Collaborative Environmental Justice
The Women’s Environmental Institute was established on the principle that our environmental justice work needs to be, at its heart, community-based and community-led – as a matter both of sustainability and of racial and gender equity. As a result, our most successful initiatives have consistently adhered to that principle and been developed as collaboratives or coalitions of community-based groups.
2026 Updates
Love as Stewardship: Community, Resilience, and Right Relationship with Land. WEI Educational Scholarship Recipient Millicent Kasal on the Importance of Organizations that Seek Right Relationship with Land, Food systems, Ecology, Healing, and Community. Read Millicent’s essay.
2025 Update
WEI’s partnerships with mentor Will Allen and the MN Environmental Justice Table have expanded, along with our community-based composting strategies with East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI). We’ve also deepened our support for the “Zero Waste and Zero Burn” coalitions’ efforts to help phase out the neighborhood-polluting Hennepin County Garbage Burner (HERC).
As a coalition member of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute’s (EPNI) Board of Directors, WEI continues to play an active role in the ongoing initiatives to help EPNI achieve stewardship of the former Roof Depot site in the East Phillips Neighborhood. While facing significant setbacks in 2025, the coalition remains strong and committed to EPNI’s innovative and equitable model of community stewardship for the future community hub and indoor and outdoor urban farm.
2025 marked the 15th Annual Will Allen Farmer Training Weekend in September, which was a valuable and successful event that brought together farmers, community organizers, teachers, activists, allies and more. This annual event remains unique in our region for providing an array of panel discussions, mini workshops, networking, and community building opportunities across sectors dedicated to a more equitable, accessible, and healthier future.
2024 Update
In 2024, WEI continued developing our partnerships and activism for environmental justice in both urban and rural Minnesota. We continued to present our GIS mapping project, which documents the disproportionate racial and income-related health disparities from toxic environmental exposures to our Native American and BIPOC residents in Phillips Neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Since we created the map in 2006, its powerful message has opened doors to new or renewed EJ partnerships. For example, last summer students from Macalester University’s Urban GIS class volunteered to help update our health impact data to the 2020 census, a project not yet completed by our South Side Green Zone grant in 2024. Participants at WEI’s 14th Annual Will Allen Farmer Training this September also strongly requested WEI initiate mapping research and documentation in more suburban and rural communities impacted by suspected PFC (perfluorochemical) contamination.
As a coalition member of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute’s (EPNI) Board of Directors, WEI continues to play an active role in helping EPNI win MN state legislative support to stop the City of Minneapolis plan to force a proposed city-wide toxic pollution-generating maintenance yard into East Phillips Neighborhood at the former Roof Depot site.
The EPNI coalition is now close to finalizing the purchase of the site. A purchase agreement with the City was renegotiated to extend the sale date for a year to September 2025. In the meantime, WEI created a new coalition partnership with EPNI and our urban farmer-mentor Will Allen and the new Ministry of Trade and Commerce of Wisconsin (MOTCW).
Partnering with the Minnesota Environmental Justice Table (MN EJ Table) to help fund WEI’s 2024 Will Allen Farmer Training, WEI helped build strong community-based coalition support and momentum that resulted in the shutdown of two of East Phillips’ most significant toxic polluting industries: the Smith Foundry and Bituminous Roadways — in late summer 2024. WEI has also joined with MN EJ Table to help promote earlier shutdown of the toxic air polluting Hennepin County Energy Recovery Center (HERC) and with the Minneapolis City Council to help incentivize major polluters to reduce their toxic, global-warming carbon emissions in Minneapolis neighborhoods. Each of these efforts target the severely disproportionate racial and income-based health disparities in our “Green Zone” neighborhoods that WEI’s environmental justice mission addresses.
EJ Partnerships & Projects
Since it was established in 2003, WEI has collaborated with many grassroots movements, organizations, and community-led initiatives in Minneapolis and beyond. The following is a selection of current partnerships, followed by links to legacy projects. WEI also provides board representation on the Little Earth of United Tribes Housing, Wicoie Nandagikendan, Healthy Legacy Steering Committee, and is a member of the Indigenous Food Network.
Annual Will Allen Farmer Training Weekend
Going into its 16th year in 2026, the Will Allen Farmer Training Weekend is a collaborative, community-building event and a unique opportunity to bring urban and rural food, farming and environmental justice work together with farmer/mentor Will Allen at WEI’s Amador Hill Farm and Orchard.
Workshops, trainings and networking offer participants hands-on knowledge and skills to take home and apply to growing food wherever they are—whether you have a small farm of your own, a backyard, community garden, or an urban balcony. Community experts, farmers, and growers lead workshops, panel discussions, and roundtable talks. Check out the 2024 program of speakers and mini workshops.
Fair Table (formerly Veggie Rx)
Until 2026, WEI partnered with M Health Fairview’s Food Is Medicine Campaign by contributing produce to our local East Central Fair Table program. In collaboration with our local North Circle partner farms in Chisago and surrounding counties, in 2024 WEI’s certified organic Amador Hill Farm and Orchard provided fresh sustainably local produce for almost 2,500 food boxes delivered to clinics and hospitals in the Chisago, Princeton, Wyoming, and North Branch areas. M Fairview’s Food as Medicine Campaign is committed to the belief that good, healthy food can impact or prevent a range of chronic conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and certain cancers and help maintain the overall health and care of our local communities. Health practitioners at the clinics actually offer a food prescription for the Fair Table produce boxes.
Healthy Legacy: Perfluorochemicals (PFCs) Research, Advocacy and Legislation
In 2006, WEI created a map that documents the disproportionate racial and income-related health disparities from toxic environmental exposures to our Native American and BIPOC residents in Phillips Neighborhood of South Minneapolis. Since then, WEI has continued its GIS mapping project and Perfluorochemicals (PFCs) research. The organization applied for a capacity building grant from the MN Department of Health to explore the possibility of carrying on the community-based advocacy and PFC research work that WEI started in 2004-7 with East Metro Hmong and Latinx farmers and residents impacted by PFCs. Dr. Fardin Oliaei had asked us to consider further research and possible reparations when she spoke at our 20th Anniversary Celebration. Watch our video about the Celebration here.
Roof Depot Coalition/East Phillips Neighborhood Institute
As a board member of the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), WEI’s Karen Clark joined community leaders and other partners at the forefront of a nearly 10-year fight to stop the City of Minneapolis’ plan to force moving a proposed city-wide water works maintenance yard into the East Phillips Neighborhood at the former Roof Depot’s 7+ acre warehouse site. EPNI had worked hard to alternatively propose developing a community-based, community-led Indoor Urban Farm and Community Hub at that site and successfully received $317,000 from the state legislature for its planning and pre-development. The City’s plan would have created more toxic pollution in this low-income, majority people of color and Native American neighborhood which is already overburdened with severe racial health disparities due to toxic environmental pollutants.
As of November 2024, the EPNI coalition is awaiting word from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about a request for funding — a portion of which would provide the final $5.7 million East Phillips Neighborhood Institute needs to purchase the former Roof Depot building site from the City of Minneapolis. EPNI also recently received the “Unsung Hero Award” from the National Community-Based Network, in honor of its environmental justice struggle: “Urban Farm, Not Toxic Harm!”
South Side Green Zone
WEI Activist Executive Director Karen Clark represented WEI on the South Side Green Zone (SSGZ) Board and was reappointed by the Minneapolis City Council in 2024. The fight for environmental justice in Minneapolis’ South Side Green Zone (SSGZ) increased its visibility through a 2023 grant to WEI to develop multilingual signage, designed by local activist artist Sandy Spieler and distributed by WEI throughout Green Zone neighborhoods. “Nurturing air, soil and water” translated into Spanish, Somali, Dakota, Ojibwe, Oromo, Korean, and English, these signs invite the viewer to help protect the environmental health of residents in this low-income BIPOC community and to help hold their policy-makers accountable to the mandated special protections. The signs are now posted everywhere in the SSGZ neighborhoods.
Nawayee Center School
Nawayee Center School is an alternative urban school focusing on American Indian youth in grades 7 through 12. The school provides transformative education, grounded in Indigenous lifeways and love of learning.
Since 2021, WEI and Nawayee Center School, supported by a Minneapolis Foundation grant, have worked together to develop the school’s on-site farm and bring students to WEI to take organic farming and aquaculture classes. Working with Will Allen to plan, design and construct a 22-foot hoop house, Nawayee students and mentors were recently guided by WEI’s Farm manager, Jacquelyn Zita, to construct three raised beds of wood chips, organic compost and organic potting soil for planting spring vegetables within the hoop house. They will construct at least three more in the adjacent farm/garden to be used over the upcoming growing season. This project results in the first permanent Native American owned and operated hoop house in the South Side Green Zone. During this project, WEI also delivered two seasons of CSA organic CSA food shares to the school as part of the grant over two years (2022-2023).
More EJ Work and Legacy Projects
WEI played a leading role in helping Little Earth of United Tribes (LEOUT) create an urban farm as part of their residential housing site in South Minneapolis. Learn more here. Some of the other EJ projects WEI led or collaborated on include the following: Amador Sunrise Land Registry, Community Food Justice Council, Environmental Justice Education and Advocacy Collaboratives, 24th Street Urban Farm Coalition and Mashkiikii Gitigan, and the Minnesota Women, Food and Agriculture Network.
