CEJA’s Green Zone Initiative is creating a new model for collaborative, comprehensive, community-based change in low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately burdened by pollution. The goal of the Green Zones Initiative is to transform overburdened neighborhoods into healthy, thriving “Green Zones.”

CEJA identifies Green Zones as low-income communities and communities of color that face a deadly combination of socioeconomic stressors, public health burdens, and environmental degradation. We worked with leading researchers at UC Berkeley, Occidental College, and University of Southern California to scientifically map areas of high cumulative impacts, using a cutting edge methodology called the Environmental Justice Screening Methodology.

Our California Green Zones Initiative has seven local campaigns in highly impacted communities across California. Each campaigns is tailored to meet the specific conditions in the community, but all utilize the same four strategies to achieve change:

• reducing existing pollution levels;
• community-based land-use planning;
• supporting green, community-based development;
• building community capacity and power.

Each local campaign has worked with local residents to identify solutions to local environmental and community development issues and assembled a collaborative of community-based organizations, local, state and federal partners to target, coordinate and leverage programmatic and public resources into Green Zone areas. Our goal is to create solution-oriented, interagency partnerships that demonstrate the effectiveness of a place-based, community-led model of achieving environmental justice that can serve as a model throughout the country.

Click here for the Green Zone 2 page factsheet with a description of the Green Zone campaigns throughout the state.

Click here for the full overview of Green Zones.