About Us
CivicGreen is a collaborative project among scholars and practitioners to enrich our democratic imagination and to expand our policy options for sustainable, resilient, and just responses to climate crisis in the United States in the coming decades. Our perspective is to locate civic engagement at the heart of work that needs to occur in communities of all kinds, across cities and regions, and among professional and other institutional partners that are key to solving problems for the long run.
We are housed at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University, but our network of senior editorial associates and advisors extends to many other academic partners and practitioners.
While we draw upon substantial research, we present civic practice and policy in a straightforward manner to assist those stepping up to community and institutional leadership from many starting points: community activism and environmental justice, environmental education and youth service, faith communities, professional engagement, city planning, public administration, and sustainable business and labor.
Our resources are designed for those seeking inspired stories of community and professional engagement, compelling cases and models that might be relevant in many settings, policy designs that enable participation and collaboration, and toolkits available for skillful and effective work.
We provide an accessible glossary of terms that are utilized in community resilience work of various kinds. In our bookshelf, we keep up with recent publications that might be of interest and provide a larger bibliography of important previous studies that have shaped innovative policy and practice. Our toolbox provides annotations and links to practical handbooks, guides, digital and mapping toolkits for civic work in specific fields of green innovation, as well as for collaborative and deliberative process generally. We also profile specific cities, especially those developing multiple and integrative sustainability and resilience strategies. In our blog we discuss issues and profile leading practitioners.
We also present innovative policy designs that might enhance the possibilities for active civic engagement, coproduction, and collaborative governance in sustainable, resilient, and just transitions. Educators will find resources to assist students in class presentations, research projects, career guidance, and community service and stewardship projects.
While we take structural issues of economic inequality, environmental racism, and neoliberal dynamics seriously, we do not subscribe to the most sweeping analytic critiques that are prevalent in some social science approaches. We choose to operate on the terrain of democratic and pragmatic institutional change, though one informed by broad vision of civic and green transformation that is needed to respond to the climate crisis for decades to come.
Many of the innovations we profile have been developed during both Democratic and Republican administrations, if unevenly, and CivicGreen remains nonpartisan.
However, we fully recognize that the previous administration attempted to roll back and undermine progress along many fronts, and that our task of a civic green transformation will be even more challenging in the years ahead amidst twin crises of climate and democracy.
To make suggestions, email our editor: carmensirianni511@gmail.com