EJ Presentation 4-26-22
Stacy Gloss and Meredith Moore gave a presentation on environmental justice to an Eco-Lunch group, RSO Graduates in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (GEEB). The presentation from 4-26-22 is attached.
Stacy Gloss and Meredith Moore gave a presentation on environmental justice to an Eco-Lunch group, RSO Graduates in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (GEEB). The presentation from 4-26-22 is attached.
The Resilience iCAP Team submitted the following recommendation to the iCAP Working Group on 4/7/22:
"iSEE should assign a staff person to meet with local governmental and community leaders to discuss how the University can plan to assist communities to address environmental justice challenges."
The Res003 Collecting Info About Environmental Justice Needs recommendation is attached.
On Wednesday, March 30th, the Resilience iCAP Team had their second meeting of the semester. The team discussed updates on projects such as the Environmental Justice Plan, the Biodiversity Plan and events for Earth Month. Meeting minutes are attached.
Stacey Gloss reached out to the iCAP resilience team to ask if Illinois is at lower risk for biodiversity risk due to the fact that "most prairie was wiped out for corn and soy a long time ago".
Jennifer Fraterrigo replied with the following:
Hi all,
This topic falls within my area of interest, so I skimmed the peer-reviewed scientific article that was published in Ecological Applications upon which the NYT article is based. The authors of the paper model and map protection-weighted range-size rarity (PWRSR), a metric that partly reflects the range size of a species. More weight is given to species with smaller ranges, as these species are expected to be more imperiled. In Illinois, we have relatively few endemic species with small ranges; most species found here have relatively large ranges. Consequently, Illinois scores low on the PWRSR metric and does not appear to be a place where biodiversity is threatened.
That is not to say biodiversity is not at risk here. Rather, the approach used in the study puts less weight on the types of species that tend to inhabit (or could inhabit) the region.
If not already on your radar, an excellent resource for understanding biodiversity patterns and biodiversity threats in Illinois is the Critical Trends Assessment, a program supported by the IDNR and managed by the IL Natural History Survey (https://publish.illinois.edu/ctap-inhs/). The Urban Biotic Assessment Program may also be of interest (https://uofi.app.box.com/s/j1826i8uip6farrlxpckqzpa18b6d97e).
Thanks,
Jennifer
On Friday, February 4th, the Resilience iCAP Team had their first meeting of the semester. The team discussed updates on projects such as the Biodiversity Plan, Local Carbon Offsets and a potential Environmental Justice Reading group. Meeting minutes are attached.
On Tuesday, November 30th, the Resilience iCAP Team had their final meeting of the semester. The team discussed updates on projects such as the Green Jobs Certification Inventory and potential plans for Carbon Offsets. Meeting minutes are attached.
Sustainability & Green Job Certification examples have now been included on the Institute for Energy, Sustainability, and the Environment (iSEE) Education Portal website. Scroll down on the page to find and review Professional Certification Programs. This list can be used to inspire and provide insight into green careers. Green Job Certification Topics include:
Buildings & Energy
Environmentalism & Advocacy
Climate Change and Sustainability Professionals, Business, Reporting
Water
Outdoors, Gardening, Wildlife, Natural Resources
A downloadable Excel file titled "Job Certifications" provides additional detail about these certifications and these careers.
Stacy Gloss and Meredith Moore met with Amanda Cox and Samantha Potempa from University Career Services to discuss how to connect students to Green Jobs and Green Job Certifications. Career Services staff described the services provided for students. Career Services across campus are distributed between the Colleges and students can meet with the central Career Services group or academic & career advisors in the College of their major. Career Services can provide presentations to both classrooms and RSO student groups. Trained peer career advisors can give presentations on interviewing, resume writing, Linked-in profiles and personal statements. A Career Services Council meets on a quarterly basis to discuss current issues and affairs. iSEE can have a representative join the Career Services Council.
Additional resources for students include:
Stacy Gloss, Meredith Moore, Morgan White, and Scott Tess met to discuss Resilience Team work.
We discussed:
On Wednesday, November 3rd the Resilience iCAP Team had their third meeting of the semester. The team discussed updates on projects such as the Green Jobs Certification Inventory and Vision Zero. Meeting minutes are attached.
The Resilience iCAP Team met on Monday, October 4th to review the iCAP Objectives Assessment and discuss our team's assessment of progress of our 7 objectives. Meeting minutes are attached.
On Friday, September 24th the Resilience iCAP Team had their first meeting of the semester. The team reviewed the Resilience Charge Letter, discussed updates on the Hazard Mitigation Plan, Biodiversity Plan, and the Assessment of Progress. Meeting minutes are attached.
Resilience Work Weekly Check-In
09/23/2021, 2:00 PM
Attendees: Morgan White, Meredith Moore, Stacy Gloss
Updates
Stacy provided an overview of her activities for the previous week including
iCAP Portal
In this meeting we discussed additional functionality, the strategy and rationale on Resilience web page organization. Morgan provided insights on using the iCAP portal such as accessing projects through a table by using the Project Page and searching Projects by Status. Projects can be added to the iCAP portal by sending a proposal to add a project to Morgan and Meredith. There is an iCAP Portal Content template that should be used.
Community resilience and sustainability projects
We reflected that there are many community projects and programs related to sustainability and resilience that do not appear anywhere in the iCAP such as MTD projects, Sanitary District work, Stormwater partnerships, Recycling projects and programs, certain solar projects. We discussed that having a website or webpage dedicated to community partnerships, programs, and outreach about sustainability, environment, resilience, water, energy, land-use etc could be an excellent community resource. The idea bubbled to have a Community Supported Resilience Portal in parallel to the iCAP portal for tracking programs, resources, and projects. This could be a recommendation for meeting one or more of the iCAP objectives.
9/17/2021, 2:15 PM
Attendees: Morgan White, Meredith Moore, Stacy Gloss
Summary:
Stacy, Meredith and Morgan met for the first time together since Stacy was appointed and started work on 9/16/2021. The purpose of the meeting is to provide the information and resources needed for Stacy to start working on resilience activities in the scope work. We reviewed Stacy’s job description regarding activities for the next 6 months and related deliverables. See attached job description.
Agreements:
To-Do’s:
Stacy will re-read the objective in iCAP 2020 PDF about all resilience objectives. Review the resilience theme, scan the project list, and look at project history for specific objectives.
8.1 Check in when needed w/ Lisa Merrifield
8.2 Start with campus contacts. Email Betsy Liggett, Brent Lewis, & Morgan White and set up a call with Betsy. Betsy is liaison to community green infrastructure. The objectives are to find out who it is to talk to in Champaign-Urbana-Savoy for off-campus infrastructure locations. Eventually, ask resilience team what information should be included on the iCAP portal map. Note: There’s an Oct 20 conference about the Champaign County storm water partnership. With this objective, we will ultimately work towards planning a coordinated rainwater mgmt. plan, and what it might look like.
8.3. Review documentation that Kimmy provided as a report on the portal.
8.4. Request a call with Ximing to explain the concept behind 8.4 and report back. Further steps may be taken to include whole iSEE management team in a conversation.
8.5. Review 8.5 Discuss at meeting 2 weeks from now.
8.6. Morgan will connect Stacy with Sarthak Prasad. Review Vision zero website soon and request a meeting with Sarthak.
8.7. Review 8.7 Discuss at meeting 2 weeks from now. Review Current State of the Market, and review files in the box folder that students created about local off sets.
We had a great iCAP Team and iCAP Working Group Kickoff on 9/16/21! During the event, we heard from iSEE Interim Director, Dr. Madhu Khanna, went through the team rosters, iCAP Procedures, iCAP 2020 and progress made thus far, and lastly summarized other resources that sustainability advocates should be aware of.
The iCAP Teams and iCAP Working Group are instrumental in helping campus advance and achieve our sustainability goals and we look forward to a great year!
The presentation is attached and the recording is found here.
This is a list of projects that need students to work on. It will be updated periodically by sustainability staff members, the last update was 9/16/21:
This project is a collaboration with the Illinois State Section of the American Planning Association; we have been asked to create a community land use and revitalization plan for a small town in Kankakee County. It is a rural community, predominantly people of color, originally settled by folks leaving the South during the Great Migration. There are many layers to the story, but it is ultimately a story of environmental equity as The Nature Conservancy and Field Museum have been collaborating with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to acquire land to create the Black Oak Savana nature preserve. The majority of residents are opposed to this preserve, primarily because land has been purchased via tax sale and foreclosure, therefore taking land out of Black ownership. This also further burdens remaining property owners because the nature preserve land becomes tax exempt, shifting the property taxes that are no longer paid on nature preserve property to a smaller and smaller portion of land owners.
Students interested in this project could assist with GIS analysis and help identify opportunities to balance environmental sustainability goals and land preservation with social and economic sustainability goals and to identify economic opportunities that accomplish all three. Contact Lacey Rains Lowe at lacey.rains <at> champaignil.gov.
Expand on existing statistical analysis with ArcGIS and spreadsheets of potential race/income disparities in provision of street trees, sidewalks, urban heat, parks, bus stops, etc. Data sets provided. Contact is Scott Tess at srtess <at> urbanaillinois.us.
LIVESTOCK FACILITY DECOMMISSIONING at the Imported Swine Research Laboratory - The push to expand the UI Research Park will require decommissioning of the waste lagoons associated with the Imported Swine Research Laboratory (ISRL). This presents an nice opportunity for a class to develop and design a decommissioning plan with associated costs and timeline. Colleen Ruhter is the point of contact, cruhter <at> illinois.edu.
If you have a project idea, please contact us at sustainability@illinois.edu, or submit it through the iCAP Portal Suggestions page.
iSEE's Interim Director Madhu Khanna sent the Resilience iCAP Team a formal charge letter on Tuesday, September 14 detailing the team's responsibilities for the upcoming year. The letter is attached.
Throughout the summer of 2021, I (Kimmy Chuang, iSEE intern, supervised by Meredith Moore) accomplished the following tasks to further the Environmental Justice Plan. Relevant documents documents attached.
1. Compile contact information for focus groups
Number and type of contacts were organized into the following:
Contacts were primarily found through Internet searches. Many of the groups were identified as relevant during Environmental Justice Committee meetings. Where possible or necessary, I’ve included notes and additional links.
2. Research other EJ plans to draft focus group questions
I drafted possible questions for focus group interviews through what I learned from the following EJ or similar Climate Justice Plans:
City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO)
National City Health and Environmental Justice Element (San Diego County, CA)
3. Compile contact information of other municipalities with EJ plans
For the plans I reviewed above, I collected contact information for each municipality into a spreadsheet. The EJ Committee suggested that we reach out to other municipalities that had successfully written EJ plans to inform our process.
4. Review local engagement efforts to identify salient local environmental issues
Meredith and I’s original goal for the focus groups was to identify 4-5 of the most salient environmental issues in our community that our plan should address.These are issues that have been identified multiple times during EJ Committee discussions or through my research:
Through my research, I identified four local public engagement efforts that could be relevant for our EJ plan:
Champaign County Community Health Plan 2021-2023
Storm Water Management Plan
Champaign County Soil and Water Conservation District
Urbana Comprehensive Plan
Here are ideas from the iCAP as it was listed in the Appendix “Acknowledgements for future considerations” that may be relevant for EJ:
5. Start conversations with other community members about EJ
Other than the Resilience iCAP Team and the EJ Committee, Meredith and I met with the following community members about EJ:
Gabe Lewis (Planner at CCRPC)
Jessica Lehmkuhl, James Corbin II (Sustainability Advisory Commission)
Cassie Carroll
Met over Zoom about Cassie’s expertise in interviews/focus groups. The following are notes from our discussion:
In this section, I will summarize what I had hoped to accomplish this summer, why we weren’t able to do so, and questions to consider as the EJ Plan moves forward.
Initially, I had planned to conduct focus groups this summer and analyze the results. However, after discussions with Meredith and the EJ Committee, we decided to delay the focus groups until we had more thorough knowledge about the best way to conduct them. The following are questions we have in mind, but aren’t sure how to proceed.
1. Scope of the EJ Plan
2. Vulnerability Assessments
3. Possible funding
4. Ownership of the EJ Committee
This update is also attached as a report and was sent to Stacy Gloss, a member of the Resilience iCAP Team, who will be leading the EJ efforts this Fall.
Attached are the charge letters sent to each of the iCAP Team members, on September 10 by iSEE interim director, Dr. Madhu Khanna.