Environmental Health
Environmental Health Education Prompts
Residents To Advocate for Policy Changes
  esearch indicates that low-income
people of color are the most likely population to be adversely affected by environmental health hazards because their communities are often surrounded
by polluting facilities.
The Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), a national organization that targets environmental justice issues, received a $90,000 grant from TCWF for core operating support to help Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities in the San Francisco Bay Area identify environmental problems and take action to solve them.
“Residents are the key to improving environmental health conditions, because they have the most at stake,” said Fatima Angeles, TCWF program director. “When people have no voice in their
communities, they’re powerless. APEN teaches [residents] how to respond to health threats in their communities.”
An example of APEN’s work is the Laotian Organizing Project, launched in 1995 in Richmond, California.
“The Laotian community, estimated at more than 10,000 in Richmond, is among the most
marginalized in terms of community services,” said Joselito Laudencia, APEN’s executive director. “With more than 350 polluting facilities —
everything from dumps to refineries and chemical plants — the city experiences ongoing problems with chemicals, as well as increasingly frequent crises involving the release of poisons into the community.”
APEN’s Laudencia said that through the project, it waged a successful several-year campaign for a telephone warning system, but it took a chemical leak of sulfur dioxide and trioxide last May, which sent many to the hospital, to get the system funded. The system is set up to warn Laotian residents of emergencies when hazardous industrial accidents occur. APEN hopes to expand the Laotian pilot
project to other Asian languages.
APEN also recruits and trains a corps of Laotian teenage girls as Asian Youth Advocates, teaching them to make connections between pollution and health, to assess community needs and to become leaders for environmental justice.
APEN hopes to replicate its success with Lao residents in Richmond to other Asian and Pacific Islander communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Central to APEN’s work is education, which Laudencia says is an important tool in raising awareness of
environmental problems. APEN sponsors “toxic tours” that take community leaders and members around their neighborhoods to see the impacts that pollution has on schools and communities.
“They can see that their homes and old schools, in various stages of disrepair, offer little protection to their children,” Laudencia said.
Tour participants learn that other hazards also lurk in the bay itself, where locals who can’t
read warning signs catch contaminated fish to feed their families.
“We have an ongoing challenge to engage the refugee community,” Laudencia said. “They come from backgrounds of distinct tribes with differing languages and a politic of not voicing their opinions. They’re learning to work together to change conditions in their communities or face slow death in their
polluted environments.”
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