Our own Marisol Becerra was recogized alongside Sonia Sotomayor and Hilda Solis as a Champion of Change by Hispanic Magazine recently for her work on OurMap of Environmental Justice, she created in collaboration with Open Youth Networks and Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

Map Together blog is also impressed. Check out their homage to Marisol’s map here.

Tags: environmental_justice, lvejo, maps

During Green Games Institute, approximately 15 low-income youth from Chicago will participate in a twelve-week curricular process that echoes the iterative cycle of game design with an environmentally critical focus. This cycle includes the phases of: 1) research and conceptualization, 2) producing the design document, 3) generating game art and assets, 4) programming/coding, 5) play testing for beta release, 6) coding refinement 7) final release and social marketing.

The first half of the curriculum teaches ethics-based game literacy and design, environmental policy and planning and social media (viral marketing, etc.). The second half of the Institute transforms into a real live game production lab with Columbia College students joining the youth to act as student mentors and implementors of the game design document that the youth have created. During this second phase, youth are introduced to programming, game art creation, play-testing and viral marketing. Green Games Institute will recruit youth from the Chicago Environmental Justice Coalition and the CMAP Future Leaders in Planning group. The youth recruited will be primarily low-income urban youth of color drawn from a cross-section of Chicago neighborhoods, but primarily from the South and Southwest sides— areas with high concentrations of industrial pollution and a lack of safe, green spaces. These youth have much to offer to the public dialogue around environmental policy and practices in Chicago because they experience a set of problems that middle class and suburban youth rarely encounter.

Green Games Institute will allow urban youth to design and develop Level the Playing Field! (working title), an environmental policy game that is played among friends on Facebook. Its overall purpose as a game experience is to help young Justice Seekers design a greener city with policies of sustainability. Aided by real knowledge of Chicago communities, the Justice Seekers work to mobilize friends and family to pass green legislation, report on greedy polluters and build greener public spaces in urban neighborhoods. This would be an asynchronous game that could be stopped and started again at any point (while waiting for the bus, in between classes, etc.)  You could only play the game as an individual to a point. In order to advance to higher levels and accomplish the mission, you would need to recruit “friends” to join with you. As more people join to play the game, they are also building social connections among people “committed to the cause”, but more importantly they are linking up to the perspectives of urban youth. The Facebook game will allow these youth to achieve a greater voice and connection to the larger student environmental movement locally and nationally.

The youth will also develop a social marketing and distribution campaign to accompany the release of the game. For example, a non-profit center at the University of Toronto, partnered with the UN Nothing but Nets Campaign to develop the Facebook game, Mosquito Splat. For each mosquito you SPLAT, you score 10 points. For every 100 points scored, advertisers make a donation to support malaria research projects at the National Institute for Medical Research in Tanzania. Users score 10 points for everyone they invite to play the game – plus there’s a link to an online donation page in case players want to support the research directly. We will challenge our youth to create a similar social media campaign that raises awareness (and possibly funding) for local environmental groups.

Marisol Becerra and Mindy Faber of Open Youth Networks presented OurMap of Environmental Justice along with a video about the impact of industrial pollution on residents of Little Village at the Columbia College School of Journalism’s Conference on Environmental Reporting on April 25th. Marisol explained how news outlets often position the environmental movement as one driven by young educated whites. Stories about personal responsibility to limit one’s carbon footprint trump investigative analyses about the irresponsibility of capitalist industry in creating the crisis in climate change and generating massive health effects on those working in and around those industries.

Photo by Mark Hallett

Moreover, the story about the environmental justice movement in the US — one led primarily by low income communities of color battling environmental racism, a policy of “selective victimization” — is often omitted or distorted by major news outlets. Little Village is a low income Mexican-American community that has been designated as an “ecological sacrifice zone” by both the industry and the state. Yet, the overwhelming majority of Chicago residents are completely unaware of the health and environmental crisis in the neighborhood.  Faber and Becerra explained that this is why it is important that residents and youth living in those communities have access to the tools of communication and technology that allow them to become citizen journalists reporting on their own experiences.

Youth members Marisol Becerra and Zane Scheuerlein worked with Mindy Faber to produce The Cloud Factory: Putting Justice on the Map. They also trained youth members of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization how to collaboratively author a multimedia Google MyMap documenting the toxics and assets of the neighborhood through stories, videos and photos. The map also reveals how many schools are located within a one and two mile radius of the Crawford Coal Power Plant. The asthma rate in Little Village is twice as high as the national average and 40 people in the community die each year from asthma attacks while thousands more must visit emergency rooms and clinics.

Open Youth Networks along with youth partners at LVEJO and their youth membership, Young Activists Organizing as Today’s Leaders are working to expand the map and add content and data about other neighborhoods in Chicago, particularly around the South Side. Visit their blog El Cilantro to learn more. Dozens of allies - other environmental justice organizations in the US -  are also included on the current map, denoted by the icon of a Lorax. If you would like to join the map as a collaborator, send an email to Mindy Faber (mfaber@colum.edu).

View OurMap of Environmental Justice in a larger map

In 2003, Marisol Becerra volunteered with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) to map and inventory the toxins found within 150 blocks of her predominantly Mexican-American community, Little Village in Chicago. Marisol was enraged to discover that in Little Village more than 60,000 youth in a two-mile radius of the Fisk and Crawford Coal Power Plants are forced to breathe air that violates EPA standards. She was inspired to act, she said, “in order to shut down these coal power plants, build more parks, and clean up the toxics. We must organize more people to stand up and fight.” Her first step was launching the youth branch of LVEJO — Youth Activists Organizing as Today’s Leaders, YAOTL. Based on the data Marisol collected, YAOTL collaborated with Chicago-based Open Youth Networks to devise OurMap of Environmental Justice, an interactive online map that includes 12 youth-created videos, descriptions of toxic sites, and gang territory delineations. With this map, Marisol educated her community about local environmental injustice and motivated them to become involved in campaigns. The map uses poignant facts and videos to educate about the different pollutants and contaminants in Little Village that cause 41 premature deaths and 550 emergency room visits annually. In 2008, Marisol was awarded a Brower Youth Award for her commitment and work.

Our very own Marisol Becerra was recently awarded one of the prestigious Brower Youth Awards by the Earth Island Institute for her community organizing work with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) and the creation of “Our Map of Environmental Justice” through the support of Open Youth Networks.

A huge article appeared in the November 3, 2008 front page section of the Chicago Tribune which you can access here. Also, read Mindy Faber’s response to the article here which unfortunately neglected to mention Open Youth Networks or LVEJO.

The Brower Youth Award website is chocked full of great information too, not only about Marisol but about the other winners as well. Check it out here.

But first watch this video…