Funding Opportunity: Building the Next Generation of STEMM Leaders in the Field of Environmental Justice

Ripples to Waves: Expanding Place-Based, Justice-Centered Environmental Curriculum on the Gulf Coast

Project Director: Claire Anderson, Ripple Effect Water Literacy Project
Award: $804,821

Summary: This project builds on one of the first local adaptations of OpenSciEd curriculum in the U.S., drawing on the expertise of local partners and OpenSciEd instruction designers to provide students with multiple weeks of in-school instruction and field-based research to investigate locally relevant water issues that disproportionately impact Black residents of the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin region. The project will develop three justice-based water literacy curriculum units, including one focused on hurricanes that will culminate with students developing Youth Participatory Action Research projects to understand how hurricanes have impacted their communities and what actions they can take for a more safe and equitable future.

Houston Environmental Action Learning (HEAL) for High School Teachers and Students

Project Director: Carolyn Nichol, Rice University
Award: $499,204

Summary: This two-year program will support a total of 96 students and 24 environmental science teachers through an immersive two-week summer experience focused on environmental justice, with follow-up sessions each fall and winter. Students will engage in hands-on learning and field work to build scientific skills and stimulate ideas for action research projects that reflect the challenges faced by their own communities. Led by a diverse interdisciplinary group of Rice University faculty and researchers, participants will examine urban land development, air and water quality, and climate change at the local level, confronting the impacts that these environmental hazards pose on health and resilience in the Houston area. In tandem, the HEAL program will support high school environmental science teachers through professional development in environmental justice education and project-based learning pedagogy.

I-DIEM HERricane Aftermath

Project Director: Mia Sanati, Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management (I-DIEM)
Award: $747,384

Summary: HERricane Aftermath is a two-week summer day camp for female high school students. The curriculum combines classroom learning, field trips, and interactions with experts and community members to provide a comprehensive understanding of climate change's diverse impacts. Participants will study the science behind global warming and climate models, investigate the effects on natural systems, infrastructure, and public health, and address the challenges faced by underserved communities. The camp emphasizes active engagement in devising practical, innovative solutions that can tackle environmental injustices and promote climate resilience from an equity-centered perspective.

Targeting 25-30 young women from grades 10 to 12 per location, the program prioritizes inclusion, focusing on underrepresented groups including racial and ethnic minorities, low-income students, LGBTQ+ youth, students with disabilities, and others disproportionately affected by environmental issues.

Exploring Environmental Health Hazards with STYLE (Sustained Training for Youth Leadership in the Environment)

Project Director: Amy Neblett, Artist Boat
Award: $499,785

Summary: This place-based experiential program will focus on the use of science and art to understand climate change, sea-level rise, and extreme storm flooding and the pollution left behind after these events, along with addressing the stress and anxiety of living in a place where these environmental hazards are a present concern. Engaging 800 students and eight teachers from four high schools, participants will examine environmental hazards in their local communities through a series of classroom-based workshops and eco art kayak adventures. Additionally, 100 students of those 800 will participate in a paid field mentorship program where they will work with art educators and environmental health researchers to investigate and understand the effects of environmental hazards on the health and resiliency of their local communities.

Environmental Justice Project LEAD with Underserved Youth and Communities through STEMM Utility, Advocacy, and Decisions

Project Director: Ryan Culbertson, American STEM Alliance
Award: $544,582

Summary: This project will bring together a diverse team of practitioners in education, environmental sciences, and STEMM fields to develop a cohesive place-based environmental justice curriculum for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley’s Pre-freshman Enrichment Program. Participating high school students will explore environmental inequalities and health disparities in their communities and develop potential solutions through project-based learning and student-led research. Field trips to collaboration partners will provide opportunities for students to engage in hands-on learning activities with community leaders and professionals. Through research symposiums, students will present their research to partners, university faculty and staff, local school district teachers and administrators, and their schools and local libraries. Additionally, students will be paired with faculty mentors at the university who can provide guidance to help them achieve their individual academic and career goals.

STEMM Scholars for Environmental Justice (SSEJ) Program

Project Director: Ashley Williams, University of South Alabama
Award: $947,928

Summary: This program has two components: classroom-based learning activities for STEMM scholars and mentored projects. The classroom-based learning will consist of 10 sessions covering topics related to the intersectionality of the STEMM fields and environmental justice. The program’s mentored projects use a mentored and participatory action approach to conduct needs assessments and community-engaged projects related to environmental justice. Students will be invited to present their work at school, in the community, and on the university’s campus. STEMM scholars will collectively perform a final service project of their choosing

Ripples to Waves: Developing Standards for Place-Based, Justice-Centered Environmental Science Curriculum on the Gulf Coast

Project Director (PD): Joshua Lewis
PD Organization: Tulane University
Project Location: New Orleans, LA
Total Award Amount: $1,133,149

Overview: This project undertakes the first local adaptation of OpenSciEd curriculum in the U.S., drawing on the expertise of local partners to provide students with multiple weeks of in-school instruction and fieldbased research to investigate locally relevant water issues that disproportionately impact Black and Indigenous residents of the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin region. Project team members will engage in four main activities: (1) adapting, or “localizing,” open-source, Tier 1 science curriculum (OpenSciEd) to incorporate locally relevant environmental justice water issues of Southeast Louisiana, (2) field-testing that curriculum and associated teacher professional development in Louisiana highschool classrooms, then (3) distributing the revised curriculum and teacher PD statewide through an existing network of STEM Education Centers. As a fourth component, this project will extend learning from the classroom to the field through a special independent research program for students to apply field-based protocols to ask and answer questions about an environmental justice issue they have identified in their own community. This program, called the Pathways Project, builds upon the CSED’s existing student research and internship program, and will produce adaptable lesson plans, evaluation rubrics, and templates for other communities to develop a similar project with local partners. Statelevel science education entities, including the Louisiana Department of Education STEM team, and the Board of Regents LaSTEM Centers will support this project by providing periodic reviews of the curriculum, and by providing facilities for teacher professional development and granting access to regional networks of schools and district leaders to scale the program statewide.

Providing Environmental Justice Education to Louisiana Youth

Project Director (PD): Michael Orr
PD Organization: Louisiana Environmental Action Network
Project Location: Baton Rouge, LA
Total Award Amount: $1,209,126

Overview: Built on the extensive environmental justice (EJ) history of the Louisiana Environmental Action Network (LEAN), this project will synthesize existing EJ historical archives and educational programming LEAN has accrued over decades worth of work and adapt it to a two-tiered environmental justice education program: 1.) an educational outreach program which can be utilized by educators either with LEAN's direct input and engagement, or as a standalone outreach program; 2.) an educational curriculum which can be adopted directly by educators for implementation within their classrooms. Working with partners at Tulane University, our goal is to introduce Louisiana youth, specifically STEMM students, to EJ topics that they would not be exposed to in a traditional academic setting. Early exposure to EJ content would provide youth with the means to make informed decisions with the environmental health and safety of communities in mind, whatever future career path they may take. This material will be built in coordination with a team of partners and a board of diverse advisors, all of whom bring unique and relevant insight and expertise to ensure the success of this effort. Working collaboratively, they will be in charge of building a curriculum off of LEAN’s previous work and instructional content to create adaptable educational modules that teachers everywhere can personalize to their communities and classrooms. Of specific interest to LEAN, as an empowerment organization with long standing relationships to environmental justice communities across the state, is the implementation of environmental justice education for youth within Louisiana’s environmental justice communities.

STEMMING THE TIDE: Empowering Youth to Meet Coastal Environmental Challenges

Project Director (PD): Kate Hayden
PD Organization: University of Montevallo
Project Location: Africatown, AL
Total Award Amount: $1,250,000

Overview: BSC will partner with CHESS and ACF to develop and train teachers in Africatown on environmental justice and locally relevant curriculum that aligns directly with the Alabama State science and social studies standards. The curriculum will initially focus on 6th-8th grade students attending MCTS in Africatown. It can be expanded to include other at-risk schools in the Mobile district, summer camps and/or after-school programs. This curriculum will utilize best practices in early STEM pedagogy, service-learning, and a focused theme on the connections between the local environment, community, and individual health. Students from Africatown and surrounding communities in Mobile, Alabama will explore the impacts of years of environmental injustice and pollution in their neighborhoods. Specifically, they will learn how the quality of the local environment impacts human and community health and how current policies, climate change, and industrial pollution impact schools and neighborhoods. To contextualize in-class learning, students will partner with community leaders and organizations to develop and participate in service projects funded by this grant aimed at revitalizing and restoring their neighborhoods, parks, and ecosystems. This model provides students with a sense of self-agency. Once implemented, it will create impactful learning interventions that allow students to achieve the state science and social studies standards while becoming agents of change in their communities. The culminating research and work done by students, teachers, and community partners would then be highlighted and shared with the broader community at this program’s biennial environmental justice and climate change conference.

Environmental and Climate Justice Storytellers Collective (ECJS Collective)

Project Director (PD): Beverly Wright
PD Organization: Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
Project Location: Gulf Coast States
Total Award Amount: $1,250,000

Overview: The DSCEJ is developing the ECJS Collective, in which youth take on the role of a climate journalist to tell the stories of environmental and climate injustices occurring in their communities and interview people and organizations working locally in their region, on solving the climate crisis. The ECJS Collective will build youth capacity in science practices through engaging them in collaborative design of digital storytelling templates used to interview scientists, other youth, community members, business leaders, and others about an environmental or climate justice issues important to them. Program facilitators will work across various organizations to bring leaders and knowledge holders in environmental and climate justice, science reporting, and other emerging areas through their networks including the HBCU-CBO Climate Change Consortium, Gulf Coast Equity Consortium, UCS, NBEJN, AAAS, AGU, Blacks in Geosciences, 500 Women Scientists, SACNAS, and the CJA. The relationships formed in the shared work will help provide multiple mentorship opportunities for youth in both their local contexts as well as across national networks in STEMM . In addition, the youth from each cohort will be invited back to act as program leaders for the next year’s cohort, for example year 1’s cohort 1 will come back to mentor year 2’s cohort 2. The grant will provide opportunities for these youth leaders to develop their leadership skills within the climate and EJ community to bring them directly into the STEMM workforce environment.

Texas Gulf Coast STEMM Youth Environmental Leadership Program

Project Director (PD): Elena Craft
PD Organization: Environmental Defense Fund, Inc.
Project Location: Pasadena, Fifth Ward, Pleasantville, TX
Total Award Amount: $1,243,984

Overview: Since launching the Environmental Youth Council (EYC) program in 2019, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been educating students in Houston about pollution and health disparities from environmental hazards. Implemented at high schools along the Ship Channel disproportionately impacted by pollution, the program has raised awareness within EJ communities and built capacity among youth to participate in leadership and civic engagement opportunities around environmental issues. Over the next five years, we propose to build on EYC’s success by developing an expanded, STEMM-focused leadership program that enriches the lives of a broad range of students living in atrisk communities along the Texas Gulf Coast. This STEMM leadership program components include: Expansion of STEMM curriculum for students focused on EJ and health disparities; Development of STEMM Environmental Leadership Toolkits for K-12 students accessible on and outside of campus, including summer camps and after-school programs; Establishment of a Houston Mayor’s Select Council; Creation of Programming for the “Climate and EJ Leadership in Medicine” Summit Through these components, we will apply creative, multi-faceted teaching strategies and technology, and conduct interactive activities designed to inspire learning and educate students about environmental hazards and EJ issues. EDF will supply curriculum and programming across a variety of formats tailored for students across K-12 settings in at-risk communities along the Texas Gulf Coast. Lessons and hands-on experiences will introduce students to topics in environmental health, air and water pollution, EJ, and climate change – with leadership, college prep, and STEMM careers as underlying theme

Science Education Achievement - Watershed Environmental Justice (SEA-WEJ)

Project Director (PD): Sarah Burkett
PD Organization: Sarasota County School
Project Location: Sarasota, FL
Total Award Amount: $128,733

Overview: SEA-WEJ will create a cohort of students from Sarasota County Schools that begins their high school science experience with a focus on how the environmental health of their city impacts the lives of their community beyond the static content written in textbooks. Their acquisition of knowledge will be inherently linked developing their confidence to pose and ask questions to persons of authority about issues that impact their community through their own observations. The program will endeavor to develop in students a life-long love of science and exploration of STEM careers, including roles in education, and as advocates in their community. SE-WEJ will foster knowledge about the connection between students, the environment, and community through service-learning projects linked to environmental justice; develop student digital and English literacy through presentations and communication through digital platforms; and foster critical thinking/nature and practice of science through partner-led explorations. In addition, SE-WEJ will develop life-long science learners who have a passion for making an impact throughout their local community.

Environmental Justice (EJ) Youth Expose to STEMM (YES) Program - EJ YES Program

Project Director (PD): Calvin Avant
PD Organization: Unity In The Family, Inc.
Project Location: Pensacola, FL
Total Award Amount: $529,290

Overview: Yearly we will engage four teachers and 25 at-risk economically disadvantage Black 4th & 5Th graders in a six-week summer STEMM Program. Teachers nor students have ever received any Environmental Justice Literacy (EJL) education. The project allows students to explore the environmental perils of their community; how people of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental justice and what can be done to dismantle and/or counteract the damage. Teachers receive 10 hours of EJL trainthe-trainer instruction. Enabling them to teach the EJL curriculum after the grant period has ended. 125 student students and 20 teachers will be taught EJL over the five-year grant period. All participants are enrolled or teach at Jacqueline Harris Preparatory Academy located less than 1½ miles from our research area where over 40% of students live. Our research area is Oliver Heights, Wedgewood and Rolling Hills located in Pensacola FL; three African American communities that are inundated for the past 35 years with 6 borrow pits and 11 unlined toxic landfills causing sickness and death to the residents. The project’s main object is to teach EJL to youth who are affected by legacy environmental justice issues. Armed with EJL education participants will be fully aware of environmental injustice and how to effectively respond. Project design contains project-based learning and research and data collection in science, technology engineering and mathematics (STEMM) and social/leadership development. Deliverables include instruction in environmental justice, GIS mapping, robotics, air monitoring, recycling, social and leadership skills, comprised of tours, charts, posters, videos and train-the-trainer.

Mississippi Gulf Coast Environmental Justice STEMM Leadership Development Program

Project Director (PD): Jonathan Green
PD Organization: Steps Coalition
Project Location: Gulfport, MS
Total Award Amount: $970,732

Overview: The Steps Coalition (STEPS), University of Southern Mississippi (USM), and Boys and Girls Club of the Mississippi Gulf Coast (BGCGC) will partner to develop and implement an Environmental Justice (EJ) STEMM Leadership Development Program at four Boys and Girls Clubs along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This community-driven science education program will train 6th through 12th graders in scientific modes of inquiry and analysis, while also encouraging them to consider historical, cultural, and political dimensions of regional public policies that may be better informed by EJ-oriented scientific inquiry. Learning through hands-on, citizen science activities that serve the immediate interests of black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities on the Gulf Coast, students will come to appreciate why EJ is so important to frontline BIPOC communities in the region. In the process, students will also be introduced to STEMM career tracks in Environmental Chemistry, Ecology, Geosciences, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, Health Professions, Social Sciences, and Climate Policy, any of which they might pursue in order to cultivate more climate and environmentally resilient communities in the region. The Steps Coalition, which has a long history of community organizing and advocacy in BIPOC communities on the coast, will coordinate the program. USM faculty will develop the STEMM program curriculum, provide access to its research facilities and coordinate teacher training opportunities for pre-service and retired teachers in the region. BGCGC will provide access to 6th through 12th grade students, facilities, and site resources in order to implement the program.

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Funding Opportunity: Building the Next Generation of STEMM Leaders in the Field of Environmental Justice

Awarded 2024

Resources

Awarded Projects

Awarded 2021

Resources

Awarded Projects

My Academies

Funding Opportunity: Building the Next Generation of STEMM Leaders in the Field of Environmental Justice

Awarded 2024

Resources

Awarded Projects

Awarded 2021

Resources

Awarded Projects