SHIFT has allocated the needed funds for both Black Liberation Month 2025 and 2026. The activities throughout this month aim to uphold sustainability through a social justice lens by creating and implementing programming that centers our most marginalized population on campus, those being Black-identified students. Through a month of events and engagement opportunities, we hope to spotlight and uplift our Black-identified student population by keeping the Black experience as the foundation of the ideas we put forward in this project.

This project focuses on offering young children in the Child Development Laboratory opportunities for engagement with the natural world and the ability to develop an ethic of care for our planet. Children will be able to spend time outdoors and in the Arcata Community Forest no matter the weather, geared up for the elements and ready to observe, interact, and develop an ethos of care for the place they call home.

This project will serve students in the emerging Critical Agriculture Studies major and the wider university community. The project will fund some initial infrastructure, including two polycarbonate greenhouses, a rainwater catchment system and a vegetable washing station. A part of this project is the ‘Cotton & Collards: A Black Plant Relationships Initiative’ which focuses on two plants central to the history of Black people in the United States.

The Latinx Community Food Initiative aims to broaden student access to fresh, culturally relevant foods while empowering them to learn where to obtain and even grow their own ingredients, fostering a deeper connection to ancestral food practices and environmental sustainability. A bi-monthly food security campaign will be hosted, designed to connect students with essential resources that promote food autonomy and access to fresh, culturally significant ingredients.

The Native American Studies Department’s Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute, Cultural Fire Club, and the NAS Department are leading Returning Good Fire — an Indigenous-led rematriation project restoring cultural burns on California’s North Coast. Guided by cultural fire practitioners and Indigenous students, the project supports habitat restoration, revives culturally significant plants, conserves water, and trains future Indigenous firekeepers.

This project will develop a certificate in Appropriate Computing, adapting the principles of Appropriate Technology to the context of AI. This project will empower students to drive AI development toward a more sustainable future. The certificate will be the first of its kind.

This project entails the creation of an interactive map that has pins on campus showing locations of plants that have ethnobotanical characteristics and relationships. This phase of the project has been completed, and has shifted into a project titled "Place Based Learning Practices Project". See project page here.

The Food Summit 2022 is a food justice focused event that took place during the first 3 weeks of April 2022. The primary goal of the Food Summit was to generate awareness of the BIPOC contributions and knowledge of food and discuss how the HSU community can build food resiliency and equity. The total Spring 2022 budget approved for this event is estimated to be $29,100 in addition to a $2,000 match funding given by Food Summit partner, La Comida Nos Une. $10,000 of the Food Summit Budget was allocated to the Indigenous Foods Festival, organized by the Rou Dalaguur Food Sovereignty Lab.

SHIFT has been funding a Black Educational Farm program in collaboration with the Umoja Center for Pan African Student Excellence at the Bayside Park Farm. 

The Black Educational Farm program has 3 goals:

 1. To teach and develop farming skills with Black students 

2. To develop a sense of belonging in the local community 

3. Facilitate discussions and learning that center Black experiences, knowledge and challenges pertaining to sustainability and land. 

The Environmental Studies Club proposed a two-day Northern California Intercollegiate Climate Community Conference, which aims to bring together students, faculty, and staff from universities and colleges that often feel isolated. The conference seeks to address the urgent need for collaborative efforts to tackle climate change, and to provide a platform for sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices among the participants. Each invited school will be requested to bring a presentation on their campus climate initiatives, accompanied by a faculty member and art.