This essay examines community narratives around Keep Virginia Beautiful's Green
Grants initiative. Green Grants is a signature annual program that awards grants to organizations
throughout Virginia in support of projects aligned with one of Keep Virginia Beautiful’s three
pillars: recycling, litter prevention, and community beautification. The primary research
questions are...
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Dr. Lori A. Cramer
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Dr
Access to broadband internet is vital for rural communities in the digital age, but persistent barriers impact adoption and availability. This topic is analyzed through the lens of the Community Capital Framework (Emery & Flora, 2006). By surveying county commissioners, the research aims to better understand rural broadband challenges and...
Period poverty is the inability to access menstrual products and more generally the lack of knowledge surrounding menstruation. About one in ten undergraduates suffer from period poverty, a number that almost doubles for first-generation students (Haneman, 2021). Previous research and current legislation aimed at addressing period poverty largely revolve around...
Seafood processing is a sector of the seafood supply chain in which individuals and communities along Oregon’s coast rely on for food, livelihood, economic, and cultural relationships. Many coastal resilience studies focus on the seafood harvest (fishing) communities leaving the seafood processing sector relatively understudied. The objective of this thesis...
Haiti is far from achieving the UN goal of sanitation access for all; 20% Haitians have no sanitation access, and less than 0.1% of urban excreta is safely managed. Container-Based Sanitation (CBS) may be a key tool for achieving equitable sanitation coverage in Haiti’s cities. CBS is a sanitation strategy...
Environmental injustices, defined as inequitable access to fair, safe, and healthy environmental outcomes, are often rooted in issues of land management, policy decision making, and sovereignty. This results from a series of processes, including loss of land ownership, exclusionary and discriminatory zoning, and structural barriers to participation. Black, Indigenous, Communities...
President Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 and subsequent federal environmental justice (EJ) policies and programs have faced significant challenges in implementation. Exploring scientific uncertainty, social complexity of EJ issues, lack of clear policy guidance, and weak regulatory enforcement demonstrate these challenges. However, at the state level, EJ policies, task forces, and...
Geocaching is an outdoor recreational activity where participants (geocachers) utilize a handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or smartphone to download coordinates in order to navigate to the location of a hidden container, a geocache. Since its inception in 2000 geocaching has grown exponentially. The potential ecological and recreation management...
The environmental justice (EJ) movement has succeeded in achieving policy change across different levels of government, however, there has been relatively little research to date on the implementation of environmental justice policies at the state level. The state of Oregon provides an opportunity to understand how state-level EJ policies are...
Commercial fishing is deeply embedded in the economy and culture of many coastal communities in Oregon. This study examined the impact of the ‘graying of the fleet’ phenomenon (Graying; the increase in the average age of commercial fishermen) on community resilience in coastal communities. This paper utilizes qualitative methods and...