Who is going to teach the program?
University of Arizona faculty and students, as well as community champions
Who is the program for?
Adults, 19 years or older can be a part of the CAB and Adult Camp programs. Youths in 7th to 12th grade are welcome to join the YAB and Youth Camps.
When will the micro-credential trainings be held?
Summer 2024, 2025, 2026
What is the goal of this project?
The goal is to create a national deep engagement learning model of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math education that empowers students as environmental health advisory board members, photographers, scientists and designers living in environmental justice communities.
What are the project aims?
- Build a Community Advisory Board and Youth Advisory Board (C/YAB) to engage and uplift community members to help inform educational activities
- Build an summer certificate program for promotoras, residents, teachers, and 7th-12th grade students within communities that lack locally relevant scientific programming
- Design and evaluate data sharing strategies, boosting participants’ environmental health literacy.
What is an Environmental Justice community?
EJ communities are those disproportionately affected by exposure to environmental hazards and experience negative health impacts as a result of those exposures.
EJ communities lack resources to support healthy and thriving populations, including access to adequate health care facilities and safe outdoor recreation spaces.
Youth growing up in these spaces need the preparation to navigate through these challenges in order to survive and return to their home communities with the skills to improve living conditions for future generations.
How does this project affect structural change in these areas?
Students will acquire the tools, skills and support needed to interpret locally gathered data and communicate results to their local communities.
These results can inform actions at local, regional, and national levels.
The proposed project centers on the social and environmental factors that affect health and justice for 7th - 12th graders in rural Arizona.
These communities are affected by significant environmental health hazards from historical or active resource extraction activities.
By increasing individuals’ knowledge of local environmental and health factors, these individuals will be able to understand the results of scientific studies of their local environments.
Some activities to boost “environmental health literacy” include studying local soil, water, and air quality as well as the health and chemistry of edible and medicinal plants.
What are the challenges impacting the success of our project?
A long legacy of mistrust between community members and decision makers has to be addressed in order for community members to engage with scientific studies in their own community.
These communities have experienced resource extraction and still must deal with the consequences of their local resources being used without accountability.
These are the kinds of challenges that create barriers to full engagement for families to increase their environmental health literacy, social literacy and data literacy.
What are the outcomes for this work?
Potential outcomes for the proposed project include generating more understanding of the links between environmental and human health.
Through studying, collecting samples, and analyzing data in the local environment, individuals can increase their data literacy.
Through the course of the program, individuals will be able to share the results of their work with researchers and community members, increasing knowledge for all parties involved in the project.