Awards Database

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.   

• 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.