Abstract

Excerpted From: Patience A. Crowder and Tom I. Romero, II, Embedding Racial Justice in the Work of Environmental Non-Profits, 22 Seattle Journal for Social Justice 803 (Spring, 2024) (50 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In response to the national and worldwide protests against racial violence and the health inequities amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, organizations across the world--including many of those involved in environmentalism and sustainability--ostensibly declared they would rethink and re-imagine the role that racial justice, equity, and inclusion play in their work. In Colorado, long-standing and well-known environmental organizations, such as Conservation Colorado and the Metro Denver Nature Alliance, for example, made commitments to reexamine their working definitions of “equity,” “inclusion,” and racial as well as social justice.

One such organization, the Colorado Water Trust (CWT), a water rights broker whose mission is to keep water in the rivers for fish and recreation, committed to each of the following actions:

• To act as an organization to dismantle racist systems;

• To incorporate Racial Equity and Inclusion (REI) at all levels of the organization--including drafting a strategic plan and policies for communications, project selection, membership outreach, and development, forming partnerships, and organizational leadership;

• To include criteria in its project selection analyses that evaluates the impacts of proposed projects on underrepresented communities;

• To participate in opportunities that cultivate diverse and inclusive employment and leadership in water, environmental, and recreational professions;

• To support and encourage CWT staff and Board members to pursue REI action;

• To provide staff with paid time off for volunteer service and encourage staff to volunteer with organizations that work towards REI;

• To participate in activities that embrace and advance REI principles in the broader Colorado water community; and

• To maintain a standing REI Committee composed of CWT Board members and CWT staff.

We are Community Engaged Researchers and Practitioners as well as Critical Race Theorists, and we have substantive understandings of water rights and community non-profit development. Accordingly, this partnership allowed us to test how and in what ways law schools can and should directly intersect, engage, and transform the work of environmental and other organizations committed to racial justice.

In the realm of environmental law and policy, such efforts represent an acknowledgment of a longer-standing disconnect between environmental movements and racial justice advocacy. Although this is not a new development, this particular collaboration revealed an unprecedented opportunity to align an environmental organization's mission and vision on behalf of the “natural environment” with its own increasing awareness of both human dependency and interaction with these same natural resources. While much of the work of environmental non-profits is necessarily local, dependent upon local geographies and climates, advocacy tools developed through this alignment have the potential to become replicable models capable of adaptation from one community and one organization to the next.

Accordingly, we believe these connections can best be explored by unpacking the following four questions in collective and on-going conversation:

1. What sorts of internal mechanisms can environmental organizations adopt, such as equity assessment tools and community asset maps, to evaluate the potential impact of their work on advancing or limiting racial equity before commencing new projects and to then evaluate those projects once completed?

2. Given concerns about organizational capacity and limited resources, how should environmental organizations build meaningful and reciprocal community partnerships with racial equity advocates?

3. How can environmental organizations reimagine their roles as partners with sovereign entities (whether tribal, federal, state, or local) to elevate and amplify new alignments between environmental advocacy and racial equity movements?

4. What role do law schools and higher education play in answering these questions?

We provide some answers to these queries by detailing the collaborative efforts of Professor Crowder's Community Economic Development Clinic (CEDC) to develop an Equity Assessment Tool for the CWT to understand and engage more deeply and directly with diverse communities where our projects live both now and into the future. Informed by Professor Romero's Color of Water in Colorado project and own expertise on the intersections between water law, policy, and practice and Critical Race Theory, the collaboration we describe is a model by which law schools and justice-oriented Professor-Practitioners alike can partner with environmental organizations to increase the inclusivity and impact of their work while keeping the most vulnerable and minoritized communities in mind.

Our essay is divided into three parts. Part I explains in more detail the work of the CWT and its journey in connecting its organizational mission to that of racial inequities and injustice. Part II details the specific representation of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law's CEDC and the opportunities as well as challenges of creating an institutional mechanism by which racial inequity can be embedded in the organization's public-facing projects. Part III concludes by noting some of the ongoing as well as future efforts in the implementation of the Equity Assessment Tool and implications for future environmental as well as racial justice collaborations.

[. . .]

In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. When Dr. King quoted the Christian New Testament to demand that “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” he was implicating every person and every organization in the project of dismantling racial injustice. It is an ethical obligation to be substantively engaged with the ongoing and interconnected crises of our times. We find Dr. King's direct connection of racial justice and water particularly powerful in the context of this essay. We therefore make a call to action toward a greater collaboration between law schools and environmental organizations working for greater equity and inclusion for all humans to the natural landscapes and resources of the world that we inhabit and rely on.

Patience A. Crowder, Prof. of Law & Founding Dir. Econ. J. and Small Bus. Clinic, U.N.L.V. Formerly Founding Dir. Cmty. Econ. Dev. Clinic, Univ. of Denv. (2010-2023).

Tom I. Romero, Prof. of Law & Hist. & Fac. Dir. Interdisc. Rsch. Inst. Study Equal., Univ. Denv.