CampaignsWe use a joint approach of community organizing and legal assistance to empower communities to tackle the environmental hazards they face. Largely, we focus on issues raised directly by our community clients. Most of that work lies within our five main campaigns:
Fighting for Racial Justice
CRPE provides our allies in the environmental justice movement with the legal assistance to resuscitate the promise of racial justice. Through utilizing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin we focus on compelling the US Environmental Protection Agency to protect the environmental health of communities of color.
Cleaning up the diriest air in the nation
San Joaquin Valley communities breathe some of the most heavily polluted air in the United States, leading to $6 billion in annual health costs. We work to target the worst and most under-regulated polluters: pesticides, diesel equipment and animal factory-style dairies.
Addressing the disproportionate impact of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color
CRPE works on the state level in California to ensure that global warming laws protect the needs of low income communities of color. In the Native Village of Kivalina, Alaska we are working with community leaders in a unique case to help save their way of life from the immediate effects of climate change.
Protecting rural communities from unfair and unsafe waste disposal practices
The Central Valley is currently California's dumping ground. Residents are literally living in the waste of the state's lucrative agricultural economy and are now finding themselves the target for dumping of toxic waste, food waste and sewage sludge from large urban cities. CRPE helps educate, mobilize, and secure protections for those communities that have been targeted for unsafe waste practices.
Eliminating poverty at the root
The campaign for Green and Just Economic Development works with grassroots groups in the San Joaquin Valley to eliminate the roots of poverty by establishing community/economic development programs that embrace principles of social, economic, and environmental justice. The first program to come from this campaign is the creation of a series of worker owned gardens. As of 2013 there are four gardens up-and-running or in cultivation. |
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