Academic Partnerships

LVEJO recognizes the importance of university-based research projects to grassroots community organizing.  When aligned with community leadership and rooted in the Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing, academic partnerships can significantly advance the achievement of environmental justice.   LVEJO also recognizes that research projects at times are not planned, funded nor conducted without community guidance and without a commitment to environmental justice principles.  LVEJO acknowledges that absent the community control of research initiatives, the production of knowledge could be harmful to Little Village and LVEJO. It also replicates the cultures of colonial mentality, exploitation, and extraction that the organization fully resists.       

To ensure that academic researchers who would like to partner with LVEJO on community-based research projects are accountable to environmental justice leadership and principles, our organization has instituted the following policy guidelines.  LVEJO requests that researchers who are interested in partnering with LVEJO consult these guidelines and reflect upon their training to conduct de-colonial research projects to form transformative research partnerships.  

LVEJO Academic Partnership SIX GUIDELINES:

1. Research Design: LVEJO supports community-based research projects that are initiated through a collaborative process.  Research questions, methods of data collection, and in some cases research writing, should be developed collaboratively with LVEJO and agreed upon.  LVEJO will not participate in projects where the research is designed prior to consulting LVEJO.
2. Staff Capacity and Compensation:  Researchers must account for the fact that environmental justice organizations such as LVEJO are severely under-resourced and prioritize community organizing.  LVEJO supports community-based research projects that adequately compensates staff and directors for their time, knowledge, and contributions to the successful completion of a research project.  University researchers must be prepared to explain how their project will provide resources and plenty of time to coordinate with LVEJO staff and directors in order to not strain LVEJO’s staff capacity and commitments to organizing.
3. Fundraising:  LVEJO supports community-based research projects that incorporate collaborative grant proposal strategies and practices.  University researchers should be fully transparent about fundraising for research, and in some cases be willing to be a secondary partner on a research proposal.  Researchers should also be open to introducing LVEJO to foundations and other funding partners.  
4. Intellectual Property:  LVEJO supports community-based research projects that explicitly recognize that knowledge produced through a collaborative process belongs to LVEJO.  In academic publications and public disseminations of research, LVEJO must also be given full credit as a research partner.
5. Student Intern Management: LVEJO supports the participation of university students, particularly students of color, in community-based research projects.  In the cases where student interns will be utilized for conducting research, university researchers should be prepared to discuss how student interns will be compensated and managed throughout the research process.
6. Memorandum of Agreement:  To ensure the integrity of a research project LVEJO supports the use of MOA’s with researchers and university colleges to set partnership ground rules, alignment principles, accountability mechanisms, and compensation rates.  LVEJO will not participate in research projects where researchers are unwilling to enter into a MOA process with LVEJO and compensate the organization for time committed to MOA development.  

For inquiries into LVEJO’s research policy, please contact:

info@lvejo.org