new member intro!

[Rose Frady]

Hello, justice40! My name is Caroline (not Rose; pronouns: she/her/hers)! I wanted to take a moment to briefly introduce myself.

I am a community organizer with a climate-activism nonprofit in Charleston, South Carolina, Charleston Climate Coalition. I got introduced to this group from the mapping for EJ Berkeley folks. 

Right now, I am working with Charleston Climate Coalition to develop an Environmental Justice Profile tool of our own. Through several years of research and review, we have identified 29 dimensions covering various environmental and social harms. The goal is to create a tool that communities can use themselves to assess these harms in order to then advocate for resources. Ideally, this would also be used by policymakers and local, or even state/federal municipalities. So very similar to the map that justice40 is currently working on. The "map" part is part of our goal but secondary to the assessment piece itself.

Because these projects seem so similar, I would love to collaborate in whatever ways that we can. We are currently being challenged on the data front as we have discovered that pre-existing maps like this, such as the EPA's EJ screen, largely rely on census data. As you all are aware, ground-truthing needs more than census data! 

Our current needs are data sources and for sources that don't exist, figuring out the "best practices" in order to collect data. I know that is quite broad, so please respond if interested, and I would be thrilled to talk more.

Thank you for your time in reading this, and I will see you at the next third Monday!

Best,

Caroline Frady