Environmental Justice Graduate Research Fund

This project is designed to raise scholarship and research funds to support Master of Science students in the Department of Environmental Studies at San Jose State University who are making a difference with their research in the arena of Environmental Justice. Funds raised for this campaign will help support scholarships, research supplies, and other expenses necessary for students to complete their research projects. These funds will allow the Department of Environmental Studies at SJSU to substantially increase our effectiveness and outreach in the realm of Environmental Justice, and they will help make our Master of Science degree accessible to a wider range of students.

 Funds raised from this campaign will help support current and future Master of Science students and projects such as those featured here.  One of our current students, Ashari Taylor Watson, intends to finish her research and graduate by December 2020, but cannot do so unless funding is identified to support her work. Ashari's research focuses on the intersection of digital equity and environmental literacy in African-American youth of low-income communities. She is conducting her research and volunteering as the STEM program instructor for the Leonard J. Metzler branch of the Oakland Boys and Girls Club, where she bridges the gaps between access to technology, green technology, and environmental justice.  

In addition to Ashari, Heidi Giancola, Claudia Damiano, Raji Rajesh, Alycia Ellington and Allison Solis are all initiating research on justice in the food system, including urban farms and gardens, educational farms, and commercial farmworker working conditions. Guadalupe Franco and Diana Saavedra are studying how city climate and infrastructure planning include and affects underrepresented constituencies.  

The entire faculty of the Department of Environmental Studies is committed to mentoring these students and others to come. However, we can't do this without your help. Please make your gift today by clicking on one of the giving levels to support the work of our current students as well as the future students that enroll in our program. Please note that gifts of any size make a difference and you can adjust the amount to something smaller than $50 after clicking the Give Now or Contribute button. Thank you in advance for your support!   

To learn more about all of our current grad students and the research they are working on, visit the link below:

https://www.sjsu.edu/envs/graduate/current_graduate_students/index.html

Additional Information:

• Donations are 100% tax-deductible and are managed by the SJSU Tower Foundation (Nonprofit Tax Code Designation: 501c(3); EIN: 83-0403915)
• You will receive a letter for your files to acknowledge the gift for tax purposes. 
• 100% of your donation will go to support graduate student salary and direct research costs and supplies. 
  • The SJSU crowdfunding site charges no overhead. 
  • Credit cards incur only a 2% processing fee
  • If you prefer to send a check, it may be made out to: 
    • Tower Foundation with a memo that it is for the Environmental Justice Graduate Research Crowdfunding campaign: 

Tower Foundation

One Washington Square

Clark Hall, Suite 300

San Jose, CA 95192-0183

408-924-1765  

If we meet our target, funds will cover: 

• One semester of salary and basic research costs for our first graduate student awardee, Ashari Taylor-Watson, who is conducting environmental education research with children at the Boys and Girls Club of Oakland, California, and 
• The remainder will be distributed among eligible Environmental Justice graduate student research projects, screened by a faculty-led panel, as small research grants.

All donors will be updated with exactly which projects and students the funds were able to support this year. 

• This campaign is the first-ever Environmental Justice crowdfunding appeal in the Department of Environmental Studies at SJSU.  We hope to make it an annual appeal, in order to strengthen the breadth and diversity of graduate students and the ENVS@SJSU contribution to Environmental Justice in a consistent, ongoing way.