EPA REGION 9 Recipient: San Diego State University Foundation (SDSU) Applicant Type: Not for Profit / Institution of Higher Education Award Amount: $10,000,000 Title: EPA Region 9 TCTAC: SDSU's Center for Community Energy and Environmental Justice Location:
EPA Region 9 (AZ, CA, HI, NV, AS, GU, and 148 tribes) SDSU Community Climate Action Network (academic), Environmental Protection Network (industry), Center for Creative Land Recycling (non-profit), University of San Diego’s Energy Policy Initiatives Center (academic), Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (tribal), Desert Research Institute (non- profit), Climate Science Alliance (non- profit education), Pacific RISA (research), University of Guam’s Center of Island Sustainability (academic), Public Health Alliance (non-profit), and Arizona State University (academic). Partners: Goals and Description:
The purpose of SDSU’s TCTAC for EPA Region 9 - The Center for Community Energy and Environmental Justice - is to empower communities in EPA’s Region 9 by providing critical services to qualified community organizations. These services will expand participants’ capacity to meet community-defined priorities and participate meaningfully in decision-making processes, focusing specifically on underserved, rural, remote, tribal, and indigenous communities. Building capacity in, providing support for, and collaborating with communities often most vulnerable and affected by environmental challenges is central to advancing environmental and energy justice.
SDSU TCTAC’s mission is to leverage and strengthen community assets by creating an accessible in-person and virtual community that builds capacity and provides technical assistance in energy and environmental justice centered around four unifying objectives: 1) Outreach and partnership building, 2) Development of resources, 3) Transfer of knowledge and building community capacity, 4) Evaluation, adaptation, and innovation.
Using a hub and spoke model, SDSU TCTAC will create a nexus of centralized expertise and coordination for each critical service for Region 9, which connects eligible organizations with established partners in each state/territory to coordinate, deliver, and monitor uptake of key services while tracking the outcomes and outputs from the communities we serve. To provide efficient and coordinated technical assistance, training, and support, this EJ TCTAC will follow a hub and spoke model. The hub of the TCTAC will be based in a physical and virtual center at SDSU called the Center for Community Energy and Environmental Justice.
Hub partners will work to coordinate activities in their area(s) of expertise across all of Region 9 and will facilitate co-production, co- development, sharing, transfer, and delivery of both process and content among Spoke partners and community partners. Spoke partners will lead on delivering services (in person and virtually) to community organizations, building and expanding on their existing eligible community organizations in their network and identifying and connecting with new community organizations, supporting community engagement and capacity building. Our activities will focus specifically on underserved, rural, remote, tribal, indigenous, and native communities.
The San Diego State University Foundation will collaborate closely with the University of Arizona, which has also been selected to receive an EJ TCTAC award to communities in EPA Region 9.