Are you an undergraduate or graduate student at The New School? Are you excited about expanding your environmental, climate, and social justice research? Perhaps you're already working on a project and could benefit from a mentor and cohort to challenge and push your project to the next level. This Fellowship award is a minimum of $5,000.
Dear Tishman Environment and Design Center Community,
We proudly congratulate Joel Towers on the announcement of his new role as The New School's tenth president. In light of this transition, I am honored to share that I will now serve as the sole Director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center. Joel served as the founding director and, most recently, as co-director with me at the Tishman Center. In his multiple leadership roles within the University and beyond, Joel has championed the integration of climate justice and sustainability. We look forward to working closely with him to continue building this into the fabric of our community. As I begin my new role as Director, I am mindful of the rich legacy of the Center that our former Director, Michelle DePass, helped us relaunch. Under her leadership, we reimagined the Center's mission as a home for environmental justice movement support, and I look forward to continuing this mission as the Director.
In light of recent disheartening news, the Supreme Court's decision to overturn the Chevron Doctrine—severely restricting the EPA and other federal agencies from protecting our environment and public health—it's essential to find and share stories of hope and resilience. One such story comes from Darryl Molina Sarmiento, the 2024-2026 EJ Disrupt Design Fellow and Executive Director of Communities for a Better Environment (CBE).
When I joined the Tishman Environment and Design Center in August 2022 as a senior researcher, I knew I was in a unique position to practiceaction-based, community-centered research for the environmental and climate justice movement. Through my newly minted Ph.D. in public and urban policy and my dissertation research on environmental justice and participatory grantmaking, I already understood the value of community involvement in decision-making.
Congratulations to the new cohort of Aronson Fellows!
This year, we have the pleasure of welcoming our fourth cohort. We’ll spotlight our fellows throughout the year and showcase their work during Earth Month in the Spring of 2024. We’re happy to share that this year’s fellows are…
‘Rhythms of the Land,’ a multimedia documentary film, was screened during the 2023 Earth Month events at The New School. Present at the event was the director, Dr. Gail Myers, filmmaker and cultural anthropologist. The event was curated and moderated by Mike Harrington, Director of Sustainability Engagement, and Dr. Kristin Retnolds, Chair of Food Studies in the Schools for Public Engagement.
In the fall of 2022, the Tishman Center’s Student Awards granted funds to nine students to support their research or design work centering environmental justice; you can read about their project proposals in this blog post. We are excited to highlight the progress of some of our awardees here!
UPDATE: Danielle Deane-Ryan is on an intergovernmental personnel assignment from The New School to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
We are thrilled to have the opportunity to learn from and exchange ideas with Danielle Deane-Ryan, whom we welcomed over the summer as a Senior Fellow at the Tishman Center. Ms. Deane-Ryan will provide thought leadership and guidance on strategic planning and development, as well as on federal initiatives related to environmental justice, including Justice40, Thriving Communities, and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The Tishman Environment and Design Center invites you to join us on September 20 at 6:30 p.m. for our Keynote Climate Week Event, a dynamic panel discussion, at The New School.
As you may have seen from emails and posters around campus, The New School has recently started a Demand Response program to save energy over the summer. Ashley Kossakowski, Director of Energy and Sustainability at TNS, spoke with us to clarify how DR works, why it’s important, and how it will impact members of the TNS community.
An article by Dr. Ana Baptista, Associate Professor and co-director of the Tishman Center, was recently published in the open-source book Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures, and Environmental Injustice (edited by Elizabeth Kryder-Reid and Sarah May).
Dr. Baptista’s chapter “Environmental Justice Tours: Transformative Narratives of Struggle, Solidarity, and Activism” reflects on the power of Environmental Justice (EJ) tours to symbolically and concretely counteract the marginalization of communities that live in frontline EJ communities.
Recently Dr. Ana Baptista, our Co-Director, attended a symposium with environmental justice (EJ) leaders to discuss industrial carbon removal strategies in the United States of America. There were representatives from a number of organizations, including the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, the Hip Hop Caucus, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and others. The result of the symposium was the statement that is below this message.
Mike Harrington, the Director of Sustainability Engagement here at the Tishman Center, has recently had his photo series “Has Existential Crisis” selected to be part of the Human Impacts Insittute’s Creative Climate Awards exhibit. This annual exhibit showcases climate-inspired work from artists around the world, focusing this year on the theme “Inspiring a Climate Renaissance.”
On April 21, 2023, President Biden signed the Executive Order on Environmental Justice entitled, Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All. He was surrounded by members of the White House Environmental Justice Council, representing environmental justice leaders from around the country. Some of these leaders were present at the 1994 signing of the first Executive Order (EO) 12892 on Environmental Justice (EJ) signed by President Clinton. The decades since that first EO was signed have demonstrated the power of the EJ movement to advance a national agenda.
Join us during the month of April for a number of events that will feature discussions, films, information sessions and more related to confronting the climate crisis from a lens of justice and community building. You can find out information about and register for events here. If you have any questions, please reach out to us at tedc@newschool.edu. We look forward to seeing you in April!
You can RSVP below for all upcoming events and you can reach us at @newschoolTEDC on Twitter and @tishmancenter on Instagram.
Lake Superior - Our Helper is a documentary film that tells the inspiring story of the Batchewana First Nation's struggle to claim their rights over the land that has been passed down to them by their ancestors.
Dr. Ana Baptista, co-director of the Tishman Center, has recently been featured on the Resources Radio podcast with host Margaret Walls. In Episode 219, “Environmental Justice and the Cumulative Impacts of Pollution”, Ana breaks down the definition of “cumulative impacts”, why they are a particularly tough problem for overburdened communities to combat, and how environmental justice movements have successfully pushed for greater cumulative impacts legislation in recent years.
This year marks a pivotal moment for the Tishman Center in our nearly twenty-year history. We are very excited to announce that in December 2021, the Center was awarded a catalytic, multi-year grant to strengthen our operational, research, and communications capacity by Waverley Street Foundation. Our increased capacity will help us better meet the needs of our campus community, our Ripe for Creative Disruption Fellows, and our collaborative, action-based research.