Linking Community Development and Environmental Justice

Linking Community Development and Environmental Justice

Meetings planned for 20 February and 12 March, Leeds .

Community development has always had 'social justice' as a core principle. As climate change starts to impact (more frequently and more severely) on our lives, with a social justice perspective we can see that it is the poorest and most marginalised communities that struggle the most. For example, many are still recovering from last year's floods. Broaden your focus to a global view and this pattern is repeated, the lifestyles of the 'haves' impacting greatest on the 'have-nots'. The largest carbon footprints are being paid for by people with the smallest footprints. We need to be looking at and addressing social and environmental justice in our community development work and developing tools and analysis that can help address these injustices through collective action, sharing of knowledge, learning from each other, reflecting on our practice.
- Are you involved in community development and/or environmental justice work?
- Do you have knowledge and experience that you are willing to contribute to creating learning materials?
- And would you like to help shape a conference on the links between community development and environmental justice in Leeds on the 2nd April? (more details of this conference will follow)
Then we'd like to hear from you!

As part of the Federation for Community Development Learning's continuing work on environmental sustainability issues (funded through the government's Every Action Counts programme) we would like to invite you to two morning meetings, followed by lunch, to:
- Meet others interested in environmental justice and community development
- discuss what we mean by environmental justice
- explore how environmental justice issues can be applied in community development work - share examples of good practice
- suggest and begin drafting learning materials and learning ideas for a 3 hour taster pack and for a day long conference in Leeds
- decide the aims and content of the conference on 2nd April (Leeds Library has already been booked) and who should be there.

The meetings will be held on Wednesdays 20th February and 12th March, 10.00am - 2.00pm at the Henry Moore Institute, next to Leeds City Art Gallery in the city centre. FCDL can support travel costs and childcare/dependent care costs. If you are interested in attending, please contact Sue Leach at FCDL: admin@fcdl.org.uk or phone 0114 253 6770. Places are limited, so please contact us soon.

These websites were mentioned by the organisers as providing useful background reading on the concept of Environmental Justice
.
www.redpepper.org.uk/article320.html

www.capacity.org.uk/resourcecentre/informationsources.html