Oral

Communities across the nation suffer from environmentally driven health problems. The Environmental Protection Agency has been tasked with reducing both the source of environmental contaminants and exposure. In 1994, Executive Order12898 focused the Agency on directly addressing environmental justice issues. EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice is working to address this problem through a series of community trainings, grant programs and a new place based initiative designed to benefit disproportionately affected communities. Some examples of financial tools provided by OEJ are the EJ Small Grants and the Collaborative Problem Solving grants. These grant programs provide financial support to communities with environmental justice concerns and seek to produce tangible environmental and health benefits. More recently, the Agency created an innovative grant program bridging all of the “stove-pipes” and assisting communities to determine for themselves what environmental problems are present and important. This is the CARE Program (Community Action for a Renewed Environment). CARE empowers a community to work to address environmental challenges. Thus far, CARE has funded more than 68 environmental justice communities to engage in this process. Each year 10-15 new communities are so empowered. The purpose of this session is to explore all of the tools employed by EPA to build the capacity in underserved communities to enable them to identify and solve their environmental problems. You will learn how citizens in disadvantaged communities around the nation have been trained, formed local partnerships, conducted research, and implemented solutions to reduce neighborhood pollution, and how this model can work in your community.

Session Objectives: 1. Explain how EPA’s grant and training programs increase a community’s ability to solve problems. 2.Assess models of how communities with environmental justice concerns use community-based research to address environmental health issues. 3. Define how U.S. communities are creating and conducting their own research approaches to solve neighborhood environmental health problems, while implementing sustainable solutions.

CE Credits: Medical (CME), Health Education (CHES), Nursing (CNE), Public Health (CPH)