Elizabeth Yeampierre: Buenos Dias, mi gente.
It’s a pleasure to be here.
It’s an honor.
I really want to thank you for inviting me.
I especially want to recognize and thank Symma Finn, who I think is a fierce advocate for
community engagement, and is always an inspiration to me, and makes me hopeful that scientists
are walking behind us, and along our side, to do some really transformational things
together.
I’m the executive director of UPROSE in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
I’m an attorney by training, and my mom says I’m an activist by birth, that I literally
came out of the womb with my fist first.
That’s quite possible [laughs].
In UPROSE, which is Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community based organization, is a multi-racial,
multi-ethnic, inter-generational community organization dedicated to environmental and
social justice.
You may have seen us at the Peoples Climate March.
We were at the front with all the sunflowers.
If you missed that, you missed the largest climate march in the history of the world,
and I would urge you to go look at it.
Our organization has been responsible for doubling the amount of open space in Sunset
Park, stopping the sighting of power plant, expending medians, sending four young people
to Antarctica and one to the North Pole on scientific expeditions.
Just young people from the neighborhood, sending them all to first year colleges providing
them with air monitors where they measure levels of PM2.5, NOx, SOx, and carbon monoxide.
We have been doing GIAS mapping.
Anything that has to do with health disparities in our community, we put those skills in the
hands of people in our community, and watch them engage in transformation.
So this conversation for us is extremely important to us.
Sunset Park is a low income community.
It’s an under-served community of color.
It’s in New York City’s largest significant maritime industrial area, and it’s surrounded
by numerous environmental burdens.
The most vulnerable population which is closest to the environmental burdens, and the way
that we look at vulnerable populations, the way that we define that, at least from an
environmental justice perspective, is we look at folks who were the descendants of colonization
and slavery.
And for us that means that generation, after generation, after generation, these are the
people who have had the worst health care, the worst living conditions, the most stresses
generation, after generation, and that that cumulative effect combined with a cumulative
impact of all the environmental burdens within which they’re living, is going to have a
health disparity for them.
And so those things are important in terms of how we collect data, how we collect information,
how we respect and honor local knowledge.
In Sunset Park because its located in that part of Brooklyn, it was affected by Sandy
and so the project that I’m going to talk about is how we put together grass-roots approach
to collect data and get the community involved in exposure to toxic harm.
When tons of water came in through Sunset Park, it came across brownfields, it came
across chemicals that were not containerized.
The significant maritime industrial area was created long before there was an EPA, was
not regulated.
So there’s no regulation that tells you how you have to containerize those chemicals.
And we know that the first responders in our community UPROSE has climate, justice, and
community resilience center, we know that the first responders in an extreme weather
event are always people in the community.
What we’re doing today, by the way, is extremely important because the demographics are changing
all over the country.
The country is going to look more like me and you guys, all right, I said before that
in the future everyone is going to look Pilipino and urbany mixes, right.
That’s a cute thing.
[laughter]
So but what that means is that you’ve got a huge demographic that has been exposed to
a lot of toxic harm over generations, now having -- now running the country.
So community partnerships become tremendously important.
We created a diverse -- how much time?
Okay.
We created a diverse community stakeholder group.
What that means for us is bringing not only the people impacted together, but the agencies,
the scientist, all of these people together to become part of a stakeholder group that
advises and guides the community through this process.
What that does is it gives the community an opportunity to have an interdisciplinary approach.
It raises the level of understanding among all of the different members of the stakeholder
group.
We do training for each of those different groups.
So, for example, for the community we train them on how to work with all these different
agencies, and how to work with all these different participants of the stakeholder group.
How to ask questions so that they’re not asking how to fix a pothole from an agency
that is federal.
And that kind of information is important.
I’m using that example because that’s what happens when you put people who have
not had power in a room with people who have a higher level of education and feel they’re
privileged.
So that level of education is important for our community.
We also do a training for those agencies and these other people who are coming because
the assumption is that folks have the cultural competency to work in a way that’s respectful,
and work in partnerships with people in the community, when they in fact don’t.
And so we provide that training.
So while all that training is happening, then we bring people together to work in a way
that’s respectful and that levels the playing field so that they could build consensus and
move a community priorities.
So that’s what we consider meaningful engagement requiring training.
The CSG, which is what we call the Community Stakeholder Group, guides research methods,
questions, reviews materials, provides feedback, corrects researchers, produces and conducts
strategies for interview recovery workers.
How we approach recovery workers may be different.
You might go to a recovery worker person in the community who because of an extreme weather
event, and they’re going to be increasing, thinks that they wore safety material, and
they went out into the water with sneakers on, and maybe put on some gloves, and they
weren’t protected from the chemicals.
And you can’t approach them with a clipboard because that freaks them out, it scares them,
it makes them think someone official is approaching them.
If they are undocumented, or if they’re not the person who runs the business, they’re
going to be fearful and they’re not going to respond.
So an organizing approach, the kind that we use as organizers, you know where we have
a conversation with neighbors and people we know and speak to them in their language makes
a big difference.
In our community speaks four different languages.
It speaks Spanish, English, Chinese, and Arabic, and so we have to have people out there from
the community that can reach out to these recovery workers that speak the language of
the community and that they can recognize, and can talk to them in a way that’s accessible,
that breaks information down so that they don’t feel like they’re being talked at,
and they can feel like they can -- it generates trust.
We also have a lot of events that are not around toxic exposure and issues that are
around food and family so that people can come in and get to know each other in a place
that’s less intimidating than talking about these kinds of things.
We provide local data to better prepare for risk reduction.
I feel like I’m going all over the place.
It’s just that she said three minutes, two minutes ago.
And we try to build synergy between local and outside expertise.
Direct partnership across disciplines with at-risk communities, deep engagement, and
local knowledge and need, and build community resilience.
In terms of the challenges and opportunities, the challenges we think is that scientists,
researchers, and local communities speak very different languages and that doesn’t just
mean language.
It’s how you present information, and how you make it accessible, and how you break
it down.
Local perceptions and needs may not meet outside expectations.
Sometimes people come to these communities with deficit base expectations assuming that
just because someone doesn’t have a higher level of education that they don’t understand.
The fact is that people come with the knowledge from their countries and from their experience
even if its struggle and it changes the whole conversation, and that they know where the
cancer clusters are.
They know where the corridor of people with asthma is.
They know -- they have information that you have to respect and approach with a lot of
humility.
The opportunities, collaboration builds resilience and deep understanding of local risk.
It provides investigators with insight not achievable through top-down methods.
It empowers communities to realize the risks and opportunities they face and research is
truly relevant to the community.
So given all of the challenges that we know are happening in every sector of this country
and that we know that there’re going to be more extreme weather events, having communities
that have been excluded from this conversation engage in a way that is meaningful is not
only important to them in terms of addressing the issues that are a priority, it’s going
to be important to you in terms of your relevance and in terms of your ability to address root
causes that are only going to get worse.
And so the good news is that this room is full of visionaries, of people who want to
get out of the silos, and get out of their comfort zones, and work with people in respectful
ways.
And part of that is also going to involve sort of checking your privilege, and that’s
a hard conversation, but there’s something about the way we come into a space that really
changes what conversation takes place.
So it really doesn’t matter how much you learn, how much you know about science, and
whether or not you are an amazing scientist, if your way of communicating and the way of
showing up in a space is one that excludes, minimizes, and diminishes in any way.
And sometimes that happens without you meaning it to happen and so that’s why building
those competencies and doing the inner-work is really important, because we need you,
and you need us, and I think that together we are going be able to do transformational
work as we move forward.
Gracias.
[applause]
[end of transcript]