Welcome to the GIS for Equity & Social Justice Group – Let’s get started!

[MargotBordne]

Welcome and thanks for joining the GIS for Equity & Social Justice Group on GeoNet.  In this group, members can find a community of people who are leveraging GIS to advance equity and social justice. This is a space for members to collaborate, share their work, connect with other professionals, ask questions, participate in discussions, share successes and challenges, and learn about relevant events. The Esri administrators of the group, Clinton Johnson and Margot Bordne, will also share the latest information and resources from Esri on this topic. 

To get started, we invite you to first review the group features and overview page and familiarize yourself with the group info, admins, and GeoNet 101 information in the left column.  As you explore the group, you’ll also find tools to connect and collaborate so we encourage you to use them to share files, create blogs, ask/answer questions and read the latest blogs posts and join discussions. 

Next, we invite you to post a comment below to introduce yourself, share about the work you do, and something you hope to gain from this space. 

We’re excited to connect and collaborate with you and we look forward to seeing your contributions.

- Clinton & Margot

[MargotBordne]

Welcome! We look forward to seeing your work!! Feel free to share

[BenHughey2]

Hello all! I was glad to see this group featured in the Geonet e-newsletter as I just started a new environmental justice mapping project. I'm helping the community group Alaska Community Action on Toxics develop an interactive map, then a Story Map of toxic waste sites (formerly used defense sites, EPA designated sites like RCRA, CERCLA, NPDES, others) across the state and have a lot to learn about these datasets, and about AGOL. 

A little about me: during an undergrad degree in Geography, I spent a term in Ecuador mapping the boundaries of indigenous communities to protect against encroachment, facilitated by the Yanapuma Foundation. After undergrad I did GIS and policy work for a Seattle-based environmental non-profit, then went back to school for an MPA. I spent the last year focused on climate and environmental justice policy through a fellowship in the US Senate.

Looking forward to learning from you all!

[MargotBordne]

Hi Ben!

Welcome to the group. Here are a few cool projects that may be of interest to you:
CalEnviroScreen

Alaska’s Justice Ecosystem: Building a Partnership of Providers

UCLA - Mapping Indigenous LA

Would love to learn more about your work! Hope you can make it to the Virtual UC this year. 

Margot

[BenHughey2]

Thanks!

I hadn't seen that very well-made StoryMap of Alaska's Justice system. Very cool.

CalEnviroScreen and the Washington Environmental Health Disparities Map are definitely the gold standards in environmental justice mapping. For others interested in the topic, see Charle Lee's article on lessons learned from EJ mapping and screening.

[KatieMigaFFX]

Thank you for putting this together!! I've been working on equity projects using GIS for close to a year for Fairfax County Government in Virginia (and longer working on demographic projects). I've created a Vulnberability Index and have just recently created a COVID-19 Vulnerability Index for the county's leadership team to use in response efforts to COVID-19. I would love to hear more ideas from everyone in this group as how to further equity and social justice using GIS!

[MargotBordne]

Hi Katherine, 

I am so glad you found the group!! I would love to hear more about the equity work you are doing in Fairfax County especially around COVID. We are working on a blog series on racial equity during COVID-19 and are actively looking for folks who are doing this work.  Here are the blogs so far:

• Racially Equitable COVID-19 Response Using GIS 
• Analyze Racial Inequity During COVID-19 

• Use ArcGIS Dashboards to Increase Racial Equity in Your COVID-19 Response 
• New Data Collection Available: COVID-19 Health, Racial, and Economic Equity 

I will send you a separate message to see if we can maybe hop on a separate call to discuss your work in more detail.  In the meantime do you have any public links you can share here with the group? I'm sure others would be interested to see as well!

Margot

[KatieMigaFFX]

Hi Margot,

Currently, the COVID-19 Vulnerability Index is internal only. I would be happy to share screeshots and methodology. I'm not sure if/when the application will be shared to the public. The Vulnerability Index I created last year is available in AGO here.

I would be happy to chat.

Best,

Katie

[EstherWest1]

Agreed, thanks for setting this up! I'm a Cooperative Development Specialist at the University of Wisconsin, with a background in urban planning and community-rooted worker cooperatives. I'm currently based in Madison, WI, and am chicanx. I'm also interested in ways to take back community power through urban planning and GIS tools - as you all know, there are so many ways this might look, so I'm excited to learn from and with you all.  My own GIS & social justice work has included trail equity and accessibility in Cincinnati, used GIS in assessing coastal flood zones with climate change in comp plans, and I put GIS to use towards

[MargotBordne]

Hi Esther West‌, thanks for joining this community.  Your work sounds incredible and we are excited to have your perspective as part of the conversation.  Please feel free to share any public examples of your work here, we would love to learn more about it! 

Do you know the work of Veronica Velez? She is a pioneer of Critical Race Spatial Analysis and is similarly doing amazing work around community power and activism using GIS tools, particularly around educational equity. If not, I believe she will be speaking at an upcoming event which I will share as soon as I have more information, if you are interested!

Thanks again for participating! 

[EstherWest1]

Hi Margot - thanks very much!  Sorry I missed your response earlier and didn't reply quickly... I really appreciate it.  I don't know Veronica Velez - thank you for sharing her work.  I would love to hear of future events with her, if you happen to have any upcoming ones.

A few projects I've worked on at the University of Wisconsin Center for Co-ops using GIS are:

• Collective Action in Rural Communities (includes an interactive national co-op resource map)
• A study titled "Latinx Co-op Power," by Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and myself - portions of the anlysis used GIS.
• Interactive maps of Co-ops in Wisconsin (though this needs some updating!)

This is a wonderful thread / page - thanks to all for sharing. I appreciate learning from everyone here.