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The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is an international organization focusing on various kinds of injustices. They have launched various programs, including Global Wellbeing, Grassroots Feminism, Demilitarise and Movement Building, aiming at addressing various types of worldwide justice struggles. 

The Grassroots Global Movement has gathered Climate Justice Alliance, It Takes Roots, People’s Action, and East Michigan Environmental Action Council to build political power for the frontlines communiteis for 2020 and beyond.

The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is aiming at thriving the green new deal. The core of the work of just transiton from this organizations is the principles mentioned in the green new deal. 

Industrial meatpacking plants in countries all over the world (USA, Germany, Australia) have all become hotspots of COVID-19 (Link). 

The close proximity in which workers working in such plants, the gruelling hours, the lack of access to healthcare among workers (many of whom are immigrants, refugees and POCs), are all reasons why such plants have emerged as hotspots. This Propublica article talks about the amont of preparation that such an industry has for pandemic flu outbreaks that could wipe out animals, but failed to do the same for their workers (Link). Moreover, our desire of meat (bad for the environment and unsustainable), has resulted in these companies having a tremendous amount of clout which allowed some to go over the heads of local officials as the ProPublica article reports. 

A well publicised Harvard study reported an association between long-term exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and COVID-19 deaths (Link). Another recent study that consider multiple pollutants found a signficiant association between nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a traffic-related pollutant and COVID-19 deaths, and not PM2.5 (Link).

Air pollution and COVID-19 have intersected in other ways. The decreases in air pollution due to the lockdown were seen as one of the few silver linings of the crisis (Link). Although early optimism has been dashed as air pollution levels have jumped right back up in China (Link) and other places when the lockdown was lifted. Some may say that under the cover of COVID-19, the Trump administration also rolled back several environmental regulations (Link), and it is unclear yet what the long-term effects of such rollbacks will be.

Air pollution is also a carrier of COVID-19 (Link), and researchers have been investigating the transmission of the virus by simulating mundane activities such as speaking in the elevator and even flushing a toilet.

Some of the other ways however, in which air pollution and COVID-19 will intersect are at infrastructure such as warehouses, which we will see increase as more and more people move to shopping online. Already in the recent pasts of the building of massive warehouses have been challenged for environmental justice reasons, as they tend to be built in poor, minority communities and result in heavy freight traffic, which in turn burdens such communities with increased pollution (Link1, Link2). Amazon employees themselves have documented the nature of siting of warehouses (Link), and it is likely to become an even more fraught site of contention as we move forward.

The mission statement of the Center for Prisioner Health and Human Rights is as follows:

"The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to improve the health and human rights of criminal justice populations through education, research, and advocacy."

The center's directors, members, and volunteers establish specific priorities on how this mission is going to be approached. Their current focuses as stated on their website are as follows:

– To bring attention to the health and healthcare issues and challenges of prisoners and other criminal justice populations.
– To improve the continuum of care for prisoners from admission to a correctional facility through release, including improving healthcare access and opportunities for criminal justice populations in the community.
– To advance policies and programs that promote both public health oriented approaches to mental illness, addiction, and substance use and [alternatives to][less reliance on] incarceration and the criminal justice system.
– To engage students and health professionals in the Center’s mission with training and education opportunities, and by providing students with practical experiences working directly on concrete issues, problems, and challenges.

In recent years, incarceration rates and prison populations nationwide have grown exponentially for a variety of sociological and political factors. The organization believes that research indicates that this epidemic has had a particularly hard impact on economically vulnerable communities, where a majority of the people brought into custody suffer from addiction, substance use, and/or mental illness. Due to their economic situation these people were likely unable to seek care or treatment from any public health system in the community. This interaction of illnesses and diseases and criminalization in communities and incarceration results in a complex public health and human rights crisis in both correctional and other criminal justice settings. The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights seeks to apply new research to help to mitigate this.

The Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights is located at the Miriam Hospital of The Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The program is funded in most part by Brown University, and research funding is suplimented by various grants applied for by individual researchers.

The program is focused on educating students and researchers in various methods to further research on the criminal justice system and its associated sociological factors. As of this time, the Center is offering two main educational opportunities, one for summer research interns and one for researchers to participate in a 2 year study on HIV in prisons funded by  the National Institute on Drug Abuse

The programs are targeted at students and health professionals, educating them in the Center’s mission and providing them with training and education opportunities.