For two decades, the Tishman Center has stood alongside frontline communities, artists, scholars, and organizers. Together, we have challenged extractive systems, co-created environmental justice research, and amplified grassroots solutions to climate change. This exhibit traces the Center’s evolution, from early design and sustainability initiatives to today’s national leadership in EJ policy, movement design, and multi-sector coalition building. Explore the relationships, ideas, and bold experiments that brought us to this pivotal twentieth year with interviews from our past and current Center directors.

Students are at the heart of the Center’s work. Each year, the Tishman Center supports student scholars, artists, faculty researchers, and organizers exploring questions that push the boundaries of EJ policy and practice, from climate trauma care and circular fashion to sustainable public infrastructure and collective climate advocacy. This exhibit celebrates the visions and creative inquiries shaping the next generation of environmental justice practitioners.

Frontline climate solutions are not just theoretical—they are innovative, practiced, and reshaping our collective future. This exhibit brings together our research, events, and movement stories that document how grassroots leaders are building real climate solutions on the ground. Together, these materials show how communities are designing the systems they need and scaling their solutions up, out, and deep across regions.

The inspiration for the creation of an EJ leadership program came directly from the findings of a landscape assessment study conducted by the Tishman Environment and Design Center, where EJ leaders discussed the characteristics of a leadership program that could have a profound impact on the movement. The responses from EJ leaders in this study created a blueprint for what later became the EJ Movement Fellowship, now called the EJ Disrupt Design Fellowship. This program has reframed what leadership development can look like: community-powered, creative, iterative, and rooted in relationships within the EJ movement. This exhibit documents how the program was developed and how 20 frontline leaders from the first fellowship cohort shaped a new model of design practice, one that has since influenced 350+ organizations, mobilized over millions of grant dollars for community-led projects, and sparked climate organizing across the United States and beyond. Enter the world of EJ Design: curiosity, empathy, creative disruption, and interrelatedness.

At climate gatherings where frontline voices are often sidelined, the Tishman Center convenes differently. We create spaces where movement leaders set the agenda, where arts and culture guide the conversation, and where academic institutions listen and follow. This exhibit showcases a sample of gatherings hosted or co-hosted by the Tishman Center between 2015 and 2020, during Climate Week, Earth Month, and beyond, which have helped reimagine how universities show up for justice and amplify EJ voices.