Roth: Health, environmental grants available

Need extra dollars to help with your local health or environmental program?  The Environmental Protection Agency Region 6 office in Dallas recently announced that it is accepting grant applications for $100,000 in funding to support projects designed to educate and enable communities to understand and address local health and environmental issues. Region 6 includes Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas.

The $100,000 will be divided into four grants of $25,000 each through the Environmental Justice Small Grants program. An additional $200,000 in $50,000 increments will be made available nationally to gather scientific data on the environmental and health impacts of exposure to any number of pollution sources in communities.

The program is a multistate effort to provide funding to eligible applicants for projects that address environmental and public health issues within a particular community. Its purpose is to raise community awareness and to create actions to correct or prevent environmental and health harms and risks.

The EPA will look for two types of activities when granting these rewards:

• Activities designed to educate, empower and enable communities to understand and to identify ways to address the environmental and public health issues at the local level.

• Research activities related to Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act. This law created a tax on the chemical and petroleum industries and provided broad federal authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment.

Environmental justice issues often involve multiple sources of contamination. It could be pollution produced from several industrial facilities within one neighborhood. It could include environmental hazards at the workplace or in homes. It could be the result of contamination from the consumption of fish or other subsistence foods.

The subsidies will support activities of a research nature that examine issues related to a community’s exposure to environmental harms and risks, i.e., survey, research, collecting and analyzing data that will be used to expand scientific knowledge or understanding of the subject studied. Research projects, however, need not be limited to academic studies, so any community-based effort is encouraged.

The EPA has interpreted “research” to include studies that extend to socioeconomic, institutional and public policy issues, as well as the “natural” sciences. The application must include a description of how the research projects will examine and address the issue of multiple environmental harms and risks.

Environmental justice is a phrase meaning the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people in the environmental decision-making process.

Eligible applicants are welcome from all levels of income, nonprofit, faith-based groups and tribal organizations. Others working in the community of the proposed project are also encouraged to apply.

The long-term goals of the EJSG program are to help build the capacity of the communities to address environmental justice concerns and create self-sustaining, community-based partnerships that will continue to improve local environments in the future.

A successful application will identify the local environmental and public risk in the proposal. Applicants must be able to demonstrate that they have worked directly with a vulnerable community that is disproportionately impacted by environmental harms and risks.

Applications must be postmarked by March 31, so if interested please begin immediately.

For detailed information, visit www.epa.gov and search for “Environmental Justice Small Grants program.” If you have further questions, call Dave Bary or Joe Hubbard at (214) 665-2200 or e-mail r6press@epa.gov.

Good luck! 

Jim Roth, a former Oklahoma corporation commissioner, is an attorney with Phillips Murrah P.C. in Oklahoma City, where his practice focuses on clean, green energy for Oklahoma.