Fourth World People's University: Environmental and Social Justice for All

The fall 2020 Fourth World People’s University (FWPU) sessions in New York City aimed to explore more deeply, from a local perspective, the theme of the United Nations International Day for The Eradication of Poverty (IDEP). The IDEP theme for October 17, 2020, was: ACHIEVING ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR ALL.

FWPU participants continued to meet virtually to stay safe and healthy during the pandemic. ATD Fourth World members met three times on Zoom to formulate mock proposals about their concerns for a healthy environment and social justice for all, especially for communities where poverty and exclusion prevail. The FWPU preparation team encouraged members to think about who would hear their proposals. This was the first FWPU meeting without invited guests. Instead, members had to plan and write proposals for an outsider to read.

The fall 2020 FWPU sessions launched a new format — building mock proposals. The exercises for workshops were designed for small groups to brainstorm and write mock proposals to elected officials and their community leaders. To start the proposal-making process, members worked by Zoom using Jamboard. In each session, members identified what environmental justice means, then discussed the problems and solutions by focusing on the environmental situations that people living in poverty face every day. The details of the sessions are in the appendix.

In the last session, the groups took the results of the brainstorming and, with three guiding questions, wrote three paragraphs outlining what the problem is, why it is important, and what the addressees can do to help solve it. Each group formed draft messages to be shared with community groups, city agencies, elected officials, and one another. Each group came up with different proposals.

You are invited to share your comments with nycteam@4thworldmovement.org

Group 1 mock proposal letter

To: Our fellow citizens

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?  Achieving Environmental and Social Justice for All

With questions still looming about climate change, unequal access to healthy food, clean air, natural community parks, public gathering spaces, and access to technology, we need to speak up to make sure everyone's voices are heard. This includes the voices of people at risk of not participating because of poverty, overwork, or lack of time. The problems at the forefront include:

  • Legislators not being accountable to all citizens;

  • Legislators not being close enough to citizens and organizations and the problems and realities they are facing;

  • Legislators not being aware of all the problems. It’s up to use to make them aware;

  • Legislators having discussions only among themselves and not participating in dialogues with the people they are supposed to serve;

  • Legislators not taking concrete actions and not keeping us informed of what actions are taken.

WHY IS THE PROBLEM IMPORTANT TO US?

Dear fellow citizens,

For us, it is important to hold legislators accountable because they have power and they can make the necessary changes. They can also convene and influence other people who have power. Legislators are in charge of administering public money from our taxes, so they can use this money to solve the problems we care about.

SOLUTIONS AND HOW THE PERSON/INSTITUTION YOU ARE ADDRESSING CAN HELP

Here’s what you can do to help:

  • Urge the legislators you know to take action, especially to repair, clean, and update the system, and regularly check if the situation is decent or needs to be fixed. Examples: trash collection in certain neighborhoods is neglected, neighborhoods are not included in zoning decisions, etc.

  • Be very specific with your legislators about the changes you want to see. 

  • Request regular (monthly or weekly) meetings with legislators.

  • Create spaces for people with different perspectives to share in your community; invite legislators to participate in the debate and listen to your testimonies; enhance productive dialogues.

  • Encourage legislators to volunteer with organizations you know that are taking action and to attend their meetings. 

  • Ask your representative legislators to open safe spaces to have these conversations and take the initiative to create dialogue.

  • Invite people with diverse backgrounds and experience to weekly meetings about the concerns you have and prepare to take part in the decision-making process.

  • Ask legislators to simplify the way people can get in touch with/connect with/reach them.

  • Improve access to new technologies for everyone, and ask this question in the dialogue with legislators: How can everyone participate or receive communications if they don’t have access?

This is an urgent message from your neighbors to make your voices heard. We must work together to solve problems. We all have something to bring to the table. We suggest the participation of all stakeholders equally and need your participation to be sure of including our elected representatives and making them aware of what we need and want in order to achieve environmental and social justice for all.

Sincerely,

Fourth World People’s University — Group 1

Group 2 mock proposal draft

Group 2: Write a letter to the mayor and copy the Department of Transportation, the Department of Health, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the Department of Housing, etc. (ascertain what the city is already doing and revise our letter from that)

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The areas that are populated by people in poverty are the most polluted areas. For example:

  • In Williamsburg, the city built an incinerator in the 1970s and people in the neighborhood became sick.

  • In Harlem and the South Bronx, there is a lot of traffic.

  • In some neighborhoods, there’s no access to healthy food. 

  • Homeless people live in those areas. 

Where low-income housing buildings are situated, traffic is very heavy. The air quality is not good, and there’s noise pollution. It affects the mind, it's difficult for children to focus, and hard for elderly people who stay home all day. 

Most of the city’s waste is now handled by private carters or exported under contract with the city. Waste-transfer stations are still concentrated in poor neighborhoods with large populations of African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans who have high levels of asthma and respiratory disease, conditions that are exacerbated by the increased truck traffic, odors, noise, and vermin.

Residents inhale the emissions of the hundreds of daily trucks going in and out of the nearby Fresh Direct warehouse, and exhaust emitted by constant traffic on the four nearby highways, as well as from the printing presses of the Wall Street Journal, a parcel depot and sewage works not far away.

They need asthma hospitalizations at five times the national average and at rates 21 times higher than other NYC neighborhoods.

WHY IS THE PROBLEM IMPORTANT TO US? 

Share numbers of the impact of pollution. The human impact of environmental issues and social issues is real. We know many people who are directly affected by pollution and who live in disadvantaged areas. 

We propose a partnership with the Little Sisters of Assumption — and see Ray Lopez's contribution at the New School in March 2019.

Health Department estimates show that each year, pollution in New York City causes more than 3,000 deaths, 2,000 hospital admissions for lung and heart conditions, and approximately 6,000 emergency department visits for asthma in children and adults.

SOLUTIONS AND HOW THE PERSON/INSTITUTION YOU ARE ADDRESSING CAN HELP

  • Low income housing should be placed in better neighborhoods with less pollution. 

  • The city should limit the number of trucks that come every day to unload supplies. 

  • Take a look at rerouting the flow of traffic. 

  • Authorities can ask companies to use trucks that use better energy, like electric energy. That would reduce noise and improve air quality.

  • Use more local products, grown in the city. In the Netherlands, a very small country but the second world provider of food, they developed interesting techniques. In the Bronx, there are initiatives of growing food in school, in a vertical way. Promote community gardens and vertical gardens. More green spaces would provide better air quality. It's a community-based solution to pollution and to poverty. 

  • Homeless people should be prioritized for access to fresh produce. 

  • Have noise reduction signs in the street; for example, “Do not honk.” 

  • Educate the people and also law enforcement. 

  • Change the windows of older buildings. 

  • To provide better lightning, efficient energy should be used, like solar panels. 

Ask the mayor to create a task force on environmental and social justice that will coordinate the work of all the departments above. Include people living in poverty in designing and evaluating the OneNYC Plan.

Group 3 mock proposal draft

Group 3 audience: NYC public agencies, Department of Homeless Services, public food pantries 

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

Living in poverty creates injustices in terms of access to food that is healthy, of high quality, and environmentally friendly. 

  • Living in a disadvantaged neighborhood is sometimes defined as living in a ‘’food desert,’’ as very few options are available to buy fresh, quality food. 

  • Government policies and interventions sometimes reinforce this inequality in accessing quality food. In public housing, tenants sometimes have access to only the cheapest appliances, which don't help you to cook as things break very easily. Even the basic right to heat, hot water, and gas are not granted.

  • More education and awareness are needed about which food to eat, in a way that protects people and the planet.

WHY IS THE PROBLEM IMPORTANT TO US?

Having access to quality food improves people's overall health, as well as their physical and mental capacity and stability. 

Environmentally friendly food is generally understood as food that is locally grown, organic, with fewer pesticides, and delivered in bulk (less plastic). But today, only a minority of households are able to afford this environmentally friendly food, which tends to be more expensive. Families living in poverty are not able to access organic and fresh produce. As ATD Fourth World activists said: “We want to eat well but we cannot always get fresh food with food stamps and we don't have access to good food in the groceries in our neighborhoods.” 

Food stamps delivered by public authorities are restrictive in the food that users can buy. For example, food stamps don’t allow individuals to buy hot food, even in the winter.

In food pantries, very few fresh vegetables are distributed. In most places, the system is usually organized on a first-come, first-served basis, so not everyone can receive these healthy foods. The rest is usually canned, processed food. The system relies on donations, so not everyone receives the same food. 

SOLUTIONS AND HOW THE PERSON/INSTITUTION YOU ARE ADDRESSING CAN HELP

To ensure that everyone has access to quality food and fresh food, the following should be considered: 

  • To combat the food desert problem, encourage local stores to open in disadvantaged neighborhoods, with affordable healthy food. 

  • Encourage supermarkets and farmers’ markets that have leftovers to share it in the food desert areas. 

  • In food pantries, advocate for more frequent days of operation and more variety in the food distributed. People should have a choice of what food they are receiving.

  • More nutritious food should be distributed in schools, otherwise issues such as diabetes and heart disease can arise if unhealthy food is served to children.

  • Ensure that public housing units are equipped with functioning appliances so that residents can cook at home. 

Promoting knowledge and access to environmentally friendly food would entail: 

  • Having a bulk section in every grocery store.

  • Encouraging awareness-raising activities and communication campaigns in schools and supermarkets. (For example: Information posters on recycling, natural home cleaning remedies, and protein alternatives to meat.) 

  • Promoting a solid, in-person education for all children and young people. 

Appendix

The preparation process for people’s university sessions opens with brainstorming meetings to bring to the table all ideas around the theme.  Here’s an excerpt from the first workshop from fall 2020. The mock proposals above were developed from two such brainstorming sessions, which had guiding questions and used Jamboard to capture each individual’s thoughts.  

Guiding question: “What does social and environmental justice mean to us?” 

Summary of the brainstorming  

FWPU first preparation meeting — October, 30, 2020 

Group 1:   

  • Natural resources for all, with equal quality (non-polluted) and distribution;

  • Relationship with nature in all its aspects: peers, family, institutions, environment;

  • Important for the future, a better future for all; 

  • Social and environmental justice can’t be separated or that creates more inequalities; 

  • Earth can’t be separated from human beings. We Are All One With Earth; 

  • Respect Earth/nature and build a fair relationship with it, to preserve our health in all aspects (physical, mental); 

  • A better environment to raise children in better conditions; 

  • Equal access to education/environmental education/education into family. For example, how to protect resources and nature, how to use other resources, recycling, stop using plastic. Education is essential. 

Group 2: 

  • Climate change and related catastrophes always impact the poorest people. Nature and poverty are both mistreated. No money or means to keep nature clean and protect it. People living in poverty live in places the most impacted by pollution. 

  • It should be given priority rather than giving priority to the economy. 

  • Pessimism and worries about the future of children, about the kind of world they will live in. 

  • Today’s economy doesn’t make sense. It is contrived to make you consume, throw away, and buy repeatedly. 

  • Include people who have the most difficult lives in the process of designing a new way of building society, otherwise what will be decided and implemented will go against them. 

  • Community actions to involve neighbors and young people in their neighborhoods. For example, promote community clean up days as a means of gathering people and fighting violence. 

  • Skills, knowledge of our ancestors: what did we learn from them? 

  • Education, teaching recycling, clean up should become a normal thing to do. 

  • Wearing masks every day to be protected from pollution, not only during the pandemic.

  • Changes in our lifestyle, the way we consume, our behavior: compost, use tote bags instead of plastic bags, stop/reduce eating meat and fish, clean, not litter, reuse, fix, buy second hand items, use thrift stores, do not use a car as much, save water, buy at local farms, rescue fruits and vegetables programs. 

Group 3: 

  • It is through our bodies that we connect to nature and the environment. Our body is valuable. Having to do working-class jobs, manual labor — oppression of that experience doesn’t allow us to enjoy nature. 

  • People living in poverty live in the most polluted and toxic areas: African-American communities in the US, in Europe too. Environmental and social injustices go back to the industrialization period and still occur. 

  • Climate change is bringing more inequalities. All around the world, the poorest people work in poor conditions to extract resources for the richest. In the meantime, their work leads to pollute their country always more. 

  • Equal access to nature: dirty, poor neighborhoods without parks vs. clean, rich neighborhoods with parks and beaches. Facilitate the use of bikes. 

  • Destroying of nature, forests, and villages, lives, animals. A lot of species disappeared. North Pole melting. Rivers are drying. This leads to forced migrations. 

  • Inequality about food: junk food for the poorest, even picking from garbage, vs. healthy food for the richest. Especially in the cities, where the poorest people don’t have any choice. 

  • Decrease use of fossil resources.  

  • Stop the wars and take care of each other. 

  • Ecological lifestyle is more expensive, not accessible to all. For example, vegetarian, organic food.  Sustainable items vs. plastic items. Also, it means education and awareness. 

  • Sharing vs. wasting (food, clothes, etc.), self-help. Community gardens, housing associations are ways to connect. 

  • People living in poverty, as they consume less, pollute much less than the wealthy (plane, cars, etc.). Their carbon footprint is lower, but they are the first victims of climate change.

New York