 2017, the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program launched a companion program, Field Studies Southwest Program, aimed for MFA students spend two weeks in southern Arizona exploring how literary and documentary arts can create humane responses to environmental, social justice and border issues in the region.

The new southwest project is coordinated by recent MFA alumnus (and Grand Manan Field Studies alum) Francisco Cantú. Associate Professor Susan Briante serves as faculty facilitator. Ethnobotanist and Patagonia resident Gary Paul Nabhan also serves as a consultant. Participants work in collaboration with the Borderlands Earth Care Youth Institute, a program sponsored by the Borderlands Habitat Institute, engaging culturally diverse youth in hands-on restoration work of the local ecosystem while providing leadership and educational opportunities. Students also visit migrant shelters, the Border Community Alliance, and other organizations working for social justice on the border.

• Award Date: Mar 2017
• Award Amount: $35,000
• Duration: 2.5 years
• Status: Completed

Nina Rabin was Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law where she served as Director of the Bacon Immigration Law and Policy Program, an interdisciplinary program on immigration law and policy. In August 2018, Nina started working as Director of the Immigrant Family Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law. Mrs. Rabin's project focuses on efforts to bring more resources, expertise, and attention to bear on the immigration courts in Tucson and Eloy, Arizona.

As immigration enforcement increases, there will be more pressure on the immigration court system to process cases quickly. It is necessary to ensure refugees and immigrants are receiving due process. Rabin proposes three efforts. First, work closely with the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project to organize a series of trainings, and develop online and print materials for pro bono attorneys. The trainings and materials would cover topics including representation in bond proceedings, gender-based asylum claims, and other immigration relief for long-term residents with U.S. citizen children. Second, launch an organize a court-monitoring project to track what is happening in immigration courtrooms in Tucson and Eloy. Third and finally, Rabin would set aside a small fund to be devoted to media documentation of the work. Mrs. Rabin believes it is essential to tell the stories of the immigrants and refugees so that the narrative is not dominated by fear-inducing images.

Shefali Milczarek‐Desai, Assistant Clinical Professor at UA Immigrant Justice Clinic & Workers' Rights Clinic, took the lead of the project after Mrs. Rabin left. Milczarek-Desai will continue Rabin's legacy by 1) Creating training materials for pro bono attorneys to represent immigrants and asylum seekers in detention and deportation proceedings; 2)Training pro bono attorneys and student interns to provide direct representation to immigrants and asylum-seekers in detention and deportation proceedings; 3) Providing student interpreters and translators to assist non-Spanish speaking attorneys; and 4) Documenting immigration justice work through film and storytelling.

Milczarek has experience in training and mentoring J.D. and B.A. law students to become the next generation of legal professionals dedicated to providing access to justice by advocating for vulnerable and marginalized populations with client-centered and cross-cultural representation in the inextricably linked areas of (a) immigration and asylum law, and (b) immigrant workers’ labor and employment rights law. She has collaborated with community partners, including Keep Tucson Together (KTT), the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project (FIRRP), the Mexican Consulate, the International Rescue Committee, the Southside Workers’ Center, Nuestras Raices (Pima County Librarians), and the Arizona Employment Lawyer’s Association, to widely disseminate knowledge of legal rights and support community action. Also, she's been engaged in Research, Writing, Policy Recommendations, and Advocacy that result in long-term, sustainable practices, and institutions. 

Partners: Sonoran Institute and Watershed Management Group

• Award Date: Jan 2017
• Award Amount: $79,153
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

This project works with community groups and non-profits to improve equity and justice issues around green infrastructure and urban connectivity along the Liberty Bike Boulevard, 4.85-mile route of existing residential bike routes on Tucson’s southside. The work focuses on harnessing community interest, non-profit study and action, and city activity through community-university partnership. Year one of the project focused on developing the project activities and dialogues to begin to shape the community engagement process with particular emphasis on the partner network. The team will focus on engagement at the neighborhood level in year two.

Partners: Eric Dhruv (Ironwood Tree Experience), Melodie Lopez (Indigenous Strategies)

• Award Date: Jan 2017
• Award Amount: $49,309
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Lack of male participation in education and tribal lifeways related to land-use practices and management is a key environmental and social justice issue in Indian Country today. Youth engagement in these areas is also necessary for building sustainable Native nations. Very little research discusses the social justice issue of Native boys’ engagement, even among educational initiatives targeting boys and young men of color. Few social justice programs targeting boys and men of color, in turn, speak to land-use issues and environmental justice. This project  investigates and documents Native boys’, young men and leaders’ perspectives on Native youth engagement and environmental justice issues, creates resources highlighting promising programs and educational approaches for engaging Native boys and young men in educational pathways and environmental justice issues related to tribal land use and management, fosters intercultural and intergenerational discussion of Native boys’ and young men’s perspectives on engagement, education, and environmental issues and possibilities, creates an intertribal and intercultural network of youth, tribal leaders and educators focused on social justice and environmental collaboration, knowledge-sharing and problem-solving and plans related educational program changes in the College of Education at UA, the Native Educational Alliance, and the Ironwood Tree Experience while identify new collaborative program and action research opportunities to increase Native youth engagement in education and tribal lifeways related to the environment.

• Award Date: Jan 2017
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Faculty fellow Vasiliki Karanikola, research scientist with the University of Arizona’s Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department, works with marginalized communities on the Navajo Nation lands to improve access to clean water. Installation of water purification systems which use alternative energy sources, such as solar, treat water sources with impaired quality. This work also provides opportunities for growth by creating business models for vulnerable communities reliant on improved water, food and energy circumstances. Karanikola also serves as faculty advisor to Engineers Without Border – University of Arizona Chapter which provides engineering consulting services to the Nalwoodi Denzhone Community, a non-profit organization of the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona. Karanikola is spending the 2017-18 academic term at Yale University to perfect analytical skills critical to her work and to her department.

• Award Date: Jan 2017
• Award Amount: $76,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Faculty fellow Wilder, research scientist with the Institute of the Environment, is interim director of Tumamoc Hill, a facility of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.  His fellowship provides support for Wilder to renew the vision of outreach and research at Tumamoc Hill as well as to expand his biological research in South America.