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campaigns
YUCA in East Palo Alto fights for for Environmental
Justice in our community. We are doing this by addressing two major problems
that the community is facing: Gentrification and Environmental Racism.
Already, our office has been moved around a five times because
of redevelopment in our community. Over the last 3 years, we worked to
educate and organize the community to speak out about redevelopment projects
that are taking advantage of the city, displacing people and making misleading
promises to the community. Through our efforts of petition gathering,
outreaching, protesting and mobilizing folks to speak at City Council
meetings, we were able to help stop a "University Palms" office
development from coming in.
Unfortunately, after a new round of city council member elections, the
proposal came back on to the table. Though we organized again, this time
the proposal passed. The community was able to get better concessions
or benefits because it was stopped the first time. The revised proposal
now provides concessions that the developers said earlier were impossible
to do, proving that they were trying to take advantage of us all along.
Now, we are strategizing on a new campaign to deal with gentrification
and redevelopment.
In East Palo Alto, US Liquids operates a Romic facility that has been
operating on an expired permit for over 10 years. YUCA, Ujima Security
Council and other community members have been working to get the Department
of Toxic Substance Control to hold Romic accountable for completing an
Environmental Impact Report and Permit Application for public review for
over 5 years. Last year, DTSC agreed to regular monthly meetings so we
could hold them accountable to the timeline that they provided us. We
are currently developing ways to make sure that community members voices
will really be heard in this process.
As a part of the Romic campaign, YUCA is also conducting a community-wide
health survey to get information about health conditions in our community.
Nothing like this has ever been done and we hope to use this information
to show how traffic and toxic environmental sites are affecting our community.
In the summer, we completed a pilot health survey ,for which we surveyed
275 young people in the community and found high incidents of asthma and
other conditions. We will use our experiences from that survey to get
better results for the community-wide survey.
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