Environmental Justice Education and Advocacy Collaboration (EJEAC)

With initial grants from Headwaters Foundation for Justice, WEI created a project to clarify and make visible the link between toxic sites mapped by the MN Pollution Control Agency, MN Department of Agriculture and other state agencies concerning both what we know and what we need to know about health disparities experienced by individuals living near or on those sites.

No state agency is tracking those connections and existing disease registries have never tracked the environmental public health impacts on GIS coordinates in Minnesota. Our premise is that individuals and communites have a right-to-know these connections as a basic human right. Our method is to build a strong and skilled community base to research, inform, and help neighbors to organize for their own health and safety, environmental protection, and to change public policy to ensure remediation and prevention. Our goal today is to create the grass roots momentum needed to get appropriate government and private agencies that should be doing this work on this missing environmental justice tracking. We will conduct primary research and attempt to evaluate cumulative body impacts from the numerous toxins our low-income and communities of color often face. The EJEAC project targets the Phillips Neighborhood in Minneapolis, the East Side in St. Paul and potentially a tribal community. We hope to create a model for community-empowered environmental justice organizing and advocacy that can be useful regionally and nationally. This project is supported by the Bush Foundation, Bremer Foundation, and the Headwaters Foundation for Justice. Principal Investigator: Dr. Cecilia Martinez.

Progress report available in pdf.