Tackling Environmental Injustice: EJ Communities Should Have a Say
Guest Feature - For the Spring 2022 term, EPIC worked with students from the Policy Innovation Lab at Carnegie Mellon University on understanding data needs/gaps and building a community engagement process for Environmental Justice (EJ) Screening Tools. This blog was written by Alejandra Achury, Cathy Chen, Valen Huang, Shamitha Ravi Naidu, and Phoenix Nguyen to summarize their findings and share recommendations.
In January 2021, the Biden Administration created the Justice40 Initiative to ensure 40% of federal benefits go to vulnerable communities. The program prioritizations will be informed by mapping of the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool CEJST, developed by the Council of Environmental Quality (CEQ). Through user interviews, we unfortunately found a consistent lack of meaningful engagement by community members in public processes, such as submitting public comments on the tool. While the beta version of the CEJST contains a survey function to mimic the engagement process, the final result might lose the voices of the most vulnerable communities because they often lack the access to the Internet, don’t have sufficient technical literacy to understand the data and jargon used, or simply don’t know where to start. However, these disadvantaged communities are disproportionately impacted by environmental factors and need to be prioritized in tool development and use. Without a comprehensive mechanism to engage disadvantaged communities, the most difficult part of the problem is left untreated.
To address this issue, our research project focused on bridging the communication gaps between community groups and the federal government. What we know from prior experience is two-way conversations create tremendous value, where community members not only contribute but also get to see how they actually make a difference. This graphic can be helpful for organizations and government agencies to orient and right-size their level of engagement with communities and key stakeholders throughout programs.
Our proposed solution ultimately comes down to a more comprehensive engagement process for updating the CEJST, including an add-on “community feedback” feature to the tool’s website and a decentralized community engagement framework that goes hand in hand. To dive deeper into this work, check out our project report which includes:
A more detailed narrative of our project, an analysis of the key stakeholders, insights from our user research about the needs/gaps of EJ screening tools, and a prototype demonstration of the add-on feature to educate.
A multi-partner community engagement workshop framework to empower EJ communities and build capacity for sustainable EJ advocacy, and a list of potential organizations that interested individuals could partner with and reach out to.
A chart that shows the spectrum of community engagement.
Addressing EJ issues is a long-term investment. Similarly, we believe community engagement should also be a consistent and iterative process that is improved over time. These resources are only the first step to upholding this commitment.
————
Many thanks to Jessie Mahr, Gabby Mabayyed, Professor Christopher Goranson, TA Haleema for their support on the project.