Awards Database

Partners: Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA), the Indian Health Service (IHS) Sanitation Facilities Construction Program and a Chapter House in the Navajo Nation

• Award Date: Jul 2020
• Duration: 4 years
• Status: Ongoing

The project aims to address the urgent need for food, energy, and water on the Navajo Nation that has been intensified due to COVID-19. The project leaders will use pressure-driven desalination methods, nanofiltration (NF), and reverse osmosis (RO) for the treatment of brackish waters such as those on the Navajo Nation while producing high-quality water. The system will be powered by solar panels.  

The team will construct and deploy two off-grid mobile water purification units to test the system. The overall goal of the project is to provide mid and long-term solutions to the food, energy, and water challenges in the Navajo Nation.

• Award Date: Jul 2020
• Duration: 1.5 years
• Status: Ongoing

Funds for an Administrative Assistant to the newly appointed United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, (UNSRRIP/Special Rapporteur), Francisco Cali Tzay. 

• Award Date: Jun 2020
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

The project's aim is to inspire underserved Native American and Hispanic youth to pursue STEM careers. The project focused on strengthening opportunities related to the nexus of social justice and the environment in the education pipeline (k-12) for underserved Native Americans and Hispanic youth. The project prepared students with the necessary math background for them to take advanced math courses by 12th grade to increase the number of underserved youth placing into higher prerequisite math courses required in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). 

• Award Date: May 2020
• Duration: 8 months
• Status: Ongoing

Graduate Student Support for Karletta Chief, UArizona Department of Environmental Science.

Recipient: Nikki Tulley, second-year Ph.D. student, UArizona Department of Environmental Science

Ms. Tulley will assist Dr. Chief on the Indigenous Food, Energy & Water Security and Sovereignty (Indige-FEWSS) program. Indige-Fewss aims to develop a diverse workforce with intercultural awareness and Food-Energy-Water Security (FEWS) expertise to address FEWS challenges in indigenous communities.

Partners: Northern Arizona University, Ronson Engineering, University of California, MSU, University of New Mexico, SRIC

• Award Date: May 2020
• Duration: 6 months
• Status: Completed

The project aims to identify COVID-19 high-risk areas in the Navajo Nation. Through UArizona’s collaborations regarding water, health, and environmental health, project leaders will create a map that combines water quality, water infrastructure, health, and socio-economic data to identify areas on the Navajo Nation that are most at risk for a COVID-19 spike in the fall due to lack of access to water, food, and energy. 

• Award Date: Mar 2020
• Duration: 1.5 years
• Status: Ongoing

The project's aim is to inspire underserved Native American and Hispanic youth to pursue STEM careers. The project focused on strengthening opportunities related to the nexus of social justice and the environment in the education pipeline (k-12) for underserved Native Americans and Hispanic youth. The project prepared students with the necessary math background for them to take advanced math courses by 12th grade to increase the number of underserved youth placing into higher prerequisite math courses required in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). 

Partners: David Seibert, Borderlands Restoration Network; Robin Reineke, UArizona Southwest Center; Natalia Mendoza Rockwell, Fordham University; Carolyn O'Meara, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Chris Lukinbeal, UArizona School of Geography and Development

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $5,850
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

Since at least the mid-1990s, United States immigration policies have harshly affected people and places across the Sonoran Desert border region. In an attempt to ‘secure’ the border, these policies have militarized and effectively ‘weaponized’ the desert landscape, using infrastructure and enforcement to funnel migration into the hottest, driest, and most sparsely populated zones. The hoped-for result is that the ruggedness, isolation, and extreme heat would deter migrants from attempting to cross. Instead, the border has become a collective site of humanitarian and ecological crisis.

Social justice and environmental groups in the region have responded with great courage and creativity, but their voices are so often lost in the political fray and drowned out by the stridency of popular media. In particular, they face two central challenges: 1) their work remains largely isolated -- that is, these groups are, with some important exceptions, not in dialogue with one another; and 2) their unique data are rarely available to a broader public, let alone shared among different non-profit groups to increase effective collaboration. This partnership collaboration aims to build a team that works for an ethical and equitable program of collaborative inquiry among academic, humanitarian, and environmental communities. We hope to break down the silos of border research and nurture the production of much-needed local knowledge on the region. Our overarching reason for this partnership, therefore, is to begin developing a framework for collaboration between researchers and community partners to protect, extend, and communicate the innovative local ways that human and non-human communities have resisted, restored, and flourished in the context of border militarization.

The primary project partners (co-leads) -- UA Southwest Center, Southern Border Communities Coalition, and Borderlands Restoration Network -- will work toward a common language and collective goals for sharing data and local knowledge on the impacts of border militarization in the Sonoran Desert region. Such a partnership brings together a diverse array of backgrounds and perspectives: humanistic, environmental, and social.

Partners: Shefali Milczarek-Desai, UArizona Law, and The Tucson Cooperative Network [The Community Food Bank of Arizona, Tucson Rainwater Harvesting Co-op, Cooperative Impulso, Flowers and Bullets, BICAS, Local First Arizona, Technicians for Sustainability]

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $5,608
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

This partnership aims to strengthen the Tucson Cooperative Network (TCN). The TCN promotes and supports the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, growing a community with fair wages, equal rights, equity and mutual collaboration. We focus on regenerative businesses such as rainwater harvesting, habitat restoration, sustainable food production, and individual capacity building centered on indigenous values that respect all beings. These businesses regenerate natural, social and cultural capital and build resilience to climate change. We work with all people without discrimination and prioritize immigrants, women, LGBTQ+, people who are low-income, and people of color. By supporting these marginalized populations to become business owners, we restore socioeconomic equality to achieve social justice.

Our network organizations (see Question 3) focus on supporting local/regional communities to achieve environmental sustainability and environmental justice. By developing a viable business model for these activities, we create a more financially sustainable path for these critical activities. We envision the Southwest in the next 25 years prospers from businesses centered on regenerating instead of depleting natural, social and cultural capitals. This region also will support a strong ecosystem of democratically governed cooperative businesses. In this model, market capital flows to the population in need and the environment in need to restore ecological balance, enhance social collaboration, and strengthen democracy and economic equality. We take a network approach, focus on key players in our regional network, train them to become both cooperatives and cooperative promoters. Our approach is analogous to acupuncture, activating and strengthening critical nodal points in a network to achieve whole-system effects. This network approach not just moves the needle, but creates a socioeconomic movement that unites our society and restores natural balance.

Partners: Kerry Schwartz, Arizona Project WET, and Benjamin Blonder, UArizona Science Coordinator Sky School Steward Observatory

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $79,104
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Ongoing

As communities develop climate response plans to mitigate the hardships a changing climate brings, the gap between the haves and have-nots becomes apparent. This is seen even in Tucson, the third-fastest-warming city in the U.S., where inequity results in significantly less tree shade in the southern parts of the city compared to the north. Developing the next generation of environmental leaders to address these challenges locally requires the inclusion of people from diverse backgrounds. However, many young people do not gain exposure to environmental science and climate change topics, nor do they build connections to their local environments, in part because their teachers are not well versed in these topics.

This project brings together Sky School and Project WET with the Tucson Unified School District. We will recruit two cohorts of twenty 4th and 6th grade teachers in underserved schools for monthly, year-long professional development days on climate science and sustainability, emphasizing local issues. Through connections with the University of Arizona researchers and community leaders, teachers will build knowledge of the science behind climate change and its local impacts. They will be supported by curriculum experts in creating engaging lessons to implement with their students. As a final project, students and teachers will utilize project-based learning to create and carry out an action plan on a sustainability topic they identify as important in their school or community.

This project will develop a cohort of teachers engaged in climate and sustainability, who will influence students at underserved schools for years to come.

Partners: Tina Howard, Kore Press Institute; Tanner Menard, Equality Arizona; Lizette Trujillo, Southern Arizona Gender Alliance; Em Bowen, UArizona College of Education; and Molly Burke, UArizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $5,000
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

Kore Press Institute and the UArizona College of Public Health seek to develop a cohesive and productive partnership by laying a foundation that addresses the critical aspects of collaborative skill-building and team-building that make a successful project (the Gender Diversity Initiative). We recognize that input from all partners is valuable and necessary, and therefore, we intend to follow a ​community-based, facilitated process with a true cross-sector at the table for deep and rich conversations from multiple perspectives. ​The aim is to change culture, mindsets, resource allocation, systems, and health outcomes for safer, more accessible, and inclusive learning environments in order to move the needle on basic safety in Arizona schools for LGBTQ+ youth.

This partnership intends to address this pressing need for safer, more inclusive educational ecosystems, environments, and practices cognizant of health outcome disparities for LGBTQ+ youth. We intend to move the needle for our most vulnerable by addressing the root cause of gender-based violence with interventions to affect systemic change: teacher education and policy change. We view the issue of safety for our most vulnerable as a moral and environmental imperative. The partnership intends to build a stronger and more richly diverse social ecosystem for a more just and sustainable Southwest in 25 years. Providing an environment of safety and social justice for the most marginalized populations in Southern Arizona’s classrooms has deep implications. We recognize that normative narratives don’t work for everybody and that those who are worried about personal safety are not only barred from accessing an ability, and right, to fully thrive, but also from putting energy into issues facing the larger, natural environment like climate change or food security.

Our goals for funding the partnership include building specific skills and capacities that will support a successful, long-term collaboration and project. We want to build these capacities as co-leaders as a base, and to share bits of knowledge with other partners and collaborators across the project, especially since we will be intentionally working across sectors, across cultures, across generations, often with differently impacted populations, and potentially with folks who may not be allies.

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $53,000
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Ongoing

The project's aim is to inspire underserved Native American and Hispanic youth to pursue STEM careers. The project focused on strengthening opportunities related to the nexus of social justice and the environment in the education pipeline (k-12) for underserved Native Americans and Hispanic youth. The project prepared students with the necessary math background for them to take advanced math courses by 12th grade to increase the number of underserved youth placing into higher prerequisite math courses required in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). 

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $4,764
• Duration: 1 year
• Status: Completed

Sustainable Tucson and the University of Arizona John and Doris Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences propose to expand on their Community Organization-UA partnership with Sustainable Tucson 2045 (ST 2045). ST 2045 will work to engage our diverse community in visualizing and creating a path to build a sustainable community in Southern Arizona by 2045. We believe this initiative fully supports the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice vision for all people to live more sustainable lives and improve Tucsonans' quality of life and their capacity to live sustainably in our changing environment. 

The goal of ST 2045 is to help Tucson become a truly resilient, desert-adaptive community whose culture and economic practices enrich the environment rather than deplete it, support biological diversity rather than extinguish it, clean the air and conserve water rather than pollute it. This is an audacious goal—not something that anyone individual or individual organization can achieve alone. We believe it can only be achieved by members of our diverse community coming together to envision our future and work together to bring that future into being. 

The partnership of the University of Arizona (UA) faculty and students and Sustainable Tucson (ST) will forward this important sustainable community initiative. It will also create a framework for sustainability research and provide UA students with opportunities to conduct field research in sustainability, environmental sciences, and community engagement processes.

Partners: Jennifer Katcher, Pima Community College, Jessica Dietrich, Flowing Wells High School, Steve Uyeda, Sunnyside High School, and Jill Williams, UArizona WISE

• Award Date: Jan 2020
• Award Amount: $110,706
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

The Tucson Bee Collaborative is a partnership effort to increase awareness of Tucson’s exceptional bee diversity, and to empower future scientists by engaging them in research activities. Through course-based research experiences, this project will connect biodiversity conservation with STEM education, by involving high school students from underserved communities in real-world research on native bees. Students will make authentic research contributions by sampling the bee fauna on their campuses and generate genetic DNA identification tools vital to the success of the broader pollinator research effort.

Tucson Bee Collaborative is a collaboration between the University of Arizona (UA), the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum (ASDM), and Pima Community College (PCC). This proposal aims to broaden the collaboration to include Flowing Wells Unified School District and Sunnyside Unified School District high schools. These Title 1 districts, located in economically depressed areas within the City of Tucson, largely serve a diverse population of students where opportunities for meaningful STEM education are welcomed.

In addition to confronting disparities in educational opportunities, this project aims to connect these young scientists to the biodiversity within their own neighborhoods, building awareness of the importance of native bees and the native plants on which they depend. Students will be empowered by being provided with the skills and knowledge to become their own advocates. They will grasp a deeper understanding of biodiversity, and a new realization that they themselves, are scientists capable of contributing to a wide diversity of STEM fields.

Partners: Tohono O'odham Nation Department of Health and Human Services

• Award Date: Jul 2019
• Award Amount: $103,767
• Duration: 2 years
• Status: Completed

This project is focused on improving and preserving health on the Tohono O’odham Nation while strengthening community resilience, education, and voice in the context of climate change-induced spread of vector-borne disease. Since 2002, range expansion of the tick vector has led to the emergence of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (RMSF) as a serious health problem among tribes and marginalized rural communities in Arizona and northwestern Mexico. Through a Haury partnership, researchers in the Entomology Department at the University of Arizona and Tohono O’odham Nation Department of Health and Human Services (TONDHHS) and animal welfare agency personnel will work together to fill gaps on community knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding ticks and RMSF. We will also evaluate tick distribution on dogs and in the environment on the Tohono O’odham Nation to identify ecological and social factors associated with high abundance of the brown dog tick and use these factors to predict future population densities. These data will be used in an information campaign to increase community awareness of RMSF risk. Data will also be used by TONDHHS to strengthen RMSF surveillance and prevention activities.

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

Dr. Joseph's research interests include sustainable engineering for mine reclamation of hazardous waste, paleoecology, watershed hydrology and management, analytical methods for human exposures to anthropogenic contaminants, and community-based participatory research. As an advocate for Indigenous Data Sovereignty, Dr. Joseph specialize in using Indigenous methodologies to advance and protect Tribal interests. The Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environmental and Social Justice would assist Dr. Joseph's data equity efforts, as the Program has continued to support community initiatives in underrepresented populations that have led to key insights across the dimensions of social equity, food sovereignty, educational enrichment, and environmental protection. The research will build on these insights by continuing to partner with Hopi village members to further understand the impacts that uranium extraction and mining have on the health, cultural, environmental, and socioecological well-being of the Hopi Nation. The Hopi Tribe consists of approximately 7,100 residents are geographically encapsulated within the larger Navajo Reservation. The Navajo Tribe has a well-documented history of uranium lease agreements that were established with the U.S. Government. Over 500 abandoned mines, four uranium processing sites, and 1,100 features are left as reminders of this history, along with a legacy of environmental and health impacts. Research previously conducted has found the Hopi Tribe was never consulted about the extensive mining history, nor are found in any community-based literature or exposure efforts in the area