Strategy 1: Assist organizations build economically vibrant and socially just communities with emphasis on health and well-being of families and children. Launch initiatives to clean up and develop degraded and vacant land exemplified by the following: use economic incentives to attract clean technology businesses; support job training and retraining the workforce that develops and produces “green jobs” for clean technologies; use zoning ordinances and other land-use tools to ensure healthy housing, adequate green space, and access to healthy foods and quality health care; and support transportation equity that ensures efficient and health-enhancing transit, safe biking, and walking routes.
Strategy 2: Support initiatives that strengthen the capacity of organizations to analyze and solve place-focused problems at the national, regional, statewide, and local community level. Nongovernmental organizations need support to grow a movement and leaders that emphasize solution-oriented, place-based strategies and approaches such as “Sustainable Development Zones,” “Green Impact Zones,” and “Health Impact Zones” to transform dying, redlined, and burdened neighborhoods into thriving centers of social connection, economic activity, and health-enhancing environments.
Strategy 3: Foster strong collaborations, alliances, and multigenerational networking. Assist with multigenerational, multidisciplinary, cross-issue collaboration, networking, and training opportunities for young people and emerging leaders who are transitioning to greater leadership roles.
Strategy 4: Advance youth and student work that intersects with a diverse range of organizing areas across the broader environmental justice, health, and racial equity fields. Investing in youth and student organizing around environment, health, and racial equity provides an opportunity to connect youth leadership and young people to the broader goals of social change.
Strategy 5: Embrace long-term campaigns and programming. Invest in long-term campaigns, organizing, educations/training, community-based participatory research, and policy infrastructure to enhance networking and collaborations nongovernmental organizations within the Environmental Justice Movement and with other organization allies working on similar topics and initiatives.
Strategy 6: Broaden foundations and government funding of environmental justice and health equity work that extends beyond funding “silos.” Environmental justice is integrative and holistic in its approach—encompassing a broad array of solution-driven protocols, including “anti-toxics” campaign, pollution prevention, precautionary principle, chemical reform, green chemistry, green products, food security, clean energy, green jobs, green economy, etc.
Strategy 7: Strengthen collaborative work on climate justice, public health, and vulnerable communities. Climate justice looms as a major environmental justice issue of the twenty-first century. Investments are needed in the growing Climate Justice Movement since the most vulnerable populations will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks because of where they live, their limited income and economic means, and their lack of access to health care.
Strategy 8: Leverage public and private resources for translations of environmental justice, health and racial equity research. Information is power. Foster translation of research and technical reports and documents to highlight the link between community conditions and individual health and to provide insights about the effectiveness of different approaches.
Strategy 9: Document and disseminate EJ “success stories.” Authentic “success stories” need to be told through the voices of the individuals who produced the successes. Build collaborations that result in more television and big screen movies on EJ subject matter.
Strategy 10: Maintain a focus on racial equity and eliminating environmental and health disparities. Encourage funders to apply a racial equity lens to grantmaking.
Strategy 11: Support “toxic-free” neighborhoods and healthy schools. Healthy people and healthy environments are related. Advocates are fighting to get access to affordable housing in “toxic-free” neighborhoods and build healthy high performing schools.
Strategy 12: Increase general operating support and multi-year funding. Reliable, predictable, and flexible multi-year core funding support allows organizations to carry out their mission and respond to new challenges and opportunities.
Strategy 13: Invest in community-university partnerships. There is a need for more community-university partnerships (CUPs) to advance health and racial equity goals of the Environmental Justice Movement. Health Impact Assessments (HIA) should also be used to provide recommendations to increase positive health outcomes.
