The Center for Environmental Justice at ACM offers hope for Our Shared Future

On Earth Day, the Anacostia Community Museum celebrated the launch of its Center for Environmental Justice. Over 500 people gathered to mark this joyous new chapter in the museum’s history. The event included the first of what is now a weekly farm stand bringing fresh, locally grown fruits and vegetables to communities east of the Anacostia River; a chalk mural and series of drawings of fauna found along the Anacostia Watershed for kids to color in on the sidewalk; and the planting of this year’s community gardens.

It’s no wonder there was so much energy for the opening event: the Center for Environmental Justice has been 55 years in the making. It’s the culmination of work the museum has been doing since the very beginning: community-based projects including the Urban Waterways program, a food justice initiative prompted by the pandemic, and a longstanding commitment to local storytelling have all given way to the Center for Environmental Justice, a research hub and a collection of programs focused on sustainability and equity. Every component centers the community and their relationship to a changing environment.  

One of the Center’s flagship programs is the Environmental Justice Academy, which launched this February with its inaugural cohort of 32 young women and non-binary people of color living in communities along the Anacostia River; the program encourages participants to explore the intersections of community, justice, and environment. Students engage in conversation with one another and with guest speakers about climate change in the context of their daily lives; they also partake in a series of field trips in the D.C. area and to the Anacostia Community Museum. The program is molding a new generation of leaders: members of the current cohort participated in a panel discussion at the Earth Day celebration. These young people are already critically engaged with their changing environment and the community it sustains.

On May 19, the Anacostia Community Museum will open its newest exhibition to the public, To Live and Breathe: Women and Environmental Justice in Washington, DC. The exhibit traces a long history of activism in environmental justice among women of color in the D.C. area and across the country. It was created with support from the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative and embodies the Anacostia Community Museum’s theme for 2023: Our Environment, Our Future. The museum will host special exhibition viewing for SI staff at a date to be announced this summer, and I encourage all those in the area to see the exhibit.

This September, the Center for Environmental Justice will host the Women’s Environmental Leadership Summit for the third time, after a hiatus during the pandemic. The conference brings together over 200 participants including scholars; activists; and representatives from nonprofits, local government, and cultural institutions to foster collaboration, leadership, and community development among women working in the environmental space around and beyond the nation’s capital. The three-day event will feature panels, workshops, tours, and social gatherings intended to ground participants in environmental practice and foster innovative approaches to sustainable community-building.

In concert, these new initiatives fill me with renewed energy and optimism for our shared future at the Smithsonian. One of the central tenets of our strategic plan is to prioritize sustainability and environmental justice in tandem; I am so proud of the work the Anacostia Community Museum continues to do on this front. Their acknowledgment of climate change as a hyper-local issue, one that disproportionately affects traditionally underserved neighborhoods, is both jarring and motivating. It’s a reminder that even in the hardest-hit communities—especially so, in fact—unity and action provide the promise of resilience and lasting change.

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Our Smithsonian: Backyard archaeology ICYMI: Highlights from the week that was Feb. 1 – Feb. 7, 2020 Photographs from the “Not an Ostrich Exhibition” at the Library of Congress: Recording Now Available If you can read this, thank a teacher!