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Building
Healthy Communities from the Ground Up: Every day, California’s low-income communities and communities of color face challenges from a disproportionate burden of toxics and pollution. Unequal political and legal rights worsen these conditions, due to a lack of community resources and exclusion of affected communities from public policy-making. The goal of environmental justice is to ensure that all people have the right to safe, secure and sustainable livelihoods free of toxic pollution, and a voice in the decision-making that affects them. Building Healthy Communities from the Ground Up is the result of discussions between environmental justice organizations in California to explore environmental conditions in the state’s most impacted communities, and develop policy recommendations to address these issues. The five key organizations – Asian Pacific Environmental Network (Oakland), Communities for a Better Environment (San Francisco Bay Area/ Los Angeles), Environmental Health Coalition (San Diego), People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (San Francisco), and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition/ Health and Environmental Justice Project (San Jose) – have long histories working together in coalition and have begun to develop and explore possibilities for addressing environmental justice at the state policy level. The recommendations contained in the report range from the general to the specific, but define a strategic direction for building healthy communities and achieving environmental justice in California. Download
the full report: PDF
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