Environmental Justice Hub

Blue Thumb is actively engaged in an intentional effort to create equity frameworks for our leadership, our partners and our broader community that infuse understanding and accountability into our work and our relationships in order to build just, inclusive, and equitable communities.

This work is shaped by conversations and partner meetings we held in 2019, culminating in Phase One of our Equitable Engagement toolkit and helping shape the focus of our ongoing efforts.

Our Equitable Engagment committee meets regularly to determine our next steps. Find a working draft of our Problems and Goals segments below, as well as notes and summaries from past meetings. As we move forward, we envision this page becoming a hub of resources that help partners and communities incorporate equity into their work.

We plan to meet as a large group every third Wednesday of the month, with our working groups convening at regular times noted below. If you’d like more information or are interested in participating, please fill out the short contact form on this page and we will get back to you!

To get involved, use the contact form below.

DRAFT: BLUE THUMB EQUITY STATEMENT

Blue Thumb is actively engaged in an ongoing and intentional effort to create a multi-level equity framework for our leadership, our partners, and our broader community that centers understanding and accountability into our work  and our relationships to build just, inclusive, and equitable communities.

CORE VALUES: adapted from the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2)

1. Engagement  is centered on the belief that those who are affected by a decision have a right to be involved in the decision-making process.
2. Engagement  includes the promise that the public’s contribution will influence the decision, as well as how their input helps determine and affect the decision, and what limitations there are on their influence..
3. Engagement requires transparency in decision making  recognizing and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, including decision makers.
4. Engagement seeks out and facilitates the involvement of those potentially affected by or interested in a decision.
5. Engagement   honors participant determination  of how they participate, and provides participants with the information they need to participate in a meaningful way.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT:

1. Purpose: We support prioritizing BIPOC community engagement as a process to make better decisions that incorporate the interests and concerns of all affected stakeholders Role of Practitioner: We will seek BIPOC engagement  in the decision making process and assist decision makers in being responsive to the BIPOC community’s concerns and suggestions.
2. Trust: We will undertake and encourage actions that build trust and accountability into the process among all participants.
3. Representing the  Public’s Role: We will carefully consider and accurately portray the public’s role in the decision making process.
4. Openness: We will encourage the disclosure of all information relevant to the public’s understanding and evaluation of a decision.
5. Access to the Process: We will ensure that stakeholders have fair and equal access to the public participation process and the opportunity to influence decisions.
6. Respect for Communities: We will avoid strategies that risk polarizing community interests or that appear to “divide and conquer.”
7. Advocacy: We will advocate for the process of community engagement and will not advocate for interest, party, or project outcome.
8. Commitments: We ensure that all commitments made to the community, including those by the decision maker, are made in good faith.
9. Support of the Practice: We will mentor new practitioners in the field and educate decision makers and the public about the value and use of equitable community engagement.

GOALS FOR OUR EJ HUB

At meetings of our initial planning committee, we identified goals statements we would address with a seminar series for Blue Thumb partners:

• To make equity resources accessible and create a language that’s usable by people working in the environmental field on a daily basis.
• To create a digestible way to talk about equity without alienating folks who may not be too familiar with the concept
• To reframe the way environmental conversations have taken place in the past and connect that to the contemporary environmental school of thought
• Create a more inclusive space for people who haven’t been in environmental decision-making rooms but are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards
• Create connections and identify pathways to equitable leadership in appointed, elected, hired and contracted positions in environmental organizations and agencies.
• Navigate uncomfortable conversations around the roots of environmentalism as it relates to land ownership
• Offer an alternative way of sharing environmental knowledge and connection to the land ( via stories, multimedia, etc..)
• Preserve culture in times of crisis and change

DRAFT PROBLEM STATEMENTS

1. Some of the policies, practices and planning documents that guide our work are and have been discriminatory practices. Some of these we can identify and we have taken steps to change them.

• Implementation plans in  BIPOC communities that do not identify engagement of community stakeholders in the solution.
• Cost share programs that are reimbursement based or have a high dollar match requirement in low income communities.
• Cost share programs that are oriented toward engaging property owners rather than renters. Renters are a large segment of the community and this practice disproportionately does not allow us to engage BIPOC community and leads to inequities in investment of environmental resources Nonresidential cost share programs that do not have an equity component in prioritizing criteria and do not engage or address needs of BIPOC communities.
• Investment of environmental staff time,  project budgets and capital investments are allocated disproportionately toward more affluent communities.
• We have not established accountability measures for actualizing equity.

2. There is a lack of BIPOC community involvement in governmental  environmental institutions, on staff, on boards and committees, at workshops, and at community input meetings. Yet there is a long history of environmental action and knowledge within the BIPOC community that would strengthen our ability to act upon the environmental challenges we all face. Barriers to creating a more inclusive natural resources community, include:

• Meeting times and locations are not accessible or welcoming to low income and BIPOC communities.
• We have not designated resources to support involvement of low income and BIPOC representatives of environmental networks.
• We have not taken the steps to reach out to BIPOC communities and engage in meaningful partnership with communities who have knowledge and information on environmental justice, climate, water, land stewardship and other environmental actions. We have not built connections that are meaningful and not extractive, or recognized the power within the community to lead and to make change.

3. The majority of clean water and natural resource funding is not being invested in EJ communities? EJ communities that are disproportionately impacted are underrepresented in the projects being installed with Clean Water Funds, Brownfields Funding, Other sources? There is not an EJ classifier for how funds are spent.
4. K-12 environmental education students of today will be the staff of tomorrow for EJ. There is also a lack of BIPOC professional role models in leadership of environmental agencies in the field. We want to continue to prioritize BIPOC youth outreach and engagement of underserved students to engage them in natural resources (thinking through systems of barriers (name barriers here?) in place that are working in the exclusion of bipoc students.

• The framing around visibility vs what’s actually happening in natural resources work with BIPOC youth
• We have a fragmented focus on water systems that does not consider wholeness and interconnectedness that is part of many cultures’ understanding of water. (refer to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and ways of knowing + other Indigenous knowledge examples and the way that works parallel to contemporary/eurocentric environmental work)
• Water regulation, SWM, Fluoride, Bmps is really fragmented in the way that it’s done and wholeness is absent. Limits our ability to collaborate based on the way regulations are written.
• If the shift in approach happens, then collaboration seems more doable.

5. This is by no means exhaustive and we acknowledge that this fluid process.