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.

Throughout the years, the Tishman Center has brought to the university many renowned thought leaders from various arenas of practice and scholarship, including activists, scientists, public officials, philanthropists, writers, and many others. This exhibit showcases a sample of speakers hosted or co-hosted by the Tishman Center during Climate Week, Earth Month, and beyond, which have helped reimagine how academic spaces can be a venue for cutting-edge, inspirational climate and environmental justice discourse. 

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.

Within The New School, the Tishman Center has a tradition of motivating campus organizing and action during critical moments. We believe in the imperative and value of the university’s community lending its voices to the fight for environmental and climate justice. This exhibit documents a selection of actions and demonstrations organized amongst students during pivotal climate events of global significance.