Global Trade Impacts: Addressing the Health, Social and Environmental Consequences of Moving International Freight Through Our Communities

Examines freight transportation industry trends; the impact of global trade on workers, the environment, and health in both exporting and importing countries; and organizing strategies and policy innovations for minimizing the damage and ensuring health

Community Building, Community Bridging

A summary document of our research, entitled "Community Building, Community Bridging: Linking Neighborhood Improvement Initiatives and the New Regionalism in the San Francisco Bay Area," discusses the three initiatives and draws general lessons for those interested in how communities and regions could better work together

Global Trade Impacts: Addressing the Health, Social and Environmental Consequences of Moving International Freight through Our Communities

As ports and goods movement activity expands throughout the United States, a major challenge is how to make the adverse impacts of freight transportation a more central part of economic development, policy and planning discussions and transportation decision making. In 2009, faculty and staff from the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute of Occidental College and from the environmental health sciences and regional equity programs of the University of Southern California (USC) began a study of this evolving global trade and freight transportation system, focusing on areas in the United States where the system is expanding and where community, labor and social justice groups have begun to challenge the system. Funded by The Kresge Foundation, the purpose of the study – which resulted in this report – was to provide an overview of the growth and scale of the goods movement industries and the shift from a production to a distribution economy. At the same time, the study documents examples of organizing and policy approaches that have injected important considerations of health, labor, and community impacts into decisionmaking and identified new directions so that local and regional communities can better address what is happening in their backyards due to these shifts

Coming Together: Lessons on Collaboration From California Works for Better Health

Details the collaborative process of the California Works for Better Health initiative to improve low-income workers' health through job quality. Presents lessons learned on how the partnerships' tone, context, and strategies affect the overall outcome

Toll-like receptor 4 signaling in liver injury and hepatic fibrogenesis

Toll-like receptors (TLRs) are a family of transmembrane pattern recognition receptors (PRR) that play a key role in innate and adaptive immunity by recognizing structural components unique to bacteria, fungi and viruses. TLR4 is the most studied of the TLRs, and its primary exogenous ligand is lipopolysaccharide, a component of Gram-negative bacterial walls. In the absence of exogenous microbes, endogenous ligands including damage-associated molecular pattern molecules from damaged matrix and injured cells can also activate TLR4 signaling. In humans, single nucleotide polymorphisms of the TLR4 gene have an effect on its signal transduction and on associated risks of specific diseases, including cirrhosis. In liver, TLR4 is expressed by all parenchymal and non-parenchymal cell types, and contributes to tissue damage caused by a variety of etiologies. Intact TLR4 signaling was identified in hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), the major fibrogenic cell type in injured liver, and mediates key responses including an inflammatory phenotype, fibrogenesis and anti-apoptotic properties. Further clarification of the function and endogenous ligands of TLR4 signaling in HSCs and other liver cells could uncover novel mechanisms of fibrogenesis and facilitate the development of therapeutic strategies

Aligning Community-Engaged Research Methods with Diverse Community Organizing Approaches

Community-Engaged Research (CER) often involves partnerships between academic or professional researchers and community organizers. Critical CER and organizing each aim to mobilize people and resources to produce actionable knowledge in order to build grassroots leadership and power that promote equity and justice for marginalized communities. This article argues that critical CER collaborations can benefit by carefully matching the choice of research methods with community partners’ organizing strategies to ensure that research aligns with and supports organizing goals. We aim to add to the CER literature a more specific rationale for why professional researchers should share control over the choice of research methods with community organizers, and more detailed guidance for how CER teams can select methods that best advance organizers’ goals. After summarizing the many ways in which collaborative research can support community organizing efforts, we argue that different CER methods align best with widely-used organizing approaches (including Alinskyite, Freirean, feminist, community building and resilience-based, and transformative approaches). We illustrate the discussion with examples of research conducted by and with organizations rooted in the environmental justice (EJ) movement, which prioritizes community organizing as a strategy and draws from multiple organizing traditions, including a case study of research techniques used by the Environmental Health Coalition, one of the oldest EJ groups in the U.S

Ground Truths: Community-Engaged Research for Environmental Justice

Ground Truths shows how community-engaged research contributes to environmental justice for Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities by centering local knowledge, building truth from the ground up, producing data that can influence decisions, and transforming researchers’ relationships to communities for equity and mutual benefit. The book outlines the main steps in conducting community-engaged research, evaluates the major research methods used, and addresses institutional barriers to this kind of scholarship in academia. A critical synthesis of research in many fields, Ground Truths provides an original framework for aligning community-engaged research and environmental justice, and applies the framework in chapters on public health, urban planning, conservation, law and policy, community economic development, and food justice and sovereignty.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/faculty_books/1590/thumbnail.jp

Building a 21st Century Environmental Movement That Wins: Twenty Years of Environmental Justice Organizing by the Asian Pacific Environmental Network

Over the past twenty years, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) has engaged in innovative strategies for building grassroots leadership in Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities to bring important perspectives to the movement for environmental justice. Founded in 1993, APEN strategies include community organizing and leadership development, policy development and advocacy, multiracial movement building, and, most recently, electoral organizing and civic engagement to affect state climate and energy policy. This article reflects on lessons learned in organizing to elevate the power of AAPIs to influence the public debates over the environment and influence public policy that affects where AAPIs live, work, play, and go to school. We focus on a case study of the successful defeat of Proposition 23, a California ballot initiative that would have suspended the nation’s toughest state-level greenhouse gas emissions program and point to the increasing role and power of AAPIs in determining state and national climate policy. For organizers, policy makers, and environmental advocates in particular, the campaign illustrates the importance of integrating an electoral strategy with community organizing work to educate and turn out voters to advance progressive environmental policy change. Lessons from APEN’s twenty years illustrate the past and current role of AAPIs in environmental activism and policy and the strategies necessary to tap demographic changes in order to strengthen a comprehensive strategy to combat climate change, accelerate the development of an equitable clean energy economy, and ensure a livable planet for future generations