Awards Database

Partners: Arts, Environment and Humanities Network (AEHN)

• Award Date: Jan 2017
• Award Amount: $2,500
• Duration: 2 weeks
• Status: Completed

Virginia Grise is a playwright who visited the Tucson area to collaborate with the University of Arizona English Department and Borderlands Theater to workshop the script of Their Dogs Came with Them, an adaptation of Helena Maria Viramontes’ 2007 novel about four young Mexican American women in East Los Angeles during the 1960s and the hardships, challenges, and successes of dealing with colonist abuses. Ms. Grise’s visit and workshopping allowed local community members to participate and inform the work through the incorporation of their experiences into the lives of the characters. The visit included two workshops, public readings, and the development of collaborations. One outcome of the visits is that Ms. Grise and UA professors are imagining a more comprehensive program to address environmental and social justice challenges in prison through storytelling and theater. Ms. Grise builds on and sustains the work of this visit through her development of The Convivial Arts Practice Institute.

Partners: Forum Speakers

• Award Date: Jul 2016
• Award Amount: $5,000
• Duration: 1 week / 2 people
• Status: Completed

Funding for two visiting associates allowed their participation as panelists in the conference, Food, Water and Arid Lands, as well as wider dialogues in communities. The visiting associate funds supported Andrew Mushita, who works with the Community Technology Development Trust in Zimbabwe, studying seed exchange, biopiracy, small-scale farms and seed trusts, and Alejandro Argumedo, affiliated with ANDES and Potato Park, working on protection and development of Andean biological and cultural diversity and the rights of indigenous people of Peru. Both visitors participated in conference panel discussions and following the conference visited local Tucson groups such as Native Seed/SEARCH and the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona. They traveled with Gary Nabhan to northern Arizona to have conversations with several Navajo and Hopi groups about collaborations and coalitions.

Partners: UA Kitchen Garden, City of South Tucson

• Award Date: Jul 2016
• Award Amount: $36,140
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

The Haury seed grant provided essential support to explore the complex connections between recidivism, training, and employment while simultaneously greening the environments of communities highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and urban heat island. Working with four distinct cohorts of individuals with past felony convictions, Green Streets of Tucson built cross-sector partnerships that spanned the local, county and state penal justice systems, various departments of three jurisdictions, and a wide array of community based organizations The team developed a community-based reentry training and coaching program, aspects of which continue beyond the grant period. The project also addressed City of South Tucson’s resilience to climate change by expanding tree canopy and improving the health and diversity of the urban forest. The project engaged 63 adults and deeply engaged 22 inmates in landscaping and sustainability topics creating a reentry program that bridged the transition from inside prison to the community and can serve as a model for community programs. Pima County funded continuance of this work.

Partners: NAU, Dine Tribal College, Dine Citizens Against Ruining our Environment, Navajo Nation, Fort Lewis College

• Award Date: Jul 2016
• Award Amount: $600,000
• Duration: 3 years
• Status: Completed

The Gold King Mine Spill in 2015 near Silverton, Colorado, disproportionately impacted the Diné (Navajo) people. Their deep spiritual connection to the natural environment, their subsistence activities (primarily agriculture) along the San Juan River, and the long legacy of environmental injustices to them make such environmental disasters especially devastating. In addition, the Diné were completely ignored by the regulatory authorities. The goal of this project is to empower individuals with scientific knowledge to increase the diversity of voices responding to the spill and the resilience of the community to respond to contamination by understanding and thereby minimizing the effects. Building tribal capacity through training of Diné tribal college students, environmental interns and community health representatives will help the community and be used to develop a model of community capacity building aimed at empowering affected communities to college samples, minimize impacts, and engage in informed decision-making.

Partners: UA Community and School Garden Program

• Award Date: Jul 2016
• Award Amount: $10,000
• Duration: 2 months
• Status: Completed

Climate change is increasingly recognized as one of society’s greatest challenges, and understanding the role of cities in catalyzing transitions toward more sustainable, democratic, and resilient sociotechnical configurations is especially urgent. Infrastructure is at the heart of sustainable urban transformations, yet the practices that underpin and catalyze spatial planning, infrastructural diversity, and equitable access remain poorly understood. Meehan collaborated with two UA faculty members to advance understanding of urban transitions through discursive analysis of water infrastructure plans, policies, and practices in select Southwest cities. The outcomes of this project included curriculum development in conjunction with UA’s Community and School Garden Program, development of research collaborations and publications.

Partners: Friends of Saguaro National Park and Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

• Award Date: Jul 2016
• Award Amount: $98,155
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The Bio/Diversity Project is a collaborative effort to develop and implement a pilot program with K-12 students and teachers to create a pipeline from the internship experience into the Next Generation Ranger Program of the Friends of Saguaro National Park. These efforts work to improve science identity, motivation, and self-efficacy among K-12 student participants, such as girls and minorities, and thereby increase the diversity of voices included in discussions of environmental problems and development of solutions via the creation of environmental science education-job training-mentorship pipeline.

Partners: Ak-Chin Indian Community, Tohono O'odham Nation, Baboquivari High School, Ha:sañ Preparatory & Leadership School, Pascua Yaqui Tribe, Hiaki High School, Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona (ITCA), UA Native American Science & Engineering Program (NASEP)

• Award Date: Jan 2016
• Award Amount: $60,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Native and young voices are not heard in many discussions of environmental health, social justice and environmental challenges. The Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center worked with Native American tribes to bring Native voices to the fore in discussions of environmental health and climate change in Indian Country through the Indigenous Stewards magazine and the Tribal Forum. The project expanded readership of the magazine and held two Tribal Forums.

Partners: Ramirez-Andreotta (UA SWES), Betterton (UA Atmospheric Sciences)

• Award Date: Jan 2016
• Award Amount: $25,000
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

Families in southern metropolitan Tucson have been disproportionately affected by pollution in the past and unless things change, will continue to be affected in the future, especially as human-made global warming impacts the climate. Sonora Environmental Research Institute, Inc. (SERI)'s promotora program has worked in the southern Tucson community for over ten years through the promotora program in a culturally appropriate manner and language. Promotoras who have received training in environmental health and spread their knowledge throughout the community through home and business visits. The underserved community lacks knowledge regarding climate change and many have pre-existing vulnerabilities including poor housing, environmental conditions, and economic instability. SERI and partners from UA Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences and UA Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science created a new promotora certificate program focused on climate change and environmental sustainability. Through workshops, home visits, demonstration sites, and hands-on experiments this program continues to build community leaders, increase the community's understanding of climate change and sustainability, and increases the resilience of the community by reducing heat vulnerability. SERI adopted the program into its ongoing programs and at the completion of the Haury award received funding from Tucson Water for neighborhood projects building on the Haury Program award.

Partners: Community Food Bank, Community Gardens

• Award Date: Jan 2016
• Award Amount: $48,665
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

Adequate access to healthy food has become a more pressing societal issue due to the recent recession and continued un- and underemployment depressing income. The collaborations between the UA researchers, Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona and Community Gardens of Tucson and Compass Affordable Housing sought to map food access, improve local access and provide a case study to integrate social justice and environmental sustainability into food access for the local community and as a model for other communities. The project focused on low-income women and men with a special focus on disabled adults, women, the elderly and recent migrants.

Partners: Yaqui Traditional Experts

• Award Date: Jan 2016
• Award Amount: $60,000
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The collaborations between the traditional authorities of Pueblo Vicam in the Yaqui ancestral homeland, Rio Yaqui, Sonora, the Yoem Pueblo in Marana, Arizona and the Southwest Folklife Alliance designed and tested a pilot project for cross-national environmental and social development plan to link Yaqui territories in Sonora and the Tucson basin around the themes of food memory, food justice and food sovereignty. The project collected oral histories, conducted test planting of ancestral wheat varieties, established artisanal workshops and developed a market recovery strategic plan for Yaqui-owned and branded new artisanal wheat products.

Partners: School of Geography and Development

• Award Date: Feb 2015
• Award Amount: $12,490
• Duration: 12 weeks
• Status: Completed

Sundberg visited the University of Arizona to work with collaborators on challenges to the Southwest socio-natural environment growing out of contemporary strategies to enforce the US-Mexico political boundary. Sundberg conducted field work and interviews, and facilitated a panel discussion about border and REAL ID Act issues in September 2015 at the University of Arizona.

Partners: CCASS and Institute of the Environment

• Award Date: Feb 2015
• Award Amount: $5,000
• Duration: 4 weeks
• Status: Completed

Waple worked with faculty and students at the University of Arizona's Institute for the Environment and the Center for Climate Adaptation Science and Solutions to develop a set of ideas to form a foundation for collaborative teams to work on adaptation and resilience planning for the metropolitan Tucson area. These efforts included learning about existing planning efforts and local priorities, mini-workshops with City representatives and other stakeholders, and open lectures about resilience efforts.