Community Outreach: Programs
The Trade, Health and Environment Impact Project
www.TheImpactProject.org
THE (Trade, Health, Environment) Impact Project is a community-academic collaboration working to find healthy solutions to the harmful impacts of “goods movement”—the transportation of goods from manufacturing to their final destination. THE Impact Project benefits from the research literacy of four environmental justice and public health organizations and the community-based focus of two academic institutes. The collaborative uses science-based information to inform public policy decision-making on ways to reduce air pollution from ports, rail yards, intermodal facilities, distribution centers, trucking routes and other goods movement expansion activities. One of THE Impact Project’s goals is to ensure that reducing health, environmental and community impacts becomes central to the transportation and goods movement planning and policy process. THE Impact Project also seeks to shift the nature of the debate about ports and freight movement to elevate community voices in the policy arena, while also using the science and policy work of the academic partners to strengthen those voices.
A-Teams
With our community partners, the COEC has developed a successful training program for community members to assess environmental conditions in their neighborhoods. The teams developed protocols with the COEC for counting traffic on busy residential streets and taking air pollution measurements in selected locations, using portable ultrafine particle-counting devices. A-Team members have used their data in effective presentations before policymakers and are familiar with the community health issues and scientific research findings.
For more information, visit http://hydra.usc.edu/cehc/