EDGI is honored to announce that the David & Lucile Packard Foundation has awarded us a generous grant to sustain and expand our work over the next two years.
Supported by previous funding through the Packard Foundation, EDGI identified gaps in policies that enabled the Trump administration to undermine science, roll-back environmental protections, scrub public information, reduce environmental enforcement, and open agency doors to regulatory capture by industry. This new sustaining $450,000 grant from the Packard Foundation will allow EDGI to build on our previous work and begin addressing these gaps.
Over the next two years, with a receptive administration in the White House and Democratic control of Congress, EDGI will sharpen our analyses, provide actionable recommendations and prototypes for improvements, communicate those recommendations to agency and legislative leaders, and continue to hold the administration accountable to promises of better environmental governance.
The deregulatory environmental agenda and attacks on science by the Trump administration demonstrated that effective environmental governance must center justice, equity, and scientific rigor and integrity. Environmental management decisions must be rooted in evidence and should guard against undue influence from industry and from conventional practices stemming from colonial attitudes. The public, particularly those with structurally limited economic and social power, must be able to meaningfully participate in policy discussions and decisions. These principles will guide our recommendations.
EDGI is predominantly a volunteer initiative. Since forming in 2016, EDGI’s network of caring and committed members has grown to include individuals from more than 30 different academic institutions and 10 non-profit and grassroots organizations. Starting in 2018, we were able to hire coordinators to lead our distributed and collaborative efforts. The funding of this grant will sustain this core group of coordinators.