This project documents and explores the groundbreaking vision of several grassroots groups across the United States, together known as the Climate Justice Alliance, whose innovative strategies include community empowerment through organizing, youth leadership programs, worker cooperatives, land use and policy reforms, as well as energy democracy projects and policies. While the goal of many of these grassroots groups is to address environmental burdens in their communities, they also seek to more broadly transform the inequitable political and economic conditions that are so deeply entrenched in society and give rise to environmental injustice.
The Climate Justice Alliance focuses on supporting and highlighting a core group of “Our Power Communities” that are home to key grassroots groups who are poised to take on the extreme energy interests while creating grassroots solutions for a just transition. They provide diverse examples of urban and rural areas transitioning to local living economies in ways that address each communities unique challenges and builds on its strengths, culture, and history. Through shared work, common messaging, and movement building done in localities across the country, we build our power to shift the political landscape to bring these real solutions to scale.
Each Our Power Community has its own strategies and tactics unique to local circumstances on-the-ground, but all of them include coordinated base-building, communications, direct action, and policy strategies.
The Our Power communities are united in their focus to achieve a Just Transition away from the extractive economy and towards a regenerative economy based on local living economic models of sustainability. These grassroots organizations are articulating their own vision of a Just Transition and are finding innovative ways to realize climate justice through the implementation of Just Transition strategies.
Highlighted Our Power Communities
- San Antonio, Texas
- Jackson, Mississippi
- Eastern Kentucky, Kentucky
- Black Mesa, Arizona
- Detroit, Michigan
- Richmond, California
- Mission District, San Francisco, California
PARTNER
SCHOOL/COLLEGE
Tishman Environment and Design Center
RELATED COURSES
Environmental Justice: Race, Class and the Environment
