Environmental Equity and Justice Partnership (EEJP) is an independent grant-making program of the Just Environment Charitable Trust and supported by the Ford Foundation. The initiative is dedicated to helping groups and individuals foster lasting improvement in the area of environmental justice by catalysing grassroots initiatives; triggering new imagination; bringing in new perspectives; encouraging crossover linkages; promoting community participation, and providing greater opportunities to connect to the environmental thinking.

The goal of EEJP is ‘to secure environmental justice especially for the poor and the marginalized that are often expected to bear more than their share of environmental burdens’.

To this effect EEJP strives to accomplish the following long-term objectives:

• Promote environmental justice at grassroots level;
• Integrate local work into mainstream policy;
• Focus on organizational development to create a sense of confidence to take broader issues;
• Create a better-informed community

More specifically, the program works toward the following:

• Up-scaling the existing and catalysing new, innovative interventions on the issue;
• Generating new research data especially on new emerging issues;
• Up-scaling community understanding on environmental issues and enhancing their participation in environmental decision making;
• Establishing linkages between the local institutions and environmental issues;
• Pooling resources of local level expertise

The underlying principles of EEJP remain:

• to foster and catalyse environmental work at the grassroots level.
• to encourage new environmental thinking and ways of imagining solutions and hence challenge the status quo.
• to help build, create and catalyse networks.
• to encourage production and dissemination of knowledge products that moves the ground.
• to bridge the gap between commitment and resources.
• to raise awareness about cross over linkages.
• to promote public participation in environmental decision-making.
• to mobilise and channel larger resources towards environmental justices.

EEJP extends support under two components:

Environmental Small Grants (for grassroots organisations) and Environmental Fellowships (for young individuals).

For more information: http://eejp.org/