A Voice For the Voiceless
The Advocacy Project helps marginalized communities to tell their story, claim their rights and produce social change. We recruit graduate students to volunteer as Peace Fellows with partners.
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Jacqui Kotyk and Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group
University of British Columbia
This summer, Jacqui Kotyk will be working with Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group in New Delhi, India. Chintan is an advocacy organization committed to achieving sustainable development and environmental justice within the informal waste sector of urban India. As such, Chintan works directly with poor and marginalized communities in New Delhi to build capacity for a dignified, safe and sustainable livelihood within waste management. Jacqueline will be using her background in grassroots activism, environmental science, and law to support Chintan’s important advocacy efforts.
Jacqui grew up on the Canadian prairies in Winnipeg, Manitoba where she became passionate about the disproportionate impact of environmental harms on historically marginalized peoples. In 2007 she graduated from the University of Manitoba with a Bachelor of Environmental Science (First Class Honours) and a University Gold Medal as the highest achieving graduate in her faculty. While her degree focused on ecology, Jacqui also infused her program with courses such as environmental economics, environmental ethics and women’s studies to enrich her understanding of the social contexts that inform environmental degradation and scientific analysis. She also completed an Honours Thesis on the socio-political outcomes of urban tallgrass prairie restoration in Winnipeg, MB with a specific focus on the nature/culture dichotomy and environmental justice in urban planning.
While completing this degree, Jacqui worked in the University of Manitoba’s Environmental Conservation Lab assisting with research and advocacy around the social impacts of mad cow disease in Canadian rural communities, the ecological outcomes of prairies restoration, and local food distribution within Manitoba. She also played a leadership role in reinvigorating the group Students for Sustainability in an effort to counteract the expansion of intensive hog operations in Manitoba. In this role, Jacqui worked with many other groups in engaging with stakeholders such as NGOs, people in the affected communities, local politicians and proponents of the industry. Ultimately, the government of Manitoba placed a moratorium on the intensive hog industry.
In the fall of 2007, Jacqui began a Law degree at the University of British Columbia to enhance her advocacy skills and further understand the social contexts informing environmental degradation. Within her first year at UBC she was awarded the BLG Fellowship to work with Dr. Natasha Affolder, researching biodiversity contracting with global mining corporations, an emerging area of environmental law.
While at UBC Law, Jacqui remains active within the environmental justice community. She is Co-Chair of UBC’s Environmental Law Group and co-coordinator of the Public Interest Law Society. In addition, Jacqui is working with a Vancouver-based organization, Justice for Girls International, to reinterpret the Convention on the Rights of the Child, so that this international instrument forces State Parties to contemplate and ameliorate the unique and disproportionately harmful circumstances of girl-children within declining environments. She is excited to learn more about environmental justice from the people at Chintan, while helping to build this organization’s advocacy capacity.
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