The West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project is a resident led, community-based environmental justice organization dedicated to achieving healthy homes, healthy jobs and healthy neighborhoods for all who live, work, learn and play in West Oakland, California.
Our mission is to build grassroots capacity to provide local leadership for positive change. Our work aids residents in understanding the political, social, and natural forces that impact their lives. We give impacted residents the tools to participate in these processes and to drive change from the bottom.
Environmental justice through community resilience
WOEIP has been centering the voices of impacted residents for more than two decades: people experiencing the negative impacts of local industrialization that stem from decades of redlining and discriminatory policy and enforcement. These are the people living on toxic soil, with polluting businesses for neighbors and diesel trucks rumbling past their windows. Everyone talks about community empowerment, but what does this really mean? It means that business and real estate developers shouldn’t be the loudest voice at the table when land use planning is on the civic agenda. Local residents, whose lives will be enhanced or degraded by land use decisions, deserve not only to inform but to drive local redevelopment decisions. WOEIP helps them do just that.
WOEIP in the news
West Oakland metal recycling fire sparks innovative environmental program
Oakland tries to make dent in abandoned car problem
Battery-powered big rigs could haul the future of trucking
We believe in:
- Self-determination
- Self examination and evaluation
- Radical confidence
- Struggle is healthy
- Unity without uniformity
- Trust in the process
- Resident-based power through knowledge and political engagement
- Personal and organizational integrity
- Respect for the individual and the individual experience
- Courage to speak truth to power
- Loyalty to allies and an understanding of self-interest
- Leadership by affected persons