View the final projects completed below.

Community Water Justice Awards

These awards support projects led by or with water justice communities in the state of Oregon. They are funded by an unprecedented historic Oregon state budget allocation through the Water Equity Fund housed by the Just Futures Institute and the Climate Solutions Center at the University of Oregon. Learn whose projects were funded in 2024.

Click below to see the recipients of the 2024 Community Water Justice Awards! This is a grant awarded to community members to support their water justice work. The 2025 application is coming soon!

Note: Although this is an archival website with projects that are finalized as of December 2024, the Community Water Justice Awards will continue. This is the only part of the website that will be updated beyond Decemebr 2024.

Oregon Water Futures

This project is funded by an unprecedented historic Oregon state budget allocation through the Water Equity Fund housed by the Just Futures Institute and the Climate Solutions Center at the University of Oregon.

The Oregon Water Futures Project is a collaboration between water and environmental justice interests, Indigenous peoples, communities of color, low-income communities, and academic institutions. Through a water justice lens, we aim to impact how the future of water in Oregon is imagined through storytelling, capacity building, relationship building, policymaking, and community-centered advocacy at the state and local level. Learn more about this cluster here.

Next West Media Lab

Next West Media Lab was an intensive, experiential learning program, focusing on gathering and sharing the stories of voices less often heard in the rural, eastern portions of Washington and Oregon on issues relating to land, water, and climate justice. Learn more about this cluster here.

Indigenous Lifeways

Climate change is wreaking havoc on traditional foods used by Indigenous communities for sustenance and medicine. In the PNW, sea-level rise, drought, and wildfire have been among many climate-related injuries to Indigenous lands. Indigenous communities find it increasingly difficult to perform the labors and ceremonies that maintain cultures ravaged by centuries of colonial violence. Learn more about this cluster here.

Inclusive Cities

Sustaining Inclusive Cities involves various interrelated initiatives, all of which are aimed at sustaining inclusive cities, both physically and culturally. Learn more about this cluster here.

Economic Dignity

The interrelated crises of systemic racism, climate change, and the pandemic make clear to us that we need new ways to map, visualize, and imagine the PNW in order to prepare strategically for just transitions that address economic dignity, immigrant rights, and the integrity of our climate. Learn more about this cluster here.

AfroIndigenous Healing

We recognize the important knowledge held by Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Black traditional healing and ecological knowledge keepers in PNW communities. In their everyday practices, medicine people, curanderes, traditional ceremonialists, and TEK specialists decolonize false distinctions between healing the Earth, and healing our bodies, hearts, and minds; for them, we are all interconnected in sets of healing relations that ensure all life can continue. Through storytelling, we create a digital platform that shares how healers support communities disproportionately impacted by climate change; foster educational exchanges between migrant Afro-Indigenous communities, and local Native and African American communities; and train students on how to engage in climate and racial-justice research, community engagement, and digital humanities. Learn more about this cluster here.

University of Idaho researchers at the Confluence Lab, in partnership with local communities, will create Stories of Fire: A Pacific Northwest Climate Justice Atlas. Learn more about this cluster here.

Click below to view the atlas!

Academic Incentives

Tackling the intertwined injuries of racism and climate change requires a new pipeline for recruiting and retaining Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the professoriate. Through the provision of two postdoctoral positions and one dissertation fellowship, the Academic Incentives team sought to create more professional opportunities for BIPoC scholars; to promote scholarship that illuminates racial, Indigenous and (de)colonial dynamics in the PNW; to foster humanities research in environmental justice and climate justice; to create a critical mass of BIPoC scholars and others to help shift UO culture; and to identify potential tenure-track hires who focus on racial, ethnic, Indigenous, and decolonial studies. Learn more about this cluster here.

Ice, Society, and Climate Justice

Melting glaciers are an icon of global climate change. But they affect groups of people differently, depending not just on place, but on race, indigeneity, and other social factors. Ice in the PNW (on Rainier, Cascades, Olympics, Hood) is crucial for farming, hydroelectricity, drinking water, recreation, spirituality, and identities. We will build on existing multidisciplinary strengths at the UO in humanities and natural sciences to create an Ice, Society, and Climate Justice Initiative that foregrounds climate justice to understand inequalities, power imbalances, and uneven vulnerabilities beneath melting glaciers. This is crucial for Indigenous communities living around all the PNW’s glacier-covered mountains, for BIPOC communities relegated to floodplains subject to increasing glacier landslides and outburst floods, and for Latinx farmworkers irrigating crops with glacier runoff. This Initiative tackled these human-ice-justice issues through diverse public events, research, mentorship of students, field trainings, lectures, and courses. Learn more about this cluster here.

View some of JFI’s biggest highlights below!