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

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.

Intersectionality & Ecological Systems Theory (Spanish Language)

Posted in: Environment, Public Policy | Tags: Featured Content
Published in: The Community Psychologist
Carlos and his colleagues apply psychological theory to practice. As a result, he and his colleagues advance genuine and sustainable change alongside the Mapuche people.

Youth Can (and should) Lead Movements to Support Environmental Work

Posted in: Blog, Environment, Inspiration
Generation-based priorities lead youth to promote environmental sustainability, health, and social justice. Youth are capable of unique problem-solving and deserving of authority related to environmental sustainability, the built environment, and health, while showing that certain communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss.

Blog: My Upcoming Plans to Decentralize Colonialism and Provide Space for Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Posted in: Anti-Racism, Environment, Rural Communities
Published in: The Community Psychologist
White cultural complexes can be embedded in non-profit organizations. “Sustainable” practices are often rooted in Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous cultures and their history of land-care need to be honored.

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
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.