A Different Kind of Seminar
In Santiago, Baja California Sur, there are young people who know things that no university teaches. They know which plants survive a drought. They know how a fishing cooperative makes decisions. They know which soils hold water and which ones let it run. They know what it costs, in time and money and labor, to live in a place that has been beautiful and remote and underserved for generations.
What they often do not have is a path from that knowledge to an income. From that experience to a project. From that commitment to their community to something that can sustain them while they do the work they already know they want to do. The Binational Coalition for Environmental Justice (CBJA) is building that path.
A Coalition Rooted in Community
CBJA brings together three organizations with deep roots on both sides of the United States-Mexico border: Comite Civico del Valle (CCV) in California's Imperial Valley, the Center for Renewable Energy and Environmental Quality (CERCA) in Baja California Sur, and Our Roots Multicultural Center. Together, they coordinate with Indigenous youth, agricultural workers, fishing communities, and grassroots collectives to build what conventional development programs have rarely delivered: economic opportunity that is designed by the community, rooted in the community's own assets, and structured to keep the community's young people in the place they love.
The Coalition's Sustainable Community Empowerment program is a structured entrepreneurship seminar for young people in communities affected by pollution and the climate crisis, focused on the development of community productive projects that include legal cooperative structures and long-term sustainability plans.
Why This Matters
The communities of the border region are losing their young people. Not because young people want to leave, but because the conditions for staying are not there. There is no income. There is no legal structure for a cooperative. There is no support for turning an idea into something real. And so the knowledge, the relationships, and the commitment walk out the door and do not come back.
This is not only a loss for the families left behind. It is a loss for the environmental future of the region. The communities that are best positioned to manage the land, the water, and the ecosystems of the border region sustainably are the ones with generations of knowledge about how those systems actually work. Losing that knowledge to migration is an environmental crisis as much as it is a social one.
At the same time, the demand for community-led environmental and productive projects is growing. The CBJA's other programs, air monitoring, solar cold storage, soil restoration, and electromobility, all require local people with the skills and organizational structures to run them. The entrepreneurship seminar is the pipeline that makes those programs self-sustaining over time.
What the Project Does
The seminar is a structured, multi-session program that takes young community members from idea to legal cooperative entity. It covers the fundamentals of project design, financial planning, cooperative law, and community governance. It is not a lecture series. It is a working process, built around the participants' own project ideas, with facilitators who help each group develop a specific, viable plan for a productive activity rooted in their community's assets.
Projects emerging from the seminar are designed to align with the coalition's broader environmental work: greenhouse cooperatives that propagate endemic plants, community monitoring teams that maintain air quality sensors, cooperative cold chains that serve fishing communities. The legal structures established through the seminar are the same structures that can receive grants, sign contracts, and manage the infrastructure that the coalition's other programs are building.
Women and youth are not simply invited to participate. They are centered in the program's design, because they are the people most likely to stay, most likely to lead, and most consistently overlooked by economic development programs that assume leadership looks a particular way.
More Than a Business Plan
The seminar is a program, but the real project is something larger: the construction of an economic layer beneath the coalition's environmental work that makes that work permanent.
When a community has a legal cooperative that owns and operates its greenhouse, its cold room, or its monitoring network, it is not dependent on the next grant cycle or the next outside organization to keep that infrastructure running. It has the legal standing to contract, to employ, to own, and to decide. It has young leaders who were trained to run it and who chose to stay.
That is what a just transition looks like from the inside: not a technology delivered to a community, but a community that built the technology, owns it, runs it, and passes it on.