Rachel Forbes, an environmental justice scholar and 2011 graduate of the Monmouth University School of Social Work’s Master of Social Work program, has joined the Urban Coast Institute (UCI) as its community engagement and outreach specialist. In this role, Forbes will support the UCI’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) grant-funded work to provide coastal resilience planning support for environmental justice communities in New Jersey.
Forbes is a professor of the practice of social work at the University of Denver Graduate School of Social Work where she has led the integration of environmental justice into social work curricula and programming. She is also a social work doctoral student at the School of Social Work at Sacred Heart University where her research explores the impacts of environmental justice and climate change on mental health outcomes. Forbes has also supported the development of a bachelor’s degree program in sustainability studies at Colorado Mountain College in Western Colorado. She is co-editor of the recently published book “Ecosocial Work: Environmental Practice and Advocacy,” which delves into the intersection of environmental concerns and social work practice and calls upon social work professionals to engage in ecosocial work practice.
Environmental justice, or EJ, focuses on addressing disproportionate impacts that people including communities of color, persons with disabilities, women, aging populations, and those who don’t speak English are more likely to face from environmental problems. A society striving to build more resilient communities has an ethical and moral responsibility to consider the needs of those who face inequities as a result of having less social and economic capital at their disposal, she said.
“Environmental harms and environmental privileges are not equally distributed across populations and we know that certain populations bear the brunt of environmental harms,” Forbes said. “These are also often the communities that are least likely to actually be contributing to those harms.”
Through the NOAA project, Forbes and the UCI will partner with local leaders and residents, as well as planning and resource experts, to produce climate adaptation plans that foster equitable community resilience. The project will pilot methods for engaging stakeholders in socially vulnerable communities, who are often difficult to reach in planning processes. The community-centric engagement and planning process will develop resilience and adaptation plans that can serve as a model for disadvantaged and environmental justice communities throughout the state.
“You can’t really talk about the environment without talking about climate change,” Forbes said. “We know that these are communities that are going to be hit harder by the challenges that they face, whether it’s an acute weather event like a hurricane, or other issues like toxic dumping, air pollution, food security and water contamination.”
Forbes, a longtime resident of Belmar, was first drawn to EJ issues while a MSW student at Monmouth, where she concentrated in international and community development. At the time, she interned for the International Federation of Social Workers at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, and also spent time in Guatemala studying issues surrounding youth homelessness.
Forbes is an appointed member of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) Commission on Educational Policy, the inaugural cochair of the CSWE Committee on Environmental Justice, and a former member of CSWE’s Council on Global, Learning and Practice. She was the taskforce cochair for the CSWE Curricular Guide for Environmental Justice (2020) and was an elected member of the Colorado Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers Board of Directors. She has taught coursework on sustainability, ecological justice, culture and place-based equity, and fostering sustainable behavior across undergraduate and graduate programs for over 10 years. Her work has been published in “Environmental Justice” and has been funded by the CSWE Katherine A. Kendall Institute for International Social Work. She is co-author of the book: “The Intersection of Environmental Justice, Climate Change, Community and the Ecology of Life” (Springer Press, 2020).