West Oakland Neighborhood Groups and The Pacific Institute
West Oakland Indicators Project
Chemicals in the Environment, Human Health, Survey Approach

Background and Goals

After World War II, the West Oakland economy began to decline, and Federal Renewal Projects including freeways, public transportation, and a Main Post Office began to fracture the community, displacing residents and weakening commercial activity. Since the 1980s, the ethnic character of West Oakland has been changing to include a growing population of Latinos and Asian immigrants.

The Indicators Project was initiated in 2000 to document the problems of injustice [NOTE - sounds like justice is a problem?] and environmental degradation for use in community advocacy campaigns. The Pacific Institute piloted the Environmental Indicators Project (EIP) in West Oakland to both demonstrate the value of indicators at a neighborhood level and refine methods for developing indicators for use in other neighborhoods. Pacific Institute began the EIP process in West Oakland by partnering with a neighborhood organization, the 7th St./MyClymonds Initiative. West Oakland was chosen as the pilot site because of the environmental issues faced by the community, the history of community activism, and the opportunity to support the community revitalization efforts facilitated by the 7th St./MyClymonds Corridor Neighborhood Improvement Initiative. One core vision identified by the 7th St. Initiative's Community Plan is for "An environmentally safe and physically attractive West Oakland," affirming that West Oakland residents have a right to clean air, water, and land.

The goal of the Indicators Project is to help residents in West Oakland understand and articulate social and environmental inequities. If neighborhoods are to truly benefit from opportunities of city, regional, and larger scale planning, then they must be able to create and advocate their own vision for their neighborhood. Indicators offer neighborhoods a tool for communicating, informing, and measuring progress towards that vision. Residents can use indicators to educate residents, undertake advocacy efforts, and implement needed policy changes.

The Project: Selecting Meaningful Indicators

The West Oakland EIP established a Neighborhood Taskforce of residents who served as the community center/conscience of the project. Over the course of seven meetings and as many months, participants sought to define the term "environment" in the context of West Oakland; identify environmental issues in the community; selected what indicators community members would want to measure and track; and began to determine how such information can be incorporated into current advocacy, policy, education, and organizing work. By July 2000, the Neighborhood Taskforce had agreed on a core set of indicators. Throughout the indicator selection process ,Pacific Institute (PI) presented examples of indicators that had been used elsewhere, and the community considered these. PI would then investigate data availability on the candidate indicators and communicate the results of the investigation back to the task force. Significantly, the community was always in control of this process though and PI was employed to assist.

The indicators selected by the Neighborhood Taskforce represented a broad range of environmental concerns, from issues of air quality and toxics, to environmental health, land use, housing affordability, transportation, and even civic engagement.

Selected indicators
Air Pollution Community
Air Pollution Health Risks
Asthma Rates
Bikeable Streets
Illegal Dumping
Land Use Conflict
Lead Abatement
Lead Poisoning
New Business Development
Resident Toxic Exposure
Sensitive Area Hazards Exposure
Stability/Market
Subsidized Housing Supply
Toxic Volume
Transit Mobility
Trends Neighborhood
Voting Power
Vulnerability to Displacement/house affordability

Gathering Data

After the indicators were selected, Pacific Institute's team of researchers collected and analyzed data from city, county, state, and national agencies and compiled the information in the 17 indicator reports that make up the bulk of the publication, Neighborhood Knowledge for Change: The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project. The methodologies that Pacific Institute researchers took to find, analyze and create reports for each of the indicators are included as an appendix.

In some cases, data were not available either because agencies were not collecting this information or the information was not reliable, consistent, or regularly updated. In these cases, issues that residents identified as being important were not translated into indicators. By identifying when data was not available, residents could more easily identify data gaps in their community and advocate that government agencies begin consistently collecting this information. Although some indicators were not fully developed because data were unavailable, their inclusion is significant because these sorts of issues are important to the community and highlighting data gaps helps pressure government agencies to collect the data.

What the Data Show

One product of the indicators project is a two-page summary called ?Indicators in Brief?. It is an excellent stand-alone piece that can be used by residents, policy makers, and others to describe the state of the environment in West Oakland. An image of the first page of this summary is shown below. There is more detail on each indicator in the report, but the summary provides a snapshot of the findings for the 17 indicators selected by the community for investigation.

Taking Action: Using the Indicators in Community Campaigns

During the next phase of the project began in 2001, the Neighborhood Taskforce was reconstituted as the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WO EIP) Committee. The WO EIP Committee worked to ensure that indicators information was integrated into the neighborhood's planning, advocacy and education work. The Committee also supported greater community capacity, to continue education and data collection.

The WO EIP Committee selected three West Oakland community campaigns to support with further technical assistance and indicator information. These were: the Clean Air Coalition (to promote clean air and environmental justice), the Anti-Displacement Network (to enhance community stability and protect residents from gentrification), and the West Oakland Asthma Coalition (to help neighborhood residents prevent and control asthma).

In terms of concrete activities associated with these campaigns, the WOEIP Committee is currently working with the community on the following.
		Changing Policy. WO EIP held a policy forum where community residents and policy analysts came together to develop a matrix of policy implications and opportunities to generate positive change on the indicators. This information has been used to create community goals for different campaigns and the group met with local, county, and state policy makers to generate action on policy goals.
		Working Effectively with the Media. WO EIP held a media training for community residents and organizations about effectively designing and disseminating a message, including using the media to carry this message. Participants were taught how to communicate with the media, how to write a press advisory, press release, and an opinion piece to gain coverage of important community campaigns
		Neighborhood Law Corps. After the report release, the Oakland City Attorney, which had recently begun a Neighborhood Law Corps Program, located their first attorney in West Oakland. They are now working on legal approaches to improve public health and the environment based on findings from the report. The City Attorney?s Office has begun collecting information for a public nuisance lawsuit against one of the largest polluters in the area, Red Star Yeast. They are also working on anti-blight issues like illegal dumping.
		Diesel Study. Pacific Institute received some seed money from USEPA to begin a diesel study. The release of the report led the USEPA Division of Air Quality to invest in research to improve air quality and health in West Oakland. Division staff are in discussions around locating a Clean Air Pilot project in West Oakland, and provided the Pacific Institute with seed funding to undertake a diesel pollution study along the I-880 corridor.

Reflections on the Project

Pacific Institute?s Meena Palaniappan reports that one of the project's challenges was selecting indicators that would be relatively easy to update. The actual data for the indicators are collected by various public agencies and are easy to obtain, and the methodologies of indicator development are straightforward. The data gathering itself was generally labor-intensive. Although some indicators like the federal Toxics Release Inventory data were completed in about one month. The entire process for all the indicators took 8-12 months. This period included an evolutionary process in which interim data collection efforts were communicated to the community (task force) to make sure that goals were being met. Refinements to the indicators were made and the researchers collected more data. It is important to note that this feedback loop took place throughout data collection. Data collection methodologies are straightforward, and technology needs are modest. The GIS capability and hardware was supplied through a partnership with the GIS Lab at UC Berkeley, and the GIS work was performed by UC Berkeley graduate students. This partnership was valuable.

Community Control Key to Success
West Oakland had a distrustful attitude of many researchers who had come in and done studies with no community involvement. Citizens had the feeling that they had been ?studied to death,? and that some researchers from local universities had adopted a rather colonial attitude toward residents. This distrust had to be overcome at the outset of the indicators project. Meena Palaniappan strongly emphasized that such projects should be completely community-driven. Community involvement added time to all phases of the work (indicator selection, data collection and how to move forward with the information for making change), but is the primary reason for the project?s ongoing success and why indicators have been thoroughly embraced by the community and used extensively in campaigns. The project is ongoing, is independent and still reaping benefits, because the community is in control and has been empowered. There is an effort right now to give the community the capacity to update the indicators.

The community was instrumental in moving the campaigns forward once the indicators were published. The communities knowledge came into play especially in the material pertaining to ?what you can do? about the various indicator results. For example, the community has extensive knowledge about who is working in and around West Oakland in the various areas like anti-displacement, asthma control and so forth.

Future Challenges
There are challenges in moving beyond indicators to action. The three coalitions (clean air, asthma, displacement) are working independently to move the indicators forward in various campaigns. There are challenges in working through this process to ensure that all members of the group are comfortable with the outreach materials (brochures for door-to-door campaigns for instance) and the campaign messages. The Pacific Institute works with all these coalitions. For example, the asthma brochures went through several rounds of revisions as the members grappled with what was the most important information to feature. The issues raised involved making a choice between focusing on fairly strong links between smoking and asthma or less well understood linkages between outdoor air quality and asthma. In the end, it was decided that it was most important to focus on the smoking issue as the issue supported by the strongest science. information . Here again, the coalitions have control over the message and how the indicators are being used, while the Pacific Institute provides technical assistance and information in support of the community?s goals.

Contact information or web links.

Pacific Institute
654 13th Street, Preservation Park
Oakland, CA 94612
www.pacinst.org
T (510) 251-1600
F (510) 251-2203
Project Directors: Steve Costa, Meena Palaniappan (mpal@pacinst.org), Arlene K. Wong
Contributing Authors: Jeremy Hays, Clara Landeiro, Jane Rongerude

The indicators report is available here for download in pdf format: http://www.pacinst.org/reports/environmental_indicators.htm

A companion to indicators publication is the Environmental Indicators Project web site (http://www.neip.org), which is a resource for neighborhood indicator data, information on methodology, links to other neighborhood sustainability indicator projects, and other project resources.

This web site can assist residents and activists to build a neighborhood indicators project, and acts as a clearinghouse for neighborhood urban environmental indicators information.

Figure 1 ? This is one part of a terrific overview of the Oakland indicators produced with a short description of the current value of the indicator. This two page section summarizes all the indicators and conveys a key fact about each issue found in our research in West Oakland. This is an excellent stand alone piece that can be used by residents, policy makers, and others to describe the state of the environment in West Oakland.

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