CEC Boston team presents Metals & Environmental Justice summer camp curricula

July 25, 2022
CEC Boston team presents Metals & Environmental Justice summer camp curricula

The MEMCARE-SRC CEC Boston team partnered with the Boston Nature Center and the Bethel Social Justice Institute to conduct two Metals and Environmental Justice summer camp curricula designed by our team for grades 4th through 12th.  These were two highly successful educational and community engagement events that allowed us to partner with Projects 1, 3, and our MEMCARE trainees to do community science, having students and community members collect soil samples, measure them for metals, learn about health, and evaluate the social and environmental determinants of both metals exposures and health using an environmental justice lens.  We also partnered with our Harvard NIEHS P30 Center for this community engagement work.  We were able to evaluate environmental health literacy pre- and post- the two sessions to ensure that our curriculum and program had impact on teaching these topics, as well as to gain awareness of other critical areas of interests and community need from a youth perspective.