The ENRICH Project employs a collaborative, multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral, multi-method, and community-based approach to addressing environmental racism and climate change impacts in Indigenous, Black and other marginalized communities. The ENRICH Project is activist-scholar inspired in its quest to bridge and blur the boundaries and borders between academic scholarship, theory, and analysis and grassroots activism and other community-based activities.
Community-based research is a collaborative approach to research that involves researchers and communities working in partnership in ways that enable power to be shared among all partners. It values mutual respect and co-learning among partners, capacity building, systems change, and balancing research and action. Through this approach, partners contribute their expertise to enhance understandings of a given phenomenon and to integrate the knowledge gained through action to benefit the communities involved.
Advocacy is also a key aspect of the ENRICH Project’s approach and involves providing data to support community members’ advocacy and mobilizing efforts. It does this in several ways, including providing technical information to help community members make their case; providing anecdotes, human stories, and examples that describe and illuminate an environmental issue; acknowledging and respecting community members as experts and authorities on issues affecting their communities; and holding government officials accountable for their policy decisions and actions.