Environmental justice courses and curricula can be found at nearly every college and university across the country. It is now possible for students to receive a baccalaureate and advanced degree in environmental justice. Similarly, environmental justice is now an acceptable discipline college and university professors can select as a major research concentration, and receive tenure and promotion. A new and better trained generation of environmental justice scholars, teachers, analysts, and activists can now be found in nearly every discipline. Some of these new leaders have been elected to public office and can now influence laws and public policy directly.
University-based centers and academic programs serve as important venues to train, educate, and mentor students, faculty, and researchers in the environmental justice, health, and racial equity fields. An expanding "pipeline" of diverse scholars, scientists, researchers, policy analysts, and planners is changing environmental sciences and public health fields. In 1990, there was not a single university-based environmental justice center or a program that offered a degree in environmental justice. A decade later, there was just one program, University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment , that offered a Master's and Ph.D. degree in environmental justice. In 2011, there are 13 university-based environmental justice centers, four of which are located at Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), 22 legal clinics that list environmental justice as a core area, and six academic programs that grant degrees in environmental justice, including one legal program.
National Award and Honors
The Environmental Justice Movement has seeded a number of social movements that use a racial equity lens, including healthy homes, reproductive justice, transportation equity, smart growth, regional equity, parks justice and green access, green jobs, food justice, and climate justice. From 1990-2011, more than two-dozen environmental justice leaders were singled out for prestigious national awards that included the Heinz Award , Goldman Prize , MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship , Ford Foundation Leadership for a Changing World Award , Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leaders Award , and others.
Funding Challenges
Strategic foundation support has enabled the success of the Environmental Justice Movement. Yet, the movement is still under-funded after three decades of proven work. This is true for private foundation and government funding. Overall, foundation and government funding support for environmental justice and health equity has been piecemeal. Constrained funding has made it difficult for building organizational infrastructure, community organizing, leadership development and participating effectively at the policy table. Government funding has come primarily from two federal agencies--the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences--two federal agencies that community leaders established working relationships with in the early 1990s.
The number of foundations that have funded designated environmental justice programs has been shrinking in since the Summit II. However, there are hopeful signs from a number of foundations that are funding multidisciplinary work that intersects environment, health, and racial equity. Much of this funding is filtered through portfolios of smart growth, transportation equity, clean and renewable energy, green jobs, chemical policy reform, green chemistry, green products, parks and green access, green buildings, healthy schools, food security and food justice, sustainable agriculture, sustainable communities, equitable development, brownsfields redevelopment, worker training, worker safety, health disparities, reproductive health and justice, immigrants rights, human rights, disaster response, regionalism and regional equity, climate change, and climate justice, all of which fall under the broad category of environmental justice.
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