A three pronged collaborative approach to improving health in an environmental justice community

Seattle's Duwamish Valley (DV), which flanks the highly polluted Duwamish River, is home to 80% of Seattle's industrial lands, and the city's oldest, poorest, and most ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Residents are exposed to high levels of pollution in the form of contaminated soils; the Lower Duwamish River Superfund Site; and air releases from dozens of industrial facilities, port shipping and trucking, and three regional highways that span the valley. Health disparities include significant differences in life expectancy, lung cancer, homicide, hospitalization rates for asthma and assault, low birth weight babies, and more. Three complementary projects are addressing Environmental Justice (EJ) issues in the DV, to assist communities in improving their own health: 1. Duwamish Valley Healthy Communities Project (EPA CARE grant), to help identify, prioritize, and develop action plans to address community health threats; 2. Duwamish Valley Cumulative Health Impacts Analysis (EPA EJ grant) to document the combined risks from public health and environmental stressors in the DV; and 3. Duwamish River Superfund Health Impact Assessment (Pew Charitable Trusts and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant) to conduct a health assessment of EPA's proposed Superfund Site cleanup plan. Two non-profits (Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition/Technical Advisory Group and Just Health Action) and the University of Washington School of Public Health are the grantees. In this presentation, we describe: the projects; synergistic benefits of using complementary approaches; the grantee and community collaboration efforts; successes and challenges of the collaborative process; and recommendations to organizations interested in similar efforts.