Empowering Practicing Engineers and Planners to Advance Environmental Justice

Engineers and planners are central players in creating the built environments and shaping natural ones that make up our communities. They can be a force for creating environments that are just and equitable, and by doing so advance the ideals of environmental justice. But, too often, these professionals are not empowered to create or seize opportunities to advance environmental justice. In the face of economic, operational, and social barriers, professional engineers and planners can remain passive agents who move projects forward through planning, design, and construction with little regard to their community and environmental impact. To overcome these barriers and affect positive change, we see the pivot points of organizational change as (1) building skills in applying environmental justice and engaging communities, (2) adapting project development processes to include environmental justice, (3) defining the business case for environmental justice, and (4) driving the cultural and organizational change required to advance environmental justice. This paper describes our experience building, delivering, and evaluating a 9-week project-based learning professional development course focused on these four pivot points at Mead & Hunt, a leading architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firm. We find that our course not only enhanced participants’ awareness of environmental justice issues as they relate to AEC work, but also led to a measurable impact in Mead & Hunt related to winning bids, hiring staff, professional outreach, and corporate strategy. While future efforts will focus on strengthening the course to better achieve our stated learning outcomes and on collecting participant data more rigorously, our course suggests that a focus on environmental justice can add fresh value to the work of AEC firms, build new skills in AEC professionals, and lead to improved project outcomes.