Role and impact of the Alpha Goes Green Initiative on educating underserved communities on environmental justice and related health issues

Alpha Phi Alpha is the nation's first African-American collegiate Greek-letter organization, founded in 1906 at Cornell University. The Fraternity was founded as a social service organization to educate and empower African-Americans. The Fraternity has observed that many of the communities that it serves through its multiple education, enrichment, and empowerment programs such as "Go to High School, Go the College", "A Voteless People is a Hopeless People", and Project Alpha (a collaboration with the March of Dimes), are disadvantaged communities that are overburdened by environmental hazards and unhealthy land uses.

The Fraternity has developed the Alpha Goes Green Initiative, a new initiative, to help raise environmental awareness in disadvantaged communities and provide leadership on environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability in these communities through Advocacy, Outreach, and Capacity-Building. The Fraternity is educating its membership on environmental issues and using the train the trainer model to educate the local community on these issues. Alpha Phi Alpha has also created a new partnership with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to help provide training materials with a focus on sustainability and social justice that will be used to educate the college and alumni members of the organization and the communities that the Fraternity serves. In this presentation, we will discuss the new Initiative and the partnership between the Fraternity and EDF, progress that has made in educating the membership and local communities, and the impact of the initiative in raising awareness and creating a new cadre of environmental justice leaders and advocates.