Healthy Environment program officer Mary Rose Navarro and Taren Evans with the Coalition of Communities of Color share news of an innovative new effort to advance climate justice.
It’s probably no surprise that quotes such as “When you need to innovate, you need to collaborate” and “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much” inspire community organizations and philanthropy alike. That’s why efforts that bring together people who live in different locations, face unique challenges and have different ways to influence the government decisions attract funding from foundations such as Meyer. What you may not know is that occasionally the three sectors — community, government and philanthropy — all roll up our sleeves to actively shape an initiative together. That’s certainly the case with Climate Justice Through Collaborative Design, a joint project with Coalition of Communities of Color, Multnomah County, the city of Portland and Meyer Memorial Trust.
build equitable and sustainable communities by pairing local governments with philanthropy to support sustainability projects across the U.S. and Canada. Meyer will provide the one-on-one matching support for this award and will invest staff time in fostering the long-term relationships needed to make our communities more prosperous, livable and vibrant.
The Climate Justice Through Collaborative Design project will bring together community-based organizations, community members, government and local funders with the intent to co-create intersectional and innovative solutions to advance climate justice. It is no surprise that the Multnomah County Health Department concluded that the communities that face the greatest and most immediate effects of climate change, known as frontline communities, “face extremely sobering disparities that lead to more illness, fewer opportunities and shorter lives.” These communities are disproportionately made up of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and immigrant populations. We see these disparities tragically playing out in real time in the way frontline communities are experiencing COVID-19. The project adheres to the principle that the communities most impacted are best equipped to develop solutions.
In 2015, Multnomah County and the city of Portland adopted the 2015 Climate Action Plan, recognized as the “best” plan in the world by C40 Cities for the breadth of its scope and its focus on equity. The effort to create the plan broke new ground through partnerships with frontline communities that applied an equity lens throughout the process. Although the effort was groundbreaking, the past few years have shown us that even more innovative approaches that give voice to and elevate community concerns from project inception to completion are necessary to truly shift power.
Climate Justice Through Collaborative Design will create a new space where frontline communities can work with local governments in a way that shifts power and honors community wisdom and lived experience. This isn’t exclusively a community organizing space or a space for agency staff to set an agenda and make decisions. It’s a “third space,” where both can bring their unique perspectives to influence a new mental model for climate justice.
Fundamentally altering the way that local government and community work together involves throwing old ways of engagement out the window. Rather than being in a reactive role, community members will be in a generative role, helping to co-create climate justice strategies. Community members will be given resources to fully participate to compensate for their time and expertise. This will help to level the playing field between community and paid government staff and demonstrate the value of community knowledge.
This effort will require all the partners to be more flexible, capture learning along the way, value the relationships more than the outcomes, and trust the leadership of frontline communities. The Coalition of Communities of Color and Meyer are excited to collaborate on this new endeavor beyond our typical funder/grantee roles and look forward to sharing our experiences as we design a new space in which to envision a climate-just future.
As a regional funder in a state with demographics that still reflect Oregon’s founding as a white utopia, a pledge to reach a 30 percent goal of BIPOC-led environmental organizations feels both inspired and aspirational. In some parts of the country, such a threshold is achievable in short order; in Oregon, where 76 percent of residents identify as white, we may fall short of the target, despite our deep commitment to racial justice. But we believe in the necessity of goals that keep funders reaching forward, in partnership and in pursuit, and accept the challenge to give even more thought and creativity to mobilize for environmental justice right in our backyards.
Considering the pledge, we took a look at Meyer’s environmental grantmaking in 2018 and 2019. At present, we don't have demographic data from many of our grantees and it’s not yet a requirement that they submit this to get a grant. We have taken the approach of encouraging and supporting their movement toward adopting this practice by discussing the issue with them and sharing best practices information, etc., so that more groups that we fund will collect demographic data on their board and staff over time. In taking the DOC Climate Funders Justice Pledge, we aim to be transparent about our own status as an intentional equity funder.
Meyer made 199 grants totaling $15 million to organizations through our Healthy Environment portfolio and Willamette River Initiative during these two years. A quarter of the grants went to organizations, including Tribes, where people identified as BIPOC made up 50 percent or more of the staff and/or board. Fully half, 100, went to organizations that did not have demographic data to share. The remainder went to organizations with staff or board makeup of less than 50 percent BIPOC individuals.
Meyer already uploads all its grants, including environmental/climate ones, through the Candid eReporting portal.
Althoughwe are committed to increasing the percent of environmental grant funding to organizations that are run by, serve and build power for communities of color, we do not have complete data on this, particularly which ones have a majority of BIPOC and executive staff, although we do maintain some similar data. This is a longtime work in progress.
One more note: An advantage of Oregon's unique demographic makeup and Meyer’s funding is that we are able to provide support to and partnership with Indigenous organizations, as well as the nine federally recognized Tribes in the state. We are grateful to be able to amplify Native voices and support sovereignty in a state that is home to people descended from more than 380 Tribes.
And we are driven to apply the spirit of the pledge to our other portfolios — Building Community, Equitable Education and Housing Opportunities — as well as initiatives related to immigrants and refugees, public education and our most recent initiative, Justice Oregon for Black Lives. Justice Oregon, a $25 million, five-year commitment of dedicated funding to deepen support for Black-centered organizations, invests in long-term lasting strategic change and uplifts a just system of community well-being to improve conditions for all Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) in Oregon, and in turn, for all Oregonians.
With knowledge and intent comes power and deeper impact.
Last month, I had the honor of talking with Klamath Tribal Chairman Don Gentry; Mark Buettner, Klamath Tribes' biologist; Jay Weiner, an attorney who works with the Klamath Tribes; Brad Parrish, Klamath Tribes water rights specialist; Roberta Frost, Klamath Tribes Council Secretary; Willa Powless, Klamath Tribes Council Member; and Jana DeGarmo, Klamath Tribes Grant and Contract Compliance Officer about their work to protect and restore Tribal fisheries in the Upper Klamath Lake and throughout the broader Klamath Basin.
Jill: Could you start off by telling us about the Klamath Tribes’ relationship with the Upper Klamath Lake ecosystem and particularly the endangered c'waam and the koptu (two species of sucker fish)?
Chairman Gentry: The fish are so important to our people. Our people are here because of the resources that were here. The suckers were a big part of how our people survived, and because of that we have a strong link to the suckers, both culturally and because they are subsistence species that we’d hoped to have forever to harvest.
Mark Buettener: Unfortunately, even with protection under the ESA (Endangered Species Act), the fish have continued to decline over the last 30 or so years. We’re really worried about the potential total loss of the species.
There’s been an effort recently to propagate the suckers. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started experimenting about five years ago, and over the last couple of years the Klamath Tribes have also started a fish propagation program to prevent the suckers from going extinct and hopefully release enough fish of a large enough size that we can start seeing better survival. There’s also been restoration work, including marsh restoration to help improve habitat. Of course, our long-term objective is to improve the overall health of the system.
Over the years the biggest problem has been poor water quality in Upper Klamath Lake. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to improve water quality conditions. There’s got to be a basin wide effort to reduce some of the nutrient and sediment loading that occurs as a result of poor land-use practices. A lot of the tributaries to the lake are surrounded by agricultural land, so there’s a lot of impacts from agriculture and cattle grazing, which has degraded the water quality, and we’re working with state and federal agencies and private landowners to implement best management practices and habitat restoration in the watershed.
Since Upper Klamath Lake is the major irrigation source for a 200,000-acre federal irrigation project we are dealing with ESA consultation activities where their operations affect how the lake is managed in terms of water levels, and water levels impact not only fish habitat but the water quality conditions in the lake.
Chairman: That also brings to mind how complex this is, because there are federal agencies, state agencies, multiple ownerships, property owners. ESA is a part of it, but ESA only goes so far as to try to stop the fish from going extinct. We really need to have harvestable fisheries.
Jill: What are the new tension points related to climate change that you’re already experiencing or that you see coming that are impacting your efforts to protect and restore the basin.
Chairman Gentry:
We are in a real dry period, and have been, and that affects how we approach the reinitiation of consultation on the [federal government’s] biological opinion[1]. Climate change must be considered and addressed when we look at future management related to the biological opinion.
Jay: We’re really seeing climate change problematizing the planning models that the Bureau of Reclamation uses [to manage the lake]. The climate is based on planning models that use basically a 40-year retrospective period that dates back to the early ‘80s. One of the things that we’re seeing in the course of over the past 5 to 10 years at least, is the year-to-year variation.
The frequency of low water years has increased. It is no longer responsible to make planning decisions based on a retrospective record because of how rapidly the climate is changing around us.
Jill: What are the points of progress and challenges or setbacks this year?
Chairman: I believe we’re holding our own. We’re pushing as hard as we can using the available science and trying to use all of the tools at our disposal to push for what we think is important for the fish. I think there’s recently been a little bit of a turn — I’m not sure how far it goes — with the Bureau of Reclamation in their engagement with us. We’re having more frequent government-to-government meetings and we will be looking for meaningful response to our input.
We believe that all of the federal agencies have a trust responsibility because of our treaty to give us greater or at least the same consideration they give the irrigation project, especially given the dire condition of the fish, which is a treaty resource. It seems like we’re always pushed to the very minimum habitat needs for the fish so they can provide more water for agriculture.
I’m not going to say we have some lasting significant victory on the litigation front, but we’re currently holding our own and treading water. My hope, honestly, with the different administration coming in is that things would turn around a little bit and be a little more positive in response to needs for the fish
Jay: As Mark indicated, this was an incredibly challenging year on the water management standpoint and I think for the Klamath Tribes, we had a strange year, in terms of a shift of revolving alliances. (The Bureau of Reclamation’s) default seems to privilege irrigators beyond everyone else. One of the ways that we’ve seen that play out is — actually we’ve seen it play out pretty aggressively — is in pitting the upper and lower basin environmental and Tribal interests against each other. We ultimately found ourselves in the uncomfortable position this spring and actually joined with Reclamation to defend against a suit that the Yurok Tribe was bringing because of their [Yurok Tribe] desire for high, early-season, flushing flows, and because of how the incoming flow has been dramatically dropping for the upper basin during the middle of the spawning season. This was just existentially important for us (to protect water levels in the upper basin).
Ultimately the judge agreed with the side for which we were advocating. This reduced the amount of water coming out from Upper Klamath Lake for downriver flow. It was not at all comfortable for the Tribes to be opposing the Yurok and instead aligning with Reclamation and irrigation interests. But because of the paramount importance of the fish to the Tribes and because the Tribes continue to go where the science takes them, that’s where we found ourselves this spring.
One of the positives that came out of that, from about May to early August, is they managed early water releases from Upper Klamath Lake for both agriculture and lower river diversions based on a more conservative set of influences as compared to what they had done before. While Upper Klamath Lake ran uncomfortably low this year, they did stay above the scientifically established minimum, and we were very lucky not to see major fish dies.
Unfortunately, we come to mid-August, late August, and the end of the irrigation season, and the Yurok Tribe made a request for flows to Reclamation that are built into the operations plan to support a critically important Tribal ceremony. The Klamath Tribes said, “You know what. We support this as long as they can do it in a way that doesn’t hurt the lake.” Reclamation ultimately in mid-August turned around and said, “Yurok, we can’t do that this year. The flow is too low, and we’re worried about our Endangered Species Act [requirements], and we’re concerned about refill going into 2021. We can’t give you this one.”
The Yurok were ultimately able to get that water from Pacificorps and have that ceremony, which was fortunate. What was most galling to us in that situation is that it’s an indicator to us that Reclamation really hasn’t changed its order of priorities and continues to have this strategy of pitting the Tribes against each other. Literally, two weeks later, after declining to supply this water to the Yurok for their ceremony, they announced that they were increasing the project allocation of roughly the same amount of water that Yurok was asking for from Upper Klamath Lake and gave it to the irrigators instead for the end-of-season operations.
Mark: Sen. Jeff Merkely (Oregon) has been able to secure substantial funding to support our fish rearing program and to backfill some of the water quality and restoration activities that we’re involved with.
Jill: What else didn’t we cover about your work in the basin that you think is really important for folks to understand?
Chairman:
We feel the general community doesn’t have a good understanding of who we are, what we stand for, or what the real problems are with the fisheries. Unfortunately, there is greater a focus on supporting the agriculture community in the media rather than the Tribal fisheries needs. We are taking steps to bring the whole community along to understand our issues, so we’re not characterized as the bad people getting in the way of the agricultural community.
I think people really need to understand where we’re at, and the fact that what we [the larger society] have been doing isn’t sustainable. It’s obvious by the fact that we’re trying to fight to protect fish that have been here for thousands and thousands of years and trying to restore salmon that were once here for thousands and thousands of years. Now we’re facing climate change.
I just hope that the community will come to a better understanding of the complexities of what is affecting the fish- where the real problems lie. It’s not because the Tribes have treaty rights.
Jana: There are a lot of newer people coming in here and it’s been so long since we’ve been able to harvest our tribal crop. They don’t understand the importance of that [practice], not only to the Tribes but to the community as a whole and past history.
Jay: This isn’t just about the Tribes and the Tribes’ rights or some paper exercise or some abstract idea of sovereignty. This species that we’re talking about here, as the Chairman said, is both of critical importance to the Tribes but also, they’re suckers. They are extraordinarily hearty fish, and the fact that we are now talking about the extinction of two such sucker species, the fact that that is not a five-alarm fire for the sustainability of the environment of the entire ecosystem of the basin is mind-boggling to me from the outside.
You can’t go in the Upper Klamath Lake in the summer because it will kill you. And it will kill your dog. There were questions on whether we could continue to water crops with this water or if you’re going to sicken consumers, and so the Tribes end up having to bear the brunt of this [reality], when it is ultimately self-defeating for the entire community because they are functionally poisoning the environment around them.
There is just such a perception gap. There’s this notion that “This is just the tribes and they’re making issues for us. Now if they all went away, we could farm and be happy.” That’s just factually wrong and somehow that is not breaking through to the wider public.
Chairman: I think one of the big disconnects, too, is the fish should be every bit as important to everyone as the economy. Those fish are important to us because they’re a part of our culture, our history, and traditional subsistence economy. We want to harvest them again, and we have a federally affirmed Treaty right that should be employed to make it happen. But many folks say, “The lake is dying and the fish are dying, so big deal. We need agriculture and money and just those things have value.”
The efforts to marginalize the Klamath Tribes and almost demonize us and our concerns about the fish just blow me away. We want to change that thinking and want people to understand how important the fish are. Period. Just because they’re there and they should be there.
[1] A biological opinion is the document that states the opinion of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as to whether or not the federal action is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of listed species under the Endangered Species Act or result in the destruction or adverse modification of critical habitat.
Meyer is grateful to partner with the Klamath Tribes on their work to protect and restore the suckers in Upper Klamath Lake and hope to continue supporting their efforts.
This summer, Meyer Memorial Trust announced its largest initiative to date: $25 million to support Justice Oregon for Black Lives. With this new commitment, we seek to make sweeping changes to the systems that perpetuate racial inequity in Oregon. This isn’t the first time Meyer has rallied behind a single issue — and it won’t be the last. Thanks in part to one of its initiative predecessors, the Willamette River Initiative, we know that long-term investment in a focused area can have a deep and lasting impact.
The Willamette River Initiative launched in 2008 with the goal of achieving a healthier river by better aligning the efforts of the nonprofits, agencies and researchers focused on river health. It sought to build a strong foundation for future river health work. And, starting in 2015, it worked to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the watershed conservation field in the Willamette River Basin.
During the WRI, the pace and scale of habitat restoration increased mightily, new regional partnerships and networks took root, and cohorts of the initiative’s mostly white, mainstream environmental grantees began to embrace the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion — first through immersive learning, then through internal organizational change. At the WRI's biennial conference, Within Our Reach, you could look around the room and feel a sense of community. We suspected these were the inklings of change. Now, more than a decade and $20 million in Meyer grants later, we have the data to back it up. An external evaluation, completed by the Portland-based firm Dialogues In Action, tells us definitively: The WRI made a real and durable impact on our ability to achieve a healthier Willamette River system.
The evaluation also points to a key ingredient that made this impact possible: collaboration.
We’re lucky in Oregon to have the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, a state agency devoted to improving the ecological health of our lands and waters. OWEB was Meyer’s core partner from the start. By joining together public and private funds, we were able to leverage enough support to ramp up restoration in seven major tributaries of the Willamette River and along its main channel. At the time, the field lacked the capacity to take on large-scale, long-term projects in the river’s floodplain, and little restoration had taken place there. But decades of research told us this was an area of high priority if we wanted to make big strides in river health. Meyer’s flexible capacity funding gave organizations the ability to think strategically over the long term and build trust with riverside landowners in the hopes the landowners would partner with organizations to improve habitat on their lands.
Combined with project dollars from OWEB and later from the federal Bonneville Power Administration, Meyer’s funding unlocked close to 30 large-scale projects on the mainstem Willamette River. Many of these projects are in places you can visit today, like Willamette Mission State Park in Keizer and Minto-Brown Island Park in downtown Salem. This is on top of the over 900 landowners working with watershed councils in the tributaries, compared with 83 in 2010 — an exponential increase made possible by Meyer’s partnership with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. The BEF brought its innovative Model Watershed Program to the Willamette. Along with restoration expertise, the BEF supported collaborative efforts across the basin by filling in the gaps that individual organizations had a hard time covering on their own, such as bulk ordering plants and seeking funding. The collective impact of funders, nonprofits, government agencies, scientists and community members working in a coordinated way was integral to the WRI’s success.
Forests take decades to grow back, but we can take comfort in knowing that nature is resilient if given a chance. Even in young forests planted during the WRI, farmers and ecologists alike are seeing a vibrant new buzz of birds and insects, the first signs of a recovering ecosystem. In one site, Wapato Cove, a relentless invasive weed has been greatly decreased and wapato, an important Tribal First Food, has taken off in its place. I’m eager to watch as the ecological successes of the WRI continue to develop in the coming years.
For Meyer, building community is as important as grantmaking. The WRI exemplified this. The initiative set a tone of network-weaving by hosting events like Within Our Reach and serving as a basin-wide “matchmaker” to help seed new projects and partnerships. Organizations met the moment. Across the basin, we’ve seen people step into a deeper level of partnership than ever before. These new collaboratives are here to stay; they have shared staff, formal partnership agreements and, in one case, a new office building that serves as a nonprofit hub. The evaluation tells us that this change in how people are in relationship with each other is likely to endure.
From the start, Meyer hoped to unite people across the basin toward a healthier Willamette. The data say that establishing a common vision for the river is one of the major accomplishments of the WRI — no small feat. And yet, this is only true for those who were part of the WRI. As a mainstream conservation program framed by Western science, the WRI had to reckon with its exclusive whiteness. This meant inviting its grantees into immersive learning, while beginning to build connections with leaders of color, Indigenous leaders and community-based organizations. Some white leaders who weren’t fully ready to dive in at the time are now the most powerful voices among their peers in support of addressing racial equity in the context of river health. It’s still early, but the work has begun to build trust between white leaders and the Indigenous leaders and leaders of color who have long advocated for healthy water, air and land for their communities but have been denied meaningful access to decision-making tables.
How was this culture shift possible in only three years? The data tell us that it was in large part due to the WRI’s culture of community and trust built over time. It was the same recipe that enabled the creation of a new community-driven organization that would live outside Meyer and center diversity, equity and inclusion from the get-go. The new Willamette River Network is poised to expand upon what the WRI started, with the leadership of Indigenous people and people of color at the fore and a vision of people and rivers thriving together.
In 2008, the Willamette mattered to Meyer and it mattered to our partners and grantees. It should matter to all of us now. About 7 out of 10 Oregonians live in the Willamette Valley, most of them within a 20-minute drive of the river. The Willamette is the largest river system that is entirely contained within Oregon's borders. This makes it our river — our gift and our responsibility. The Willamette Valley produces 75 percent of Oregon’s economic output, and our river is its backbone. It provides recreation and tourism; it waters our crops; it gives us drinking water, beer, wine and cider; it washes semiconductors. The river’s salmon have been a cornerstone of the diets and cultures of Willamette Valley Tribes since time immemorial. A healthy river system is an enormous economic and cultural asset. What would it look like to treat it as one?
I believe we’re at a pivotal moment where we can unlock far greater impact for rivers and for people, with equity at the center. But it will take a broader coalition of collaborators, including public and private funders, businesses, and industry.
The WRI has shown us how much our community is capable of when given the right kind of support. The portal is open. Let’s step through it together.
The year 2020 has boggled both hearts and minds. With each new turn of events, the deep-set systems of racism, environmental harm and underinvestment in public health loom larger and more urgent in our country. I admit I’ve wondered: What could the learnings of one foundation’s river health program possibly mean in the context of this moment? But while the Willamette River initiative (WRI) was about the river, it was also about people. And it turns out that what we learned about investing in people — in learning, community-building, collaboration and inclusion — couldn’t be more pertinent than right now. I’m thrilled to share a snapshot of findings and lessons learned from an in-depth evaluation of Meyer’s Willamette River Initiative, an effort to improve the health of “Oregon’s Big River” that invested more than $20 million in grants between 2008 and 2019.
How can we know whether the WRI made the Willamette River healthier? The answer is complicated, but no more complicated than the river system itself. The Willamette is the largest river within Oregon’s borders: It runs through the state’s largest cities. It waters farms. It provides drinking water. It supports many of the state’s iconic wildlife and fish, including endangered salmon. It starts in smaller tributary rivers that flow through pristine forests and logging operations and through dams that minimize flooding but drastically alter its natural rhythms. With every rain, it receives a cocktail of chemicals, toxins and heavy metals from water that passes over fields and streets. This complex set of variables makes it impossible to make a causal link between Meyer’s investment and the river’s health at a given point in time. But what we can measure is the impact the WRI had on the ability of people and organizations to work more effectively on behalf of the river. Meyer invested in strategies that decades of ecological research and on-the-ground practice told us would have the best shot at putting our river on a trajectory of health. And we know that the number of projects meeting that criteria increased about 1,500% over the course of the WRI, a pace and scale never before seen in this river system.
The evaluation also looks at diversity, equity and inclusion.
When the WRI began, we asked: Who is working on watershed restoration in the Willamette Basin and how can we support them to increase the scale and pace of their efforts, be more strategic and be more effective? Like many freshwater conservation efforts across the U.S., the WRI defined “watershed restoration” from a dominant-culture, Western-science mindset. Consequently, the grantees and partners of the initiative were overwhelmingly white.
At the time, we didn’t consider the demographics of those organizations or whose goals and values were represented in their approach to the work. In 2015, as Meyer paused most of its grantmaking and restructured its efforts to better work toward equity in Oregon, the WRI acknowledged its own whiteness and adopted a new goal to advance diversity, equity and inclusion within the movement for a healthier Willamette River system. With only a few years left in the initiative to make progress in this area, we invited the WRI’s core grantees to learn with us and began building relationships with leaders of color, Indigenous leaders and community-based organizations whose work connected with river health.
To measure the WRI’s impact, we worked with a team of evaluators at the Portland-based consulting firm Dialogues In Action. Their participatory approach centered interviewees as co-owners of the story, in much the same way the WRI set out to work with its grantees and partners. With data from nearly 100 interviews and a quantitative survey, the evaluation report is a trove of findings and analysis that get at the impact the WRI had on people and systems, along with lessons about the WRI’s approach and recommendations for the future.
So, what did we learn? Here are some highlights, and for the full picture, you can download the report here.
The pace, scale and strategic nature of river restoration work in the Willamette River Basin has increased. Interviewees reported being able to do more projects, to do them better and to target them in the areas most likely to have a positive impact on habitat and river health. Before the WRI, most restoration efforts were disconnected from each other and done in a more opportunistic way as grant funding became available.
People are seeing their work as part of a larger vision for a healthy river. Whereas individual organizations were working in relative isolation before, the evaluation tells us that the WRI succeeded in fostering a culture of collaboration and a sense that “we’re all in this together.” For a large river system with no basin-wide authority or management plan, this is a notable accomplishment. People have started to see themselves as part of a team with a common vision. Competition is still a factor, of course; funding is finite. But the data show that a collaboration mindset is now part of the DNA of many former WRI grantees. They are asking the question of “How can we do more together than we can apart?” and several regional collaborations have grown from the grass roots up. The evaluation gives us reason to believe that these partnerships — in essence, a knitting together of the social fabric that supports river work — will live beyond the WRI and make the system more resilient to changes and challenges. Read more about collaboration through the WRI in this case study.
WRI grantees are beginning to center diversity, equity and inclusion in their work. By the time the WRI adopted a DEI goal, we were about two-thirds of the way through the initiative. We stayed on course with our original goals: to improve the river’s health, to increase coordination among those working on it and to build a strong foundation for improving river health into the future. Rather than changing course entirely, we kept on with the goals and grantees we’d been working with for nearly seven years but introduced a new conversation. We invited a core set of 15 grantees, a group of white-led, mainstream organizations, to immerse themselves in yearlong learning cohorts with the Center for Diversity and the Environment. All 15 opted in, and most are now engaged in ongoing partnerships and individual work to advance DEI. The civil unrest of this year has underscored the need for white people to step forward into the cause of anti-racism and to stay in it, beyond Instagram posts and reactions in the moment. Although time will tell, the evaluation shows early and promising evidence that this is the start of deeper, transformational change across the field of watershed restoration in the Willamette. A major focus of that change must be a vastly increased investment in leaders of color, Indigenous leaders and community-based organizations whose work connects with river health.
The evaluation gives us much to celebrate, but it also points to challenges that will need attention. Tracking and measuring changes in river health as a result of specific restoration actions is difficult, and this became only clearer through the WRI’s investments in monitoring. Yet, people long for the ability to tell a clear, simple story about the river’s state and restoration’s impact. This is an area of great need and potential, and though the WRI didn’t get as far as people hoped in these areas, the evaluation shares lessons learned that can inform future efforts.
Closely connected to “the what” of the WRI’s impact is “the how.” The data from the evaluation point to a few lessons from the WRI’s strategies that made the biggest difference.
Long-term capacity funding. A core approach of the WRI was to provide multi-year capacity grants. This funding allowed organizations to hire project managers, retain them year after year and give them the flexibility to develop projects in a strategic way. In order to be strategic — to restore high-priority areas that would have the biggest ecological impact — organizations needed funding to build relationships with streamside landowners. In many cases, this meant building trust with people who weren’t necessarily inclined to want to work with them. Some of the highest-impact projects funded by the WRI came after years of relationship building and intensive planning, followed by multiple phases of implementation that, all told, spanned the entire duration of the WRI. Meyer’s 10-year commitment to fund in the Willamette made these projects possible. Read more of the WRI’s approach to funding in this case study.
Grantmaking and network-weaving as companion strategies. The WRI treated funding and convening as equally important to build a community in support of the river, and each strategy informed the other. WRI staff spent significant time in the field getting to know grantees and partners. When challenges came up, there was a deep well of trust to draw from. This allowed people to be more honest about failures, learn from them and adapt. It also helped build a supportive community. The initiative’s Within Our Reach conference was frequently named as one of the most valuable aspects of the WRI: It provided time and space for people to share their work, celebrate successes and really see each other — a “luxury” that hadn’t existed before. Investing in the wholeness of people, not just in their role in achieving the stated outcome of a specific grant, allowed people to feel their worth and come to see themselves as part of a team. That mentality is durable and continues; it marked a culture shift in the field. Read more about Within Our Reach in this case study.
Going far by going together. The WRI built on the idea of a “Team Willamette” on a number of levels. In the tributaries, the WRI supported a cohort of seven watershed councils that worked closely together over 10 years to share strategies and bolster each other through challenges; on the mainstem, a working group of watershed councils, land trusts and others formed a partnership that went on to secure a six-year commitment of $7 million from the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board. The idea of building capacity not just as individual organizations, but as a community, was also essential to the WRI’s approach to diversity, equity and inclusion.
For white-led mainstream groups, this was new territory, and they stepped into it together. The evaluation tells us that this cohort approach — building upon the years of trust and collaboration they had built through the WRI — was pivotal in the shift toward centering DEI in a relatively short period of time. The need for a supportive network also became clear in the WRI’s early efforts to build relationships with leaders of color and Indigenous leaders. Although the WRI had supported peer-to-peer learning among white-led watershed groups for years, this kind of investment was completely lacking for community-based organizations. We saw this imbalance of resources in sharp relief after commissioning an assessment of the field’s capacity for culturally relevant environmental education. The WRI began supporting a cohort of leaders of color and Indigenous leaders, and even with only a year and a half left in the initiative, participants felt a significant impact. Having the ability to come together as peers, learn from one another and work through their experiences of systemic racism gave cohort members a system of support and a new sense of hope. Read more about the cohort approach to DEI in this case study.
As much as the evaluation reflects on the past, it’s also a story that brings us to the present.
In the Willamette Basin, as in our nation right now, moving toward a better future will require reckoning with deep-seated systems of injustice and environmental harm. It will require healing and coming together across differences to think more like a watershed; like a circulatory system; like a community. It won’t be easy, and in some ways 2020 has shown us there’s more work to do than ever. But fortunately in the Willamette Valley, we can confidently say that we have a stronger foundation to build upon than ever before.
The Willamette River is the largest watershed in Oregon’s borders: Our gift and our responsibility. Fortunately, we have a stronger foundation to build on than ever before.
Last month, the Nez Perce Tribe secured a conservation easement for 9.22 acres of land along the Wallowa River, permanently protecting an area on the Tribe's ancestral homeland that is known as Waakak’amkt or “where the braided stream disappears into the water.” This accomplishment will also preserve the Wallowa River’s eastern channel and wetland areas from future development.
The Wallowa County Chieftain documents the historic purchase, made possible by grants from organizations such as The Collins Foundation, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, Meyer Memorial Trust, Oregon Community Foundation and others:
The easement is part of a growing presence of the Nimiipuu (Nez Perce) people in their Wallowa County homeland. That includes the preservation of the Iwetemlaykin State Heritage site, Nez Perce participation in management of the county’s 1,800-acre East Moraine property, the work of the Joseph-based Nez Perce Fisheries in restoring coho salmon, lamprey eels and eventually sockeye to the rivers here, the Homeland Project in Wallowa and the Precious Lands preserve (Hetes’wits Wetes) in the Joseph Canyon area.
'Our efforts will continue to interact with the land,” said Shannon Wheeler, Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee chairman. “That’s where our people are from. … When the Nez Perce people were leaving (in 1877), one of the elders asked people to turn around and look at the land because it might be the last time that they would see it. … So any chance that we get to come back, I see a lot of smiling faces when our people are there, and I think the land smiles when the Nez Perce are there.'
The new conservation easement will preserve the Wallowa River’s eastern channel and wetland areas from future development. Photo by Ellen Morris Bishop/For the Wallowa County Chieftain.
This week the PCEF coalition released an Executive Summary and full in-depth campaign report that details the coalition’s experiences of building trust within communities of color and with white-majority organizations; securing endorsements with unusual allies; and implementing innovative campaign strategies.
Although front-line communities led the initiative’s creation, it took strong relationships with mainstream environmental and labor organizations to create a successful campaign. These bonds will be critical in achieving the city of Portland and Multnomah County’s 2017 commitment to transition all energy sectors to 100% clean energy. It will take the unique knowledge and lived experiences of each group to ensure these funds result in projects in communities most impacted by climate change while ensuring that people of color can fully participate in the emerging green economy.
As grantmakers, we at Meyer are reflecting on what role our funding might have played in the success of this effort. The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) issued a challenge to foundations to target grant dollars to address the needs of underserved communities and empower them by funding advocacy, organizing and civic engagement. Meyer joined NCRP in 2011 and began supporting communities of color in their efforts to build capacity and expand collaborative power to develop their own policy solutions.
What we’ve learned is that our support can’t stop at the policy win. Meyer has funded multiple projects since 2018 so that the coalition can continue playing a key role in the implementation of the ballot measure as it is established by the city of Portland. Without strong participation by the groups that designed the policy concept, the community values and priorities that have driven this effort are at risk of being de-emphasized or lost altogether.
The grants that Meyer has awarded since the PCEF ballot measure passed include:
$143,750 to Verde for the coalition to support early program design work by the nonprofit organizations that led the effort to establish it.
$100,000 to the Coalition of Communities of Color to pay for a dedicated staff position to organize and support partner organizations to continue playing a strong role in supporting the implementation of PCEF.
$27,000 to Resource Media to develop a communications strategy and tools to share the success of PCEF with other organizations working for a healthy environment
The bottom line is that front-line coalition-led efforts require ongoing, long-term support to ensure that the implementation of their initiatives truly leads to stronger, more resilient communities that will experience the worst of our planet’s climate crisis. You can learn more about PCEF’s efforts in my previous interview with Alan Hipólito.
I look forward to following up in another blog as the coalition's efforts prosper.
We will never forget spring 2020. The impact of and response to the novel coronavirus has been simultaneously saddening, enraging and inspiring. We are seeing heart-wrenching losses and immense health and economic fallout. We are being inspired by front-line workers who put themselves at risk to take care of the sick and keep essential services moving. People are adapting, innovating and showing kindness in so many ways. We are also coming together in one of the biggest collective actions ever by physically distancing ourselves from each other in an effort to stem the spread of the virus.
What’s also crystal clear is that although COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is harming all communities, communities of color are the most impacted. A study released last week found that COVID-19 patients exposed to even a moderate increase in air pollution long term are at a greater risk of dying. Black Americans are dying from COVID-19 at higher rates partly because they disproportionately live in places with more air pollution. On Friday, Race Forward, which has a mission to catalyze movement building for racial justice, summed it up: “Let’s be clear: Coronavirus kills, and structural racism is its accomplice.” This is because the systems and structures that drive how our society operates in a pandemic are the same broken systems that drive how it operates in normal days.
At Meyer, we understand this. We know that structural, institutional, historical and systemic racism are components in the context in which we do our work. We also know that the exploitative mindset that underlies structural racism is the same mindset that drives and sustains the overexploitation of nature. Dominance of people and nature is the story of our nation and of Oregon.
Organizers of the Oregon Environmental Justice Pathways Summit postponed the in-person convening until fall 2020. However, the organizers decided to host a virtual summit “teaser” last week by engaging some of the speakers to share a preview of their presentations on what would have been the summit’s opening day. In honor of Earth Day 2020 and to elevate the need to strengthen and grow Oregon’s environmental justice movement, I wanted to share some highlights from the preview.
University of Oregon Professor and Ethnic Studies Department Head Laura Pulido moderated a 90-minute webinar on Oregon’s environmental justice history that included the following speakers.
In the opening presentation by David Harrelson, entitled “The Kalapuya and the Myth of Wilderness,” David spoke about the history of the Kalapuya people’s cultural management of their ancestral territory in the Willamette Valley since time immemorial. He also explained how one of our country’s core conservation laws, the Wilderness Act of 1964, has played a role in building the narrative around the idea of “pristine nature without humans” that is grounded on the removal of Native American people and has informed how conservation has been practiced in the United States.
He reminded us that the cultural practices of the Kalapuya people have shaped their ancestral lands in northwest Oregon for more than 500 generations and that there is no “untrammeled land” — a term from the Wilderness Act — in their traditional territories. This narrative of pristine nature and the practices driven by it have invisibilized the Kalapuya people’s history and created barriers to their ability to practice traditional cultural management of the land today. David noted that he sees the opportunity to learn from, understand and translate ancestral teachings about land management to have a much more holistic and resilient management regime in the future.
Gwendolyn Trice’s presentation “Oregon Timber Culture: Then and Now” opened with the story of Black loggers from Maxville, who were recruited to move to Oregon to work in the timber industry at a time when the Oregon Constitution prohibited Black people from residing in or owning property in the state. Gwendolyn shared how the Black families in Maxville lived in segregated housing, attended segregated schools and played on a segregated baseball team, as well as greatly contributing to creating a vibrant timber community.
She talked about the significant role of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon in the early 1900s, describing it as the the biggest social club in the state that played a key role in connecting the dominant culture at the time. It also played a prominent role in Oregon politics. Gwendolyn also talked about Vernonia, another small timber community, as a place where different racial and ethnic groups lived and worked in segregated and substandard conditions until the NAACP stepped in to advocate for improvements. Beatrice Morrow Cannady, who was the first Black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, was a key leader in this movement.
Ramon Ramirez grounded his presentation about Oregon farmworkers in the history of the agriculture movement in the U.S., which is rooted in exploitation that began with slavery and shifted to the sharecropping system and now excludes farmworkers from national labor laws, which were first passed in the 1930s.
Ramon shared that 70% of the farmworkers who work for piece rate in the Willamette Valley are members of undocumented and Indigenous communities. Their exclusion from labor law protections, poor living conditions and legal, but dangerous, industrial agricultural practices expose them to significant health risks. Ramon shared startling information gathered from a Marion County clinic that over half of the farmworker women they serve have had miscarriages. He also shared that the average life expectancy of a farmworker is 49 as compared with 78 in the U.S. and that 25% of farmworkers get cancer.
He ended his comments by highlighting the brutal reality that even though farmworkers are deemed “essential workers” during the coronavirus crisis, most of these workers will not be able to access benefits from the recently passed CARES Act because of their citizenship status.
Linda Tamura shared how Japanese immigrants came to Oregon and how racism impacted the Japanese community for generations in the state. Japanese workers were drawn west to work on the railroads’ expansion. In the early 1900s, a strong community of Japanese immigrants grew in Hood River and gained property in exchange for clearing land for white property owners. They grew strawberries and asparagus, while establishing apple orchards.
Linda recounted how after a number of attempts, Oregon passed an Anti-Alien Land Law to prevent Japanese immigrants from purchasing land in 1923, which Japanese families were able to subvert by buying land in their children’s names. In 1942, the U.S. passed Executive Order 9066, which led to the forced removal of the Japanese community from Hood River and imprisonment in concentration camps during World War II. Many Japanese families had to abandon their businesses and personal possessions during this period. Some lost their land. After the war, parts of the Hood River community did not welcome the Japanese community’s return and tried to prevent families from returning to land they already owned.
The remarks and reflections of the speakers threaded together pieces of the history of structural racism in Oregon and its intersection with our relationship with nature today. There’s much more to unpack from this history. Understanding our shared history is an important part in addressing environmental justice issues and ensuring that all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity or expression, income, or citizenship status are able to access a clean and healthy environment where they live, work and play.
I encourage you all to tune into the full 90-minute presentation and join me in the fall at the Oregon Environmental Justice Pathways Summit.
Meyer is supporting the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians’ (ATNI) work with its member Tribes and Tribal communities to engage in important regional and statewide water policy discussions focused on quantity, quality, access, rights and cultural understanding. To encourage a broad conversation among the nine federally recognized Tribes of Oregon, ATNI hosted their first Water Summit in 2016. ATNI also connected with mainstream conservation organizations, such as Oregon Environmental Council (OEC), to find alignment around inter-Tribal water policy priorities.
To continue these dialogues and ensure Tribal perspectives inform mainstream initiatives, such as Gov. Kate Brown’s 100 Year Water Vision, ATNI and OEC partnered to create Changing Currents, a website that uses storytelling to explore how water relates to Tribal culture, governance, economic infrastructure and community health and wellness.
If you haven’t already started listening to the rich stories they’ve gathered, we recommend beginning with Shirod Younker’s exploration of the Coquille Indian Tribe’s canoe customs and the inter-Tribal healing that a single canoe can provide.
It seems like not a day goes by without new information emerging about the state of our changing planet.
Reports and data, such as the evidence presented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), continually show how increases in pollution and carbon emissions are warming our climate, causing sea level rise and affecting the earth’s water supply. Although the science is sound, arguments over climate change divide our nation and fracture relationships in the communities that call this state home.
As we look toward a flourishing and equitable future for Oregon, we’ve begun to ask ourselves who is by our side and who is missing? Where both trust and relationships are most strong? And recently, how have or haven’t we addressed mistrust?
At Meyer we use the phrase “centering front-line communities,” which is a blanket term to refer to neighborhoods that are most vulnerable to the detrimental effects of climate change because they lack things like shade, air conditioning, access to parks, nature and clean air.
In reality, these words have much more meaning.
Last summer, Momentum Fellow Denise Luk sat down with Alan Hipólito, who represents Verde — a nonprofit organization that works to secure social and economic benefits for low-income people and people of color through social enterprise, outreach and advocacy — to discuss the creation and passage of the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF) and why front-line community leadership was key to building the relationships needed for success.
Below is an abridged transcript of their conversation edited for clarity.
Denise: Who developed the Portland Clean Energy Fund? Where did the idea come from?
Alan Hipólito: It started with a conversation between Jo Ann Hardesty, a civil rights, social justice advocate who was then the director of the Portland NAACP (and is a now Portland City Commissioner) and Brent Foster, an attorney and environmental advocate.
In the summer of 2016, front-line communities were already doing a lot of work together on climate policy issues, whether that was Oregon’s cap and invest proposal, The city of Portland and Multnomah County’s 100 percent renewables, or just building capacity within front-line communities around climate change issues, for example the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), Verde and the Coalition of Communities of Color (CCC). The NAACP reached out to say, “Hey, do you want to come and sit and talk with us and a couple of environmental organizations, mostly 350PDX, to talk about this idea (the Portland Clean Energy Fund)?”
Denise: How did this group expand?
Alan Hipólito: Jo Ann and Lenny Dee from 350PDX, a longtime Portland activist and organizer, were out talking to different organizations, environmental, small business, social justice, environmental justice and the trade unions about the concept of PCEF, seeking endorsement or a willingness to work on the campaign. Simultaneously, those of us at Verde, APANO, NAYA and the Coalition of Communities of Color began doing our own outreach into the front-line communities.
That whole year, summer 2016 to summer 2017, was really about building relationships and trust across the core organizations — NAACP, Verde, APANO, CCC, 350PDX, Sierra Club — so that we could ultimately build a kind of collaboration and relationship that was necessary to be successful.
A key watershed moment was in the summer of 2017. We had a two-day planning retreat for the front-line community organizations, where we learned about ballot measures and what it would take to run a campaign. We set some common values about how we wanted to work together and most importantly the agreement that front-line communities were going to lead the effort. After that, things started to really pick up speed.
Denise: At what point did more mainstream environmental groups get involved?
Alan Hipólito: Portland Audubon’s entry into the coalition was really important. They’re a well-respected, long-standing environmental stakeholder, have a strong membership base and influence with local policy makers and other environmental organizations.
When they came to our meeting, they said, “We want to be involved: first, because we like the initiative; and second, (and even more importantly), we want to support the movement that you’re building.” They’ve been in many campaigns where it’s solely about getting 50.1% of the vote and therefore don’t include front-line communities. They saw PCEF as a chance to change the status quo of campaigns. “Win or lose, we want to help grow a more inclusive, front-line community-centered environmental movement.” While they wanted to contribute their experience to the decision-making and bring our resources to the table, they did not need to be in charge. “We’re ready to support the leadership of front-line communities in this campaign.”
That was a really big moment.
Denise: Since this effort, have there been other types of environmental ballot initiatives led by front-line communities — in partnership with mainstream environmental groups — in other places?
Alan Hipólito: Obviously, front-line communities lead all sorts of things, all over the country, including environmental measures. But this was the first of its kind in Oregon in terms of the partnership that was formed by front-line community-led leadership and then bigger mainstream groups signing on. That was a rare thing and hopefully changing.
Denise: What was the power dynamic like within the steering committee and then within the smaller subsets of PCEF? How was the decision-making process?
Alan Hipólito: It was pretty harmonious. There were obviously points of tension and stress because none of us had ever really worked on or run a campaign like this before.
We maintain a distributed leadership structure. We didn’t have, unlike some campaigns, a bunch of paid core staff. Our field team was paid, but our campaign manager, communications colleagues, fundraiser and the point person for our political endorsements committee were all volunteers or staffed and funded by partner organizations. It didn’t make sense to have a rigorous, centralized, decision-making model. It meant that we had to free folks up to be creative and use their best judgment in the day-to-day work they were accomplishing.
Denise: What were the key takeaways from this coalition and how the partnership worked?
Alan Hipólito: A lot of folks would say there would be no way to build and hold this kind of coalition together unless it was front-line community-led. Progressive efforts that bring mainstream environmental groups together with construction, labor and trade unions don’t often happen. However, everyone understood the need to center this kind of community leadership if any kind of progressive change was going to happen.
This kind of broad coalition building can win elections, especially when it comes to addressing the more traditional arguments against such initiatives. To arguments like, “This is going to kill jobs” or “This isn’t really an environmental solution” or “How is this going to affect poor people?”
The answer simply is: Environmental organizations have been putting in a lot of work and investment to build their understanding of equity and what it means to operate from a justice framework. Audubon’s posture in coming to the initiative was a testament to the growth and diversity, equity and inclusion work that they’re doing. The trades are the same way. They know where future workers will be coming from, that things haven’t been fair and just in the past or even today. They saw that a front-line community can put together an initiative that will make a difference in the things they care about.
Another takeaway is that I would certainly want to provide to the next group that tries this sort of coalition building is to not have to nickel-and-dime-it the way that we did. That was really hard to manage from a budget standpoint. At the same time, not being well-resourced required creative energy and distributed leadership. Without having a heavily centralized staff, organizations ended up putting in their own staff time. This is critical to the success of the movement we are building. However, those organizations need to be funded, too.
Denise: What’s it been like after the measure passed and is now in place? I understand the coalition is still working together.
Alan Hipólito: That’s correct. The PCEF coalition’s work did not end on election day, it shifted from winning an election to successfully and faithfully implementing the initiative. To do that, we’ve used the same front-line community-centered practice that we’ve talked about. This has allowed us to work in strong partnership with the city of Portland on key implementation issues like staffing the program, seating the PCEF grant committee, launching communications platforms and outreach efforts as well as building front-line community capacity to develop strong applications to the PCEF grant program
So I think we can feel good about all the work that we’ve done since election day, feel good about the collaboration that we built with the city bureaus and the elected leadership … and moving forward we need to make sure that the coalition has the resources needed to not just implement this victory but to solidify the power and endurance of the coalition. Organizational-level infrastructure such as internal communications will allow us to not only defend the win, but to also figure out how to move forward and build on this initiative.
And there’s still the need to fund the nuts and bolts of the work among the many organizations who developed and led the initiative, especially the front-line community-serving organizations. One of the things that we’ve learned the hard way is that the opposition doesn’t run out of money. They see this initiative, and any future initiatives, as a threat to their control over resources and political power. They are going to keep coming after us, trying to weaken or overturn PCEF at the city and state levels. The big challenge is to have the strength and resources as a coalition to counteract that consistency.
Denise: Do you feel that sense of power-building and power-sharing is still part of the implementation piece?
Alan Hipólito: Absolutely. This coalition, if it’s viable and enduring in the way that we want it to be, will inevitably decide or be asked to get involved in other things. How are those decisions going to be made? Who makes them? On what criteria, if any, are they made? How do new groups come to the table? All of these questions are where the extension of power sharing and practice of front-line community leadership is going to grow.
The story of the PCEF coalition demonstrates the unique position of front-line communities in the environmental justice movement and illustrates the way lived experiences of the communities most impacted offer solutions and innovative strategies — across interests — that transform campaigns and accomplish wins. In this way, front-line communities are transforming the environmental movement and allowing more people to see it as relevant to their lives.
Mainstream conservation organizations are important partners in this work. With established credibility and influence with local officials and the broader community, their endorsement can activate many and shift perspectives. As new approaches to climate justice emerge from the front line, it will be important for mainstream groups to explore new and innovative ways to contribute their resources, time and established reputation.
This doesn’t always mean taking a visible lead, but instead backing the proposals of those whose voices are new to the movement and allowing for new possibilities in our shared future in the face of climate change.
