Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Morello-Frosch

Alison approached environmental health and justice from two different perspectives: community health and education. From the community health perspective, she worked on a research project with the Natural Resources Defense Council examining the impact four California cement kilns have on their surrounding communities within the framework of environmental justice. She considered the impact of the cement kilns in a number of different ways: reading government documents, examining air emissions data, and collecting soil and air samples on site and conducted community outreach to contextualize this issue. From the education perspective, she taught Summerbridge San Francisco middle-school students about environmental justice. Alison revised and evaluated a curriculum that she had been developing for three years to introduce the concept of environmental justice and the urban environment to students who were experiencing the effects of environmental injustice in their own San Francisco neighborhoods.