Reducing Conflict and Promoting Community through Youth Gardening

Environment

Issues

Environment

Community Psychologists promote research, teaching, and action related to global climate change and environmental degradation. We focus on environmental justice, particularly how environmental change affects and often perpetuates social inequality.

Voices of the Youth Climate Justice Movement

Posted in: Blog, Environment
Published in: The Community Psychologist
How do youth view and categorize success? How do they deal with the burnout and frustration that inevitably comes when those most interested in changing the status quo have the least power to fix it? We explore questions regarding youth climate justice successes and challenges, posing them within an intersectional framework.

Community Reclamation through Urban Gardening as a Liberatory Praxis

Posted in: Blog, Environment
Published in: The Community Psychologist
Land reclamation can empower communities, reconnect people to land, and grow towards community liberation and autonomy. Communities are able to partake in revolutionary acts of autonomy and reclamation through the actions of physically reclaiming land in urban landscapes by eradicating colonizer plants with those plants that are Indigenous to their environments.

Photograph of school community with solar panels

A Collaboration Framework for Environmental Sustainability

Posted in: Environment | Tags: Featured Content
Published in: American Journal of Community Psychology
A people-focused approach is a new framework for working within or alongside organizations to bring about sustainability-related changes. Community Psychologists can work beside people within an organization to support them as they embed a sustainability culture.

Psychiatry Research Division Mini-Retreat with Forest Bathing Hawai`i

Posted in: Environment, Mental Health
Published in: The Community Psychologist
A Forest Bathing mini-retreat can inspire us in at least two ways – gratitude and relationships. We can collectively express gratitude for the experience of forest bathing in the moment and for sharing time in-person with co-workers and friends who have scarcely been seen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Congregating safely in a […]

Surf’s Up for Youth Mental Health

Posted in: Children, Youth and Families, Environment, Marginalized Groups, Mental Health
Published in: Global Journal of Community Psychology Practice
Surf therapy, an emerging intervention, can increase hope among youth at-promise. Surf therapy is an effective intervention to increase positive self-identity, and feelings of safety and inclusion.

Establishing Environmentally Sustainable Practices through Community Engagement: A “Greener” Approach to the “Wicked Problems” of Industrialization

Posted in: Blog, Environment
Published in: The Community Psychologist
We can change our own individualistic lifestyle and adapt a more community-oriented and prosocial approach to environmentally sustainable behavior.

Just Living is Not Enough: Community Gardens Promote Life and Connection to Others

Posted in: Environment, Sense of Community
Community gardens are more than pretty spaces. We can (and should) measure pro-social community-level programs to better understand how and why they work.

Advancing the Social Sciences of Sustainability – Dr. Manuel Riemer

Posted in: Environment, Marginalized Groups, Uncategorized | Tags: Podcasts
During this interview Dr. Riemer explains the complexity of the concept of Sustainability and argues for the need for more social science in sustainability research – stating that “we need to breathe air, but we also need to be in community”.

Apply Community Psychology Principles to Reduce Carbon Emissions

Posted in: Blog, Environment, Public Policy
Published in: The Community Psychologist
A Call to Action by Christopher Corbett Citizens–not politicians–are urgently needed and create the demand for renewable energy. Will you join in the battle to help prevent climate change? In Part I: Community Psychology and the Resist Movement (Corbett, 2017, a), I made the case that there is a moral obligation to resist our elected […]

Reducing Conflict and Promoting Community through Youth Gardening

Posted in: Children, Youth and Families, Criminal Justice, Environment
Published in: The Community Psychologist
The SCRA Social Justice Mini-grant program provided seeds for the development of a vegetable garden for youth at a detention center (Boy’s Totem Town) located St. Paul, MN. Beginning in May 2017, youth participated in a vegetable garden program that taught them the principles of environmental sustainability, healthful and nutritious diets, and responsible ecological practices.