Cynthia Medina, BS,
Elizabeth A. Kocs, PhD, MBA,
Cynthia Klein-Banai, PhD, MS
University of Illinois at Chicago
Accelerating University-Community Partnerships for Climate Justice seeks to identify best practices for identifying the community partner’s needs, supplementing their existing work with university resources, and working collectively to advance university-community relationships to mitigate climate injustices. Initial funding by the Institute for Policy and Civic Engagement (IPCE) launched a Climate Justice event in April 2021, which highlighted the need to cultivate sustainable community-university partnerships to advance climate justice and also supported a long-term partnership between Urban Grower’s Collective (UGC) and the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) sustainability team. Community participants noted concerns about the exploitative nature of academic research in their communities and a failure to establish long-term relationships and impact. An outcome of the April workshop was the desire to establish an asset map of university and community resources to facilitate lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships. UGC will work alongside UIC to produce an asset map of climate justice work within the university and surrounding communities. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research outlines a method for asset mapping in community research that will be used in the development of the asset map. We will also implement an Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach, as described by Lightfoot et al., which has the community identify and delineate its assets and uses them to develop solutions to a problem that is of concern to them --fostering active community participation. One outcome for this project will be a conceptual map that shows networks and relationships to support efforts to address climate injustices