Community, Environment and Justice

The Community, Environment, and Justice Research Group (CEJRG) is a group of faculty, students and community members with a common interest in creating a just and environmentally sustainable local and global community. Our mission is to engage with the intersections of environment, community and justice through research, action and collaboration. With our research we seek to generate empirical and practical knowledge that informs community-based efforts to climate change mitigation and adaptation with an awareness of and value for environmental justice.

Key Areas of Research

• youth engagement
• fostering engagement in sustainability and creating a culture of sustainability
• environmental and sustainability justice
• green buildings, regenerativity and wellbeing
• climate change adaptation
• other sustainability-focused topics, such as cross-sector collaboration

CEJRG has been engaged in a variety of other projects and topic areas that do not fit perfectly in one of the focus areas above. We have, for example, explored the collaboration among environmental organizations in Waterloo region and develop a model for community-university partnerships. We have also made contributions to the literature on community psychology, environment and global climate change more generally.

Contributions

We support local environmental organizations and programs in:

• Conducting evaluations;
• Planning and implementing events;
• Strategic planning and program development; and
• Grant writing.

We participate in and facilitate regional, provincial, national, and international efforts of collaboration and networking in order to create pro-environmental transformative change at multiple levels.

Our group is closely connected to the Viessmann Research Centre, part of the evolvGREEN innovation hub located in the evolv1.