Environmental Health
Fostering Community Leadership To Fight for Environmental Health
 n communities throughout California, low-income minority residents are often disproportionately exposed to higher levels of environmental threats. Their homes are located closer to industrial sites that produce harmful emissions and to freeways traveled by diesel-fueled trucks, and their workplaces are also frequently prone to toxic exposures. This is the case for many low-income neighborhoods in Southern California’s San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
 The Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice (CCAEJ) works with community groups from affected neighborhoods, providing environmental health education programs, developing leadership skills and mapping out action plans to motivate local governments and industries to act more responsibly towards the impacted residential areas.
“We recognized early on that for community-based, grassroots efforts to be successful, a few people can’t do it all,” said Penny Newman, CCAEJ executive director. “Groups need leaders with diverse skill sets, including researching issues, motivating volunteers and organizing events.”
In December 2003, CCAEJ received a TCWF grant of $130,000 over three years to provide leadership development training and environmental health education for underserved residents in the rapidly developing Inland Empire region.
Typically, when a group of residents identifies an environmental health concern in their community, they approach CCAEJ for assistance. These “Associate Groups” are mentored by CCAEJ, receiving guidance on developing an effective action plan that includes fostering community-based leadership.
CCAEJ approaches leadership development as a hands-on process. Community members learn by doing. With each Associate Group, CCAEJ helps individuals recognize their own strengths, learn new skills and develop the confidence to use them to advance the issue they’ve identified.
“We look for arenas where community members can feel in control of the situation,” Newman said. “Testifying before the county board of supervisors is a foreign environment for many community members. It can be more effective to mobilize communities outside these systems, but in ways that show the insiders that you have community support.”
In developing strategies, CCAEJ works with the Associate Groups to plan for all the “what ifs,” preparing for a range of responses from opponents.
“We celebrate every success,” she said. “Every victory is a temporary victory…like a tug of war. They need to keep applying pressure.”
Associate Groups can take credit for significant policy changes. For example, in the Riverside County community of Mira Loma, a group successfully mounted a three-year battle against growing diesel emissions in the community, resulting in action by county planning commissioners to halt the building of any additional warehouses in the area and to consider the need for a wider buffer zone between any diesel source and homes and schools. Particulates contained in diesel exhaust emissions are associated with higher rates of asthma and other respiratory problems.
“The Associate Group model used by CCAEJ is particularly effective because it starts with a core group and builds outward,” said Fatima Angeles, TCWF program director. “The skills that group members learn are shared over time with others, resulting in an expanded body of capable community leaders willing to tackle environmental health challenges.”
For more information, please visit www.ccaej.org.
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