The Black Midwest Initiative
Summer Institute on
Environmental Justice
The 2025 Summer Institute on Environmental Justice is presented by the Black Midwest Initiative (BMI) at the University of Illinois Chicago. This convening brings together a new cohort of BMI Fellows, who are doing work around environmental justice issues affecting Black people and communities within the Midwest and Rust Belt regions of the United States for a week-long series of discussions, presentations, and workshops with leading figures in the field. In alignment with environmental sociologist and Institute facilitator David Pellow, we conceive of environmental racism as a “form of violent control over bodies, space, and knowledge systems.” Accordingly, we define the parameters of the environmental justice issues applicants might propose to address broadly—from urban agriculture, toxic emissions, natural disasters, and climate change to carcerality, housing instability, residential segregation, community health and wellness, and beyond.
The 2025 Summer Institute on Environmental Justice is presented by the Black Midwest Initiative and made possible with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation, the University of Illinois Chicago, the UIC Institute for the Humanities, UIC College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Black Studies, and the National Public Housing Museum.
2025 BMI Summer Institute Fellows
To view a fellow's bio, click their headshot.
Samantha Adams
Tim Fab-Eme
Asa Featherstone, IV
Dinah George
Kaleb Lee
Ian Soloman
Jane Henderson
Kelly Lemon
Abigail Suleman
Roman Johnson
Amber Lewis
Nateya Taylor
Liv Furman
Kaaha Kaahiye
Sarah Nahar
Onteya Zachary
2025 Summer Institute Facilitators
Erika Allen is the CEO for Urban Growers Collective, President of Green ERA Educational NFP, and Co-Owner of Green Era Sustainability Partners. Her work exemplifies a strong commitment to sustainability with her dedication to the eradication of environmental injustice and promotion of regenerative, urban agriculture within Chicago. Her commitment to the public sector through the promotion of sustainable agriculture, forging economic opportunities for low-income individuals and creating access to healthy food has made a strong and considerable impact. Erika has dedicated her professional career to public service, developing sustainable community food systems and addressing structural racism and its inherent barriers to justice.
lydia marie hicks is a feral artist raised by farmers and craftspeople whose practice interweaves storytelling, deep ecology, and process-based adaptive reuse. A product of the Great Migration and the Midwest, hicks seeks to forge connections across identity, origin, and probability patterns, often drawing on their background in zoology they blend social histories and natural histories to generate grandiose metaphors for reconnection or transmutation. Holding an MFA in Film/Video from CalArts and a BS in Zoology (+business, communications, francophone studies, and scuba diving) from Cal Poly Humboldt, hicks’s work spans film, installation, and site-responsive community projects.
Tonika Johnson is an award-winning, multidisciplinary social justice artist and photographer whose work explores segregation and its enduring impact on Black communities in Chicago. She is the creator of the Folded Map Project, a nationally recognized multimedia art project that connects residents who live miles apart on opposite ends of the same Chicago streets—in segregated neighborhoods—highlighting how systemic segregation continues to shape lives, housing, and opportunity today. Her latest initiative, UnBlocked Englewood, is a reparative public art and housing justice project that revitalizes a single block through home repairs, creative placemaking, and land reclamation by residents directly impacted by historic housing discrimination.
LaShawnda Crowe Storm is an artist, activist, community builder and occasionally an urban farmer. Whether she is making artwork or sowing seeds, at the core of Crowe Storm's creative practice is a desire to create community; any community in which the process of making art creates a space and place for difficult conversations with an eye to community healing. Crowe Storm has received numerous awards for art and community service.
Adrienne Brown, PhD, is Associate Professor in the departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, where she is also Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life. She is the co-editor with Valerie Smith of Race and Real Estate (2015) and author of The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (2017) and The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (2024).
Fayola Jacobs, PhD, is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in the urban planning area. Her academic work sits at the intersection of Black geographies, Black feminisms, radical planning, and environmental justice. She uses these frameworks to understand global Black communities’ experiences of their environments. Focusing on natural hazards and climate change, her research views disasters not merely as outcomes of systemic injustices but also as opportunities to imagine and build more just Black environmental futures.
David N. Pellow is the Dehlsen Chair and Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he teaches courses on social change movements, environmental justice, human-animal conflicts, sustainability, and social inequality. His books include: What is Critical Environmental Justice?; Total Liberation: The Power and Promise of Animal Rights and the Radical Earth Movement; The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden; Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice; The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy; and Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago.
Dr. Monica M. White is the Distinguished Chair of Integrated Environmental Studies (2021-25), associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and past president of the board of directors for the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network. She is the first Black woman to earn tenure in both the College of Agricultural Life Sciences and the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies, to which she is jointly appointed. As the founding director of the Office of Environmental Justice and Engagement (OEJ) at UW-Madison, Dr. White works toward bridging the gap between the university and the broader community by connecting faculty and students to community-based organizations that are working in areas of environmental/food/land justice toward their mutual benefit.