ABOUT US
Our mission is to meaningfully contribute to decreasing incarceration and ending the inhumane conditions at the convergence of climate change, hazards, and systematic racial injustice in the carceral system.
OUR APPROACH
CIRCol is a joint project of scholars and practitioners at four organizations. These include: Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RISE) at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University, Texas Prison Community Advocates, and Women's Community Justice Association. We work for structural and cultural change through knowledge production, dissemination, and action. Our aim is to influence the well-being of those incarcerated and the broader society in relation to harm, exploitation, and inequality exacerbated by climate change and hazardous conditions. Following the lead of our community partner organizations, we conduct interdisciplinary investigations at the convergence of social, physical, and ecological systems. While we will consider impacts across all social groups, we focus our analysis on particularly marginalized demographics and systems of racial, gender, and sexual, and class inequality.
LEAD
ORGANIZATIONS
Texas Prison Community Advocates (TPCA) works to address systemic and systematic oppression within the Texas Prisons by amplifying the voices of those affected through research and grassroots mobilization, focusing on strategies to create effective policy change. This includes training and empowering formerly incarcerated people and family members to address inhumane conditions and to ensure that those in power create safe, dignified, and humane standards in all Texas prisons. TPCA is the leading organization in Texas working to address extreme temperature in prisons. They have produced impactful reports on these conditions and have worked with state legislators on bills for humane temperature standards and air purification systems in Texas prisons. TPCA is directed by Dr. Amite Dominick, who has a Ph.D. in psychology and is a family member of a formerly incarcerated person.
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Women’s Community Justice Association (WCJA) works for a safe, dignified, and fair system for justice-impacted women and gender expansive New Yorkers affected by mass incarceration. This includes strategizing, organizing, and mobilizing for the rights of impacted communities, including through research, policy change, and envisioning and designing restorative justice models. Founded in 2018, WCJA is led by justice-impacted women and focuses on change through policy advocacy, community organizing and service. WCJA works to disrupt and dismantle the unjust, racially charged systems that perpetuate trauma, violence, and harm to women and gender-expansive people, particularly in black and brown communities. WCJA is directed by Rev. Sharon White-Harrigan who is a licensed social worker, domestic violence survivor, and formerly incarcerated person.
The Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center (HRRC) studies hazards and how they affect the natural and built environments and the people who live there. With a special focus on hazard mitigation and recovery, HRRC generates research at the forefront of hazard planning. HRRC researchers focus on hazard analysis, emergency preparedness and response, disaster recovery and hazard mitigation. HRRC is one of only two United Nations (UN-OCHA) Collaborative Centers in the world. They serve OCHA as a research and consultant agency with particular emphasis on national disaster plans and their implications for future development.
Resilient Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RISE) explores holistic actions to address the many drivers of urban disaster risk worldwide, while simultaneously addressing environmental sustainability and social equity challenges. RISE converges and leverages new developments and world-class expertise in disaster resilience, sustainable design, and social justice across engineering and the CU Boulder campus to facilitate a paradigm shift in research and education related to engineering urban resilience. Combining these three themes is unprecedented and puts the group in a unique position globally. RISE is directed by Professor Shideh Dashti, a founding member of the CIRCol leadership team.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
We are advocates, researchers, and people with lived experiences of incarceration, building a diverse and empathetic community with a spectrum of expertise. We seek to advance socially just and humane responses from public health, engineering, sociology, geography, and architectural practice and policy.
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