WHAT IS ENVIRONMENTAL CITIZENSHIP?
The Environmental Citizenship Academy will train a corps of "citizen environmental generalists," not only to identify and tackle environmental problems, but to restore, sustain, and even enhance the natural systems critical to creating a high quality of life in urban neighborhoods. The skills and resources needed to meet these challenges are just as much social or political as they are technical or scientific. They include access to and influence over the entire range of organizations and agencies making decisions that affect local communities. Academy graduates will be equipped to participate actively in the current shift of environmental policies at all levels.

WHAT IS THE ACADEMY?
The Environmental Citizenship Academy is a educational program consisting of six two-hour evening seminars and two, four-hour workshops designed to help participants become more effective advocates for the environments in which they live, work, and play. The Academy will bring together urban residents, health-care advocates, staff and members from non-profit and community development organizations.

Working with environmental researchers and educators, participants will explore how an environmental perspective on urban issues can help them achieve their goals for their community.

The program will include:

• Urban environmental problems and assets
  
• Urban land use
  
• Urban infrastructure
  
• Environmental policy and law
  
• Putting it together-environmental decision-making

WHERE AND HOW WILL CLASSES BE TAUGHT?
Registered participants will receive a mailing 1-2 weeks before the first class, containing directions, room numbers, class times, initial readings or assignments, and the online address of the course website.

Classroom sessions will be taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston. These presentations will use and be supported by:

• An Environmental Citizenship website, which will allow participants to access assignments, reference materials, and resources from outside the classroom, through neighborhood libraries, community centers, or home computers.
• Two half-day Saturday field trips to local sites, to explore projects and to gain practical experience in identifying, analyzing, and resolving problems by influencing public policies.

HOW WILL I BENEFIT?
The main benefits of the course accrue to you as an individual activist, by improving your knowledge about current, critical issues influencing the quality of life in urban neighborhoods.

Your organization and other neighborhoods will benefit as you interact with and help to build a corps of neighborhood activists, leading academics, government officials, and knowledgeable citizens who share insights and skills.

Participants in the initial, fall 2003 session will collaborate with faculty to test and revise teaching materials, approaches, and case studies that will be used in the second, spring 2004 session, and will be invited to nominate participants for that second session.

Finally, all participants in the pilot year will help to form the agenda and be invited to a working conference on Environmental Citizenship. The conference will disseminate the lessons of the Academy's pilot year, as well as other experiences in environmental citizenship from around New England.

Thirty years of environmental activism and litigation may already have achieved most of what they can achieve. Further environmental progress requires inventing new tools, or putting old tools to new uses.

Environmental regulation has always been about preventing the worst. Almost by definition, ecological or historic preservation efforts focused on "special places" treats "unspecial places," where the vast majority of people live and work, as disposable...

In contrast, [environmental citizenship] is about engaging people to achieve the best-about making all places special for the people who live and work there.

From "Civic Environmentalism," by Charles H. W. Foster, et al.