A Black Environmental Justice Network Has Relaunched. Will Funding Follow?

The Wheelabrator incinerator plant, Baltimore’s biggest polluter, is located in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Westport. Nicole Glass Photography/shutterstock

When the National Black Environmental Justice Network relaunched last month, 14 years after it disbanded, it was both the culmination of years of conversations and a response to the dire crises of today.

And like much of the environmental justice work done by communities of color, it also came about before a single grant dollar arrived.

Driven by resurgent pollution in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and the broader sense that Black communities needed a stronger voice in the environmental justice movement, advocates for years had discussed restarting the network, said Beverly Wright, who was one of the founding members when NBEJN was launched in 1999. But it was hard to take the first steps.

“The truth of the matter is that we didn’t have any money to do so—and no one even had the energy,” said Wright, who is the executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, which is now the network’s fiscal sponsor. “We were so busy trying to respond to every new crisis that showed up.”

Then came COVID-19. The many systemic inequities impacting Black Americans—including greater exposure to pollution, less access to quality healthcare, and over-representation in low-wage frontline jobs–have made the community dramatically more susceptible to the pandemic. Black Americans are five times more likely to be hospitalized due to coronavirus than whites, according to the CDC.

It was an April 2020 Harvard study linking higher levels of airborne particulate matter to higher mortality that made the connection to environmental justice abundantly clear. “I couldn’t understand why the death rate there was so high until the Harvard study,” Wright said.

The murder of George Floyd in late May and the national attention to systemic racism that followed came as their work was underway, and pushed them to move even faster. One of the movement’s rallying cries, “I can’t breathe,” has long had an echo in the environmental justice movement, as pollution takes a disproportionate toll on the health of communities of color, particularly affecting respiratory wellness.

“It was the perfect storm of these two events,” said Tina Johnson, the network’s director. “The one was a virus, and then the other virus that was systemic racism.”

The group—15 organizations operating across 10 states—had been planning to launch at the end of the summer, but through a lot of long days, late nights, and deep conversations, they moved up the timeline. Members not only volunteered their time, they all pitched in money to launch the website.

“The work needs to happen—and we can’t wait. Because of the urgency, it wasn’t like, ‘let’s find a half a million dollars, and we’ll do the work.’ It was really: ‘We’ll do the work and we’ll look for the money,’” Johnson said.

The group does have a pending grant of at least $30,000 from the Energy Foundation, but it was not released before the launch. While they’ve garnered press in Politico, the Intercept, and the Guardian, financial support has been harder to come by. They recognize the potential of the moment, but are concerned that biases for big, typically white-led organizations will prevail.

“Now, everyone wants to give to EJ,” Johnson told me. “The concern right now is, will the big green organizations that don’t do environmental justice step in and take up that space, and take up those resources? Because that’s where the money is being directed now… Places and spaces that say, ‘Oh, we do EJ now. We’re interested in this topic,’ when they weren’t interested, really, in any meaningful way before.”

The Challenges Facing Black-Led Environmental Justice Groups

Black-led environmental justice organizations like NBEJN have to overcome intersecting inequities in philanthropy. First, only a tiny portion of environmental grant dollars go to environmental justice. Second, studies have repeatedly shown Black-led organizations throughout philanthropy struggle to attract funding.

Of the $1.3 billion in grant dollars awarded by 12 national environmental grantmakers to organizations between 2016 and 2017, environmental justice organizations received only 1.3%, according to a 2020 report by a group led by Building Equity & Alignment for Impact. Those grants were typically almost half the size of others, and more than a third of them went through intermediaries. Similar dynamics played out in local grantmaking in the Midwest and the Gulf South region.

A recent study by the Bridgespan Group and Echoing Green is the latest indicator of the funding disparities between white- and Black-led organizations. Among the most highly qualified applicants for Echoing Green’s prestigious fellowship program, the study found Black-led organizations had 24% lower revenues and 76% less assets compared to white-led organizations.

It also revealed a $20 million gap in funding between early-stage white- and Black-led organizations. Among later-stage organizations, the gap appears to be even worse: Only 11 percent of big investments went to organizations led by people of color (and one organization, the Harlem Children’s Zone, accounted for one-third of those funds).

“It’s systemic racism. And just a general bias against funding minority institutions. If you have a white partner, you’re more likely to get a grant than if you do it by yourself,” Wright said.

Philanthropy’s reluctance to give grants beyond what an organization has previously received compounds the obstacles. Wright’s organization was helped immensely by a $3.4 million grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 2017 that went through Texas Southern University, a historically Black university. “It gave me the ability to get larger grants,” she said. “You have to have a million to get a million.”

Amid these challenges, some state governments are making substantial investments in environmental justice. Last month, New York state announced a four-year, $10.6 million grant program that will expand access to affordable solar energy for underserved residents, one of the biggest products to date of a landmark environmental justice bill signed into law late last year.

And there are early signs that these local efforts could see an echo at the national level. Late last month, Democrats in Congress released a wide-ranging series of proposals on climate change. Building on the Green New Deal introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the package explicitly connects the work to disproportionate impacts on communities of color, particularly Black Americans, and proposes remedies. While more of a campaigning tool than viable legislation, its prospects could change depending on the outcome of the November elections.

How the Energy Foundation Grant Came About

Adrianna Quintero, senior director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the Energy Foundation, traces the origins of their grant to NBEJN back to early 2019. Following the naming of Jason Mark as CEO in January, the institution began an intentional effort to improve diversity, equity and inclusion internally and externally.

They shifted hiring policies and procedures. They launched trainings and coaching for staff. Quintero started in her new role. And they started to examine the power and racial dynamics in how they showed up as grantmakers and partners.

“It’s been a huge shift for us in the last year and a half to really refocus on this work and not be as top-down as we have in the past,” Quintero told me. “This has always prepared us to meet the moment—and we’re just at the beginning of our journey. We have a lot more to do.”

Fast-forward to December 2019. Quintero was invited to speak at an award ceremony at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on the importance of environmental justice in confronting climate change. She spoke alongside the honoree, Robert Bullard, often called the father of environmental justice, who helped found NBEJN in 1999 and is involved again today.

Not long after that conversation, Quintero was connected to Johnson through a mutual acquaintance. Hearing about the plans to relaunch the network, she wanted to support it. Though not a program officer, she has a small fund from which she can make grants.

The Energy Foundation, which gives out about $80 million in grants a year, is not an endowed foundation, supported instead by other large institutional funders. Thus, many of its grants are made with the hope of drawing attention from other funding sources.

“The environmental movement as a whole has a lot of work to do, and a legacy of racism and chronic underinvestment in communities, especially underserved communities, specifically the Black community,” Quintero told me. “I think our role is to talk about what we’re doing, not to pat ourselves on the back, not at all, but to light a fire under those in our network.”

But she emphasized that shifting practice requires much deeper work than simply getting the word out.

“Doing the internal work, and really taking a deep look at yourself as a foundation and an institution, is really critical.” Quintero said. “Look at the amount of power and energy that exists in communities that have been historically under-resourced. It’s our job for those of us with resources to ensure that we are listening and responding—and not insisting, or presuming, that we have all of the answers, because it’s simply not true.”

What’s Next for NBEJN?

Johnson’s immediate goal is to build out NBEJN’s network. They’re touching base with the 300-plus activists who were part of the original network and have held a webinar to field new interest. The network’s history is also attracting interest: An email came in recently from a woman who heard about it when she started her career and wants to join now that it’s making a comeback. While the group was able to get off the ground without support, the next step will be fundraising.

For example, Johnson said, “it’s going to be challenging to maintain the network if we can’t hire a full-time [communications] person… People’s time, that is being donated now, is going to be hard to maintain over the long term.”

The group has already defined a long list of priority areas that includes public health, transportation, youth leadership development and food and water justice—but formulating a concrete policy agenda will be a longer-term process with members.

But the broader aim is clear: to reshape the environmental movement itself. Johnson sees the network as the “connective tissue” that can connect the dots between environmental justice and the challenges facing Black Americans and our society as a whole.

“Environmental justice is about social injustice, it’s about prison reform, it’s about all of the -isms we’re dealing with in society,” Johnson said. “It’s about where we live, where we play, where we work, where we worship and the natural environment we partake in—whether it’s a walk in the park or a walk in the forest, or the water we drink. It’s about all the environments that make living in your community, in your country, healthy and fair and just and based on equity.”