The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is giving $10 million to Portland State University and a group of regional partners as part of the Biden Administration’s government-wide Justice40 Initiative to spur environmental justice and economic opportunities in historically disadvantaged communities — in this case among Native American tribes and their neighbors across the Northwest.
Alongside Willamette Partnership, the Rural Community Assistance Corporation and six additional academic, business and nonprofit organizations, Portland State will establish one of two Northwestern Environmental and Energy Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers, or TCTAC, an acronym pronounced like the candy TicTac.
The TCTAC will be based in PSU’s Institute for Tribal Government and will work with a broad diversity of partners to serve tribes, rural communities, and others in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. The funding will be used to build capacity in Native communities to develop projects that support clean energy and climate resilience, meeting needs identified through community engagement.
“This particular funding addresses some fundamental concerns around taking care of community — which is really about resources,” said Direlle Calica, director of the PSU Institute for Tribal Government. “In Tribal communities, we take care of resources and they take care of us. This allows us to translate that into the day-to-day work that we do.”
Being based at Portland State the TCTAC will be able to leverage research and student involvement as it sets out to build climate resilience and environmental justice capacity among tribes and other communities experiencing injustice. It will also set out to bring in exponentially more resources to support future projects, setting a goal of garnering at least $50 million in additional private and public funding for 50 or more different communities.
“This will strengthen the two-way communication between PSU and communities across the region,” said Bobby Cochran, senior project manager for the PSU National Policy Consensus Center, who helped develop the grant proposal. “The value set behind this project is centering Indigenous voices and values and moving toward a more just and resilient future.”
The PSU National Policy Consensus Center and the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health will work closely with the Institute for Tribal Government to implement the TCTAC.
The grant proposal highlighted the Pacific Northwest region’s history with environmental justice movements including the role of Native Tribes opposing arctic mining and drilling practices and Black community activists advocating for recognition, reconciliation and reparation following the Vanport flood of 1948 that displaced 17,500 Black residents along with the institution that eventually became Portland State.
The TCTAC team will build on that heritage through the following activities:
- Community engagement and technical assistance: TCTAC will work with groups engaged in environmental justice across the Northwest to help them connect to resources, apply for grants, develop policy and support projects.
- Cohort-style learning and leadership development: TCTAC will train community leaders serving up to 100 participants over five years with education about data justice, project funding, policy navigation and related topics.
- Ethical storytelling: TCTAC will help amplify community narratives including the responsible use of data and information sharing.
- Accountability to community and to changing systems: TCTAC will commit to centering Indigenous values in pursuit of justice, adjusting services and priorities annually based on community feedback.
Throughout this work there will be multiple opportunities to engage PSU students and researchers to learn about environmental justice leadership.
Additional partners on the grant include Alai Community Consulting, Oregon Public Health Institute, Verde, Boise State University’s Hazard and Climate Resilience Institute, Kearns and West, Linguava, Oregon Health Authority, Environmental Protection Network, and Community Engineering Corps.
“Those of us who gathered to get this proposal together, we have wanted to work together but didn’t have the catalyst,” Calica said. “Individually the work we have been doing has had significant impact, but this allows us to aggregate those efforts in a way that we’ve never had before. It will be quite impactful for the region.”
To learn more about the grant, check out the press release from TCTAC partners and the EPA’s announcement.