University of San Diego
PRE-2: Points of Distinction

The Equinox Project is a nonpartisan policy initiative that inspires, informs and engages both the public and decision-makers in crafting better solutions to regional challenges. Equinox focuses on the intersecting issues that together shape regional quality of life, including:

• Tracking key environmental and economic indicators through our Regional Quality of Life Dashboard.
• Communicating data and policy research to inform the public and influence decision-makers.
• Engaging young adults to participate in regional environmental and economic issues to ensure a growing generation of informed and civically engaged residents (Leaders 2020).

Originating in 2009 in the San Diego region, Equinox developed as a credible source for balanced public policy research and analysis. Although the San Diego region is still our main project area, Equinox is broadening its reach to other local governments and regions in California and beyond.

The first San Diego Regional Quality of Life Dashboard was released in 2010 to shine a spotlight on questions that truly mattered to San Diegans. Using environmental and economic indicators, the Dashboard quantifies trends throughout the region tracking a central theme: Is the quality of life improving?
Drawing on strong relationships with nonprofit organizations, government agencies and the business community, the Dashboard provides a balanced snapshot of the region’s well-being using credible data, clear metrics and ongoing benchmarks. The dashboard tracks regional progress on critical, interlinking quality-of-life issues and provides examples of where things are working and ideas for how we can improve.

The 2023 Dashboard deepens attention to equity as a part of the story, as we can't fully discuss quality of life if we aren't thinking about our region's population holistically. Equity is both the fair and just distribution of societal benefits and burdens and the ability of underserved communities to influence decisions in a way that addresses their needs and concerns.

Another new focus for this year’s Dashboard is the research and projects being done by the Dashboard’s home, the University of San Diego (USD). As the standard bearer for an engaged, contemporary Catholic university, USD has identified six interconnected Pathways that will help USD achieve its 2024 Vision, including the Care for Our Common Home Pathway. This Pathway demonstrates care for all creation and has become more critical as USD strives to become a leader in sustainability in all its aspects (environmental, social justice, economic benefits). By its very nature this pathway is designed to provide opportunities for faculty, students, staff and administrators to address the world’s greatest challenges. The Dashboard leverages USD student and faculty research in measuring and benchmarking the region’s quality of life trends.

The USD Food Studies Initiative (FSI) seeks to engage the entire USD community on urgent questions concerning food, generating a scientifically informed and justice-oriented approach to food on campus that aligns with all Six Pathways of USD’s strategic plan: serving as an anchor institution, supporting engaged scholarship, promoting changemaking, increasing access and inclusion, advocating for care for our common home, and exemplifying liberal arts in the 21st century.

At the foundation of the FSI is a commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship that empowers community members to analyze and respond to racism, especially anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, colonialism, climate change, violence to animals, and the ways in which all these issues often intersect in questions of food justice and food sovereignty. The FSI will bring together longstanding faculty strengths at USD that utilize food as vehicle for science education, for advancing more ethical supply chains, and for socially engaged scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

Ultimately, the FSI wants to shape the USD campus into a model of how universities can leverage food scholarship and food services—including USD’s own food supply chains—to build community on and off campus and establish more engaged and ethical foodways.

The University of San Diego is creating an Environmental Integration Lab to help meet our Strategic Initiative goal of enhancing student learning and success, using the values espoused in Laudato Si’ and adopted by USD in the Care for Our Common Home Strategic Pathway. Led by Dr. Nichole Wissman-Weber, Assistant Professor of Management, and Dr. Julia Cantzler, Associate Professor of Sociology, the EIL seeks to bring together faculty, staff and students in a concerted effort to connect campus-wide sustainability endeavors, with particular focus on climate change and environmental justice issues.

To address the urgent problems of climate change and environmental justice, we must develop future leaders with the capacity and tools to advance sustainability. This will require training students to tackle these issues through initiatives that develop competencies in sustainability, interdisciplinary and systems thinking, project management, and stakeholder engagement. To accomplish this, we must bring together faculty and staff to integrate sustainable processes and practices across campus and help students learn the skills to Care for Our Common Home.

USD has a variety of experts on environmental science, real estate sustainability, sustainable supply chain, carbon footprint measuring, green engineering product design and process development, environmental policy analysis, sustainable management, and climate justice that have never been formally brought together. The lab will harness our resources and talent to be integrated, leveraged, and made much more effective at addressing the issues of climate change and environmental justice, both on-campus and across the San Diego region.