Creative Engagement with Environmental Justice

In November 2022, Skyline High School hosted a series of community-building workshops with community partners. Sequoia Foundation facilitated environmental justice-themed creative engagement workshops to heighten awareness of how our race, gender, income, and other identifiers interact with our surrounding physical, cultural, and political environments. The workshop consisted of two activities described below.

Word Association Activity

Students spent three minutes free-writing on the prompt, “What does ‘environment’ mean to you?” Students selected keywords from their free write and the facilitator wrote them on the whiteboard, circling any repeated words. The facilitator repeated the process with the prompt, “Your ideal healthy environment.”

The facilitator then led a brief discussion about environmental justice in the context of how different aspects of the sociocultural and physical environment interact with aspects of our personal identity and life (race, gender, socioeconomic status, residence, etc). A final free-write activity prompted the students to consider different aspects of their own identity and how they may interact with their surrounding environments.

Collaborative Collage Activity

Based on the keywords from the Word-Association activity, students selected relevant images from magazines, that sparked joy or interest. They created collages depicting their ideal healthy environment by gluing the images onto larger sheets within the outlines of the chosen keyword.

These creative community-building activities can be conducted separately, and with topics environmental justice.

"I enjoyed sharing ideas to be a part of the lessons and creating a peace sign with my peers. I also learned that environment can also be things you can’t see."

"Everyone has different views and understandings about the environment, and what is important to their own environment. People connect very different types of images to the same word."

"The word environment doesn’t always have to mean nature but also means the state of comfort someone is in depending on the place, person, or environment."