
Funded by the Mellon Foundation, SUSTAIN-NYC is the first-ever partnership between CCNY and local environmental justice organization South Bronx Unite.
The City College of New York has received a $490,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish a new project at the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership, “SUSTAIN-NYC: Storytelling for Urban Sustainability and Transformation in New York City."
This project, a partnership with local environmental justice organization South Bronx Unite, aims to undertake various media projects that document, analyze, and publicize ongoing issues of environmental injustice in the communities of Mott Haven and Port Morris. These communities have been affected disproportionately by these injustices, which include “last-mile” delivery warehouses and associated industrial activities that produce heavy vehicular traffic, as well as the siting of waste management facilities that cause high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases due to the poor air quality.
The multidisciplinary research team consists of the project’s principal investigator, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Prash Naidu, an expert on environmental justice and community-based participatory action, and two co-principal investigators: Colin Powell School Director of Fellowship Programs and Office of Student Success Deborah Cheng; and Associate Professor of Sociology Yana Kucheva, who researches housing and environmental inequality.
An outgrowth of the project’s efforts will be to imagine a better path forward in both the affected communities and in New York City as a whole. One component is the development of a student fellowship program aimed at nurturing emerging scholars in the environmental humanities. This fellowship is planned to launch in fall 2025, with recruitment of the first cohort to be completed by the end of the spring 2025 semester. These undergraduate research fellowships aim to nurture a stronger and broader cohort of future scholars in the environmental humanities and humanistic social sciences.
The project will also entail the co-creation of an interactive digital platform with SBU that will amplify community voices and serve as a resource for advocacy and education. A portal that will allow for community members’ contributions of their own experiences and their visions of a more just future is one part of the project’s effort to democratize environmental justice knowledge and to empower the next generation of leaders committed to social equity.
The funding for the project commenced on Dec. 1, 2024 and continues through the end of 2027.
“Our ultimate goal is to respond to the need for a humanities-grounded approach to environmental justice,” said Naidu. “While scientific studies and regulatory interventions have provided valuable data and policy frameworks, they have often failed to fully capture the lived experiences of affected communities. Our project seeks to address these shortcomings through environmental justice storytelling; we propose to center the voices, experiences, and knowledge of South Bronx residents, including our own students who are deeply connected to these communities.”
“We are excited to develop a new student fellowship focused on the environmental humanities,” said Cheng, noting that nearly one fifth of CCNY students live in the Bronx. “Many of our students come from the communities most impacted by environmental injustices, and we are eager to cultivate the next generation of scholars whose lived experiences and research contributions can inform academia, policy, and advocacy.”
This formal partnership between CCNY and SBU, the first of its kind, was established by SBU Clean Air Organizer Leslie Vasquez, a 2022 graduate of the Powell School.
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Syd Steinhardt
212-650-7875
ssteinhardt1@ccny.cuny.edu