Healthy Environments

How can my giving enhance the natural environment of low-income neighborhoods and communities?

Whether rural or metropolitan, the quality of the natural environment plays a significant role in any community’s well-being as well as its ability to attract new residents, visitors and businesses. 

Air and water quality, preservation of open space and natural resource management are issues that challenge all communities.  Unfortunately, because they lack political and financial clout, low-income neighborhoods and communities are often feel they must choose between growing their economies and sustaining a healthy environment. 

What is the Environment?

Environmental giving has always worked to protect nature and biological diversity:  preserving land, landscapes, and wildlife habitat; conserving natural resources; protecting our lakes, rivers, and air. 

Today the “environment” has come to mean not just the outdoors, but the “built environment.”  This refers to the indoor space that we live and work and play in, including houses and apartments, community centers, hospitals and clinics, churches, day care centers, and schools.

Improving the health of the “built environment” has big impacts on the health of the air, water, people and ecosystems around it.

Giving that promotes healthy environments can be particularly helpful to low-income communities.  Poor people usually live in the unhealthiest environments, and they are often most dependent on the environment for subsistence.  

Seeing the environment broadly opens up many opportunities to make a healthier environment, with potential benefits squarely at the intersections of environmental protection, human health, poverty alleviation, and equity.  As a donor you have many options for effective grantmaking, each of which will likely have beneficial effects on other values that you hold.

The menu of options for this great work includes: tackling pollution, clean energy issues and climate change, the built environment, protecting wildlife and other threatened areas, and sustainable agriculture.

Why are healthy environments important?

• Environmental Rights:  People have the right to healthy environments: clean air, clean water, healthy foods, healthy homes, and healthy ecosystems. 
• Environmental Responsibility:  We have a responsibility to protect and preserve the environment and its resources for the next generations. There is intrinsic value in the remarkable diversity of life on earth.
• Green Space & Landscapes:  There is value in preserving land and ecosystems for human use, including recreation and aesthetics. 
• Environmental Health:  Human health and the environment are intimately connected.  We depend on clean air, clean water, healthy homes, and safe food for healthy lives.

Environmental threats.  Today, the environment is threatened by a number of interconnected issues – pollution, overdevelopment and sprawl, industrial and consumer waste, and climate change and global warming.  These issues are putting ecosystems under stress:

• oceans, riverways and lakes are being polluted,
• air quality is worsening,
• consumer and toxic waste is filling our landfills and often polluting our land, and
• industrial and residential development, pollution, and climate change are seriously impacting the habitats and health of many species of wildlife and plant life.

Work to protect the environment is happening at all levels, from local to global initiatives, providing rich opportunities in grantmaking.

Environment and Health

Learning how the environment influences human health is becoming increasingly important to organizations that work on environmental issues. 

We know now that pollution can make people and environments unhealthy.  The good news is that the more we know, the better equipped we are to do something about it. 

As science and research continue to identify health threats in our environments or ways to rectify those dangers, we can continue to make changes that will improve the health of our environments and our communities.

Science and research demonstrating that pollutants can impact our health, also bring new voices into the environmental movement that traditionally work on health issues, including: doctors, nurses, public health professionals, and health affected groups.

Opportunities vary from place to place.  Many of the opportunities to make a community’s environment healthier depend on the type of community – rural, urban or suburban – and its biggest environmental threats.  As a donor, you may ask questions like:

• How do industrial farms impact rural towns and land?
• How does a new bus depot impact the neighborhood where it is sited?
• How does zoning in the suburbs impact the families that live there?

Urban communities often have dense concentrations of homes, offices, stores, and warehouses; roads and highways; manufacturing facilities and power plants.   Each these can create environmental problems, and their combined impact on a community’s environment can be even more serious.

Rural communities are home to most farms and ranches and, increasingly, huge “factory farms.”  Many rural environmental issues are related to agriculture – such as pesticides, herbicides, or animal wastes polluting the air and water – or to the encroachment of development on wilderness and green space. 

Like many communities, suburban communities struggle with planning and development issues.  In addition, they often struggle with a mix of urban and rural issues: industrial pollution, farming, power plants, highways, and land use challenges.

Some communities face a greater risk.  Research shows that low-income communities, especially communities of color, are exposed to disproportionately high exposures to pollutants in their air, water, buildings, and food.  This is the result of many factors:

• More polluting industries:  Sewage treatment plants, power plants, recycling facilities, garbage dumps, and factories – each are more likely to be sited in or near communities of color. 
• Unenforced regulations:  Historically, environmental regulations have not been enforced as stringently or consistently in communities of color. 
• Access to political power:  The communities may suffer a lack of political power and/or access to political decision-making about siting or permitting.
• Race:  Or more accurately, racism whether direct or not – seems to play an even bigger role than income in the distribution of environmental hazards.

Environmental Justice

The Environmental Protection Agency defines “environmental justice” as:

"the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies."

One academic study of environmental philanthropy suggested that the environmental justice movement may well be the most underfunded social movement in the United States. See:  Green Of Another Color: Building Effective Partnerships Between Foundations And The Environmental Justice Movement, the Philanthropy and Environmental Justice Research Project of Northeastern University, April 10, 2001.

Despite limited funding, local groups across the country are working hard to organize their neighborhoods, educate their local, state and federal officials, and protect their communities – the people, land, air, water, wildlife, and plant life – from environmental hazards.

Certain groups of people are more vulnerable to pollutants.  The fetus and child are most vulnerable to pollutants.  Even tiny exposures to contaminants during certain windows of development are being shown to alter neurological development, the development of immune functions, and the development of reproductive functions, with health consequences throughout life. 

Kids eat and inhale more per pound of body weight than adults, exposing them to higher levels of contaminants, while their bodies’ mechanisms to repair damaged cells or tissue are not as well developed as an adult’s. In addition, normal childhood behaviors like putting hands in mouths increase kids’ intake of contaminants. 

Other populations are especially vulnerable to environmental exposures, including people with impaired immune systems or the elderly.

Opportunities abound for you to improve the health of environments.  Many factors contribute to the health of the environment: planning and zoning; poverty and disenfranchisement; polluting industries; transportation and energy choices; public health and environmental regulations; brownfields and abandoned buildings. 

With so many factors shaping ecological health, there are many opportunities to improve it.

You may want to focus on the natural environments within the community and help a neighborhood clean up a park or playground, make a grant to clean up brownfields or land that has been polluted and abandoned, or start a community garden.  You may decide that you’d like to ensure that spaces in which people live, work, worship, and play are healthy, supporting projects that improve the indoor environment.  Or you may decide that you would like to make sure that polluting facilities are no longer sited near schools or homes, by supporting efforts to change zoning policies.

The problems may seem big, but it's okay to start small!

Communities with the least healthy environments are often struggling with other obstacles – from securing good jobs to accessing health care to having access to healthy food to having a healthy political system.

It might seem overwhelming to invest in communities that are struggling with so many issues.  The reality is that every investment in a low income community can have a ripple effect. 

When you invest in building a community’s ability to work on even a small environmental issue, you better prepare them for the next challenge facing them.  It bolsters their ability to work effectively, and experience and success will bolster their political clout, and capacity to make change.

The connections between environment, health, and equity in a community also mean that small positive changes in one arena can lead to positive changes in related areas. 

CGR gratefully acknowledges the Health and Environmental Funders Network for their assistance developing Healthy Environments content.

Learn More About Healthy Environments

• Primer: Linking Health & Environment
  
• Urban environments
  
• Rural environments
  
• Built environment
  
• Clean air and energy
  
• Pollution
  

Measure the Results

• Measure Impacts