NOTE:    These are DRAFT documents that are for CUCREJ partners’ consideration only.

Community-Based Research for Environmental Justice: Workshops from the Field

As the environmental justice movement has expanded in the last decade, community-based expertise, research, and campaigns have been responsible for the bulk of the movement’s successes. Working at times in close partnership with formal academic researchers, CUCREJ’s member communities have had their share of these victories. Despite the proven success of community-based research, most researchers and policy-makers still fail to consider the community when identifying environmental justice problems and devising interventions. And many of the methods and innovations developed by some of our partners remain too foreign to others facing the same issues.

The objective of this conference is to promote sharing, evaluation, and improvement of community-based research on environmental justice. The conference core will be “workshops from the field”: focused roundtable discussions of specific approaches and tools used in a variety of community-based research projects that have already been implemented in CUCREJ partner communities . Participants will be invited from environmental justice and research organizations throughout the region, but the vital focus will be on learning from the many community-based advocacy-research examples already at hand.

The first day of the conference will consist of workshops and discussions organized around the areas in which CUCREJ partners have already engaged in community-based research: asthma; transportation including traffic counts and mass transit usage; lead poisoning; geographic information systems; land use and zoning; toxic release inventory enforcement; air monitoring; and environmental worker training. Workshop time will be divided between presentations of community-based research efforts, invited and evaluative responses from community members and/or academics as appropriate, and questions/discussion. Key plenary papers and/or presentations will be solicited from community-based and academic resource people around the country.

The ending ½-day session will be organized around discussions on the issues raised in the preceding workshops. In one session, academic researchers will discuss research needs that arose in the workshops sessions. In a separate session, community-based activists will also discuss issues that arise in the workshops. Both sessions will formulate responsive plans to the other group for the ongoing development of community-based advocacy and research linkages. The final sessions will revolve around smaller discussion groups consisting of a mix of community-based activists and researchers. Discussions will be recorded and the points raised in each session will be reported back in the closing plenary.

CUCREJ will provide careful pre-conference coordination and material dissemination to ensure that participants can most benefit from their time together. In addition, a pre-conference electronic discussion will be held several weeks prior to the meeting thereby allowing participants to begin discussing community-based advocacy and research issues. Pertinent information from the electronic discussion will be downloaded for those gathered at the workshops. A major product we will aim for is a book compiling the actual materials and methods used in such research over the last few years. This book will hopefully serve as a model for other partners in addressing similar issues.