National Survey of Environmental Justice Groups: What Do They Look Like (Organizational Structure)? What Do They Do (Tactics)? Some Implications

Abstract

Environmental justice emerged as a grass roots movement to battle the injustices of inequitable enforcement of national environmental laws that affected people of color. A Web-based survey was conducted to gauge what these groups look like today in terms of their organizational structure and the types of tactics they use in their struggle to combat environmental racism. The findings indicated that these groups have lost many of the characteristics of social movements. They have also defied the traditional trajectory of transitioning to interest groups. Instead, the vast majority of these groups have incorporated as 501c(3) nonprofits. Their organizational structure is more institutionalized in terms of staffing, resources, budgeting, and decision making. The tactics they primarily use include: educating and training other groups, organizing other groups, and researching issues. These groups have been in existence for an average of nineteen years and serve multiple populations including Anglos. As nonprofit organizations, they have been able to gain access to the regulatory process by serving on boards and commissions; they may have contributed to the policy process by identifying problems and providing solutions although this remains unclear; and, they have excluded themselves from the political process since nonprofit organizations are barred from lobbying and, thus, attempting to influence federal environmental legislation.

Early in the history of the environmental justice movement, the groups that emerged proclaimed themselves to be a grassroots or social movement with the express purpose of battling the injustices in the implementation and enforcement of national environmental laws. At that time, these groups appeared to reflect some of the characteristics of a social movement. While a single definition of a social movement does not exist, there are certain characteristics shared by these movements. Most of these groups are political in nature. The membership of these movements are comprised of an aggrieved population, often those disenfranchised groups of society, which may lack political representation in the American political system and who engage in activism with the intent of fostering reform. These movements tend to be fluid and informal organizations that can mobilize large numbers of people for some type of action, usually lacking a single leader to coordinate activity. The importance of organizational strength determines the ability to sustain the organization through networking and coalition-building. The most revealing characteristic for these social movements are the tactics and strategies used by these groups, namely the use of the politics of protest or outsider tactics that fall outside the standard political process of electoral politics and interest group lobbying. The normal evolution of social movements, if groups are able to sustain their organizational strength, is to transform themselves into interest groups in order to lobby the politicians within the political process.¹

Scant research has been conducted to investigate the organizational taxonomy of the environmental justice groups. Today, there is empirical evidence that the environmental justice groups may have lost some of the grassroots characteristics and have not transitioned to interest groups as social movement literature would suggest. Instead they are more formalized nonprofit organizations. A survey of those groups identifying with environmental justice was conducted to investigate the organizational structure, the types of tactics, their perceptions of success and their accomplishments. This article reports the findings for the demographics, the organizational structures, and the tactics for the respondents of this survey. Finally, some of the implications for these findings are addressed.

The Study

An online survey of readily identified environmental justice groups was conducted in the summer of 2006. Using SurveyMonkey.com, each identified environmental justice group was contacted via e-mail. The survey asked questions about (1) the goals of the organization, (2) organizational history, (3) current organizational structure, and (4) administrative practices and took about 20 minutes to complete. If there was no response from the organization after two weeks, a second attempt via e-mail was made. Those organizations that completed surveys were acknowledged and thanked via e-mail.

The Environmental Justice Resource Center's People of Color Environmental Groups Directory 2000² and a general Web-based search of environmental justice groups provided the sample for the study since the Directory was somewhat outdated. The intent of the Web-based search for additional groups was to stratify by subpopulation based on race and ethnicity so that no one group would be overrepresented. These groups were categorized by Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) region. Groups that had an e-mail address were sent the survey link. Only 25 addresses bounced indicating that the e-mail address, and presumably the organization, was no longer functional. In all, 503 e-mails were sent to identifiable environmental justice groups and 86 surveys were completed yielding a response rate of 17%. This response rate, while typically lower than a direct-mail response rate, as are most e-mail surveys, falls within an acceptable response rate for Web-based surveys.³

While compiling the population for the study, the organizational typology was an unknown variable for the environmental justice groups. In 2000, Rios found that there appeared to be two group typologies operating under the umbrella of environmental justice. One group type fit the characteristics of grassroots groups following the civil rights model advanced by McAdam.⁴ The other group typology used the tactics and strategies more closely resembling interest group activity while their organizational structure might have been more indicative of a nonprofit. For this reason, the respondents were asked if their group was a nonprofit, as defined by the U.S. tax code. Table 1 reflects the survey questions and levels of measurement used in this research.

Table 1.

National Survey of Environmental Justice Groups Questions

Question	Measurement
Organizational Structure
Which response below best describes your group's organizational structure?	• Volunteer director and staff
	• Paid director and volunteer staff
	• Paid director 1-3 paid staff, volunteers
	• Paid director, over 3 paid staff
Which response below best describes your group's budget planning process?	• No formal
	• Informal (face-to-face)
	• Moderately formal (planned meetings?
	• Very formal (approval by board of directors)
Which response below describes the total budget for your organization?	• Less than $50,000
	• $50,000 - $$149,999
	• $150,000 - $249,999
	• $250,000 or more
Many groups receive funding from different sources to maintain their organizations. Please indicate the percentage of funding your organizations receive from the following sources.	• Private foundations grants
	• Churches
	• Government agencies
	• Membership dues
	• Fundraising
	• Other groups or associations
Which response below best describes your group's decision making process?	• No formal process
	• Informal face-to-face meetings
	• Moderately formal, regular Meetings
	• Decisions made at executive level, formal approval from board of directors
Tactics
In order to meet their goals, many environmental justice groups engage in the activities below. Please indicate the percentage of the time your groups spends on each of these activities	• Researching issues
	• Organizing other groups
	• Educating and training
	• Networking with other groups
	• Providing technical support to other groups
	• Lobbying politicians
	• Protesting
	• Fundraising
	• Administrative functions

The Findings

The majority of the respondents in this study (77.8 percent) indicated that they indeed emerged from grassroots or social movements. The mean age of the organizations was nineteen years serving primarily African-American and Hispanic populations although more than half of the respondents reported serving multiple populations including Anglos. An unexpected finding was that 87.3 percent of the respondents claimed a nonprofit status.

Organizational structure

The variables measuring the organizational structures of the environmental justice nonprofits included: staffing, resources, budgeting processes, and decision-making processes. In measuring the staffing variable, forty-two percent (42.2%) of the organizations reported that they had a paid director and over three paid staff members with no volunteers. In terms of resources, forty-eight percent (48.4%) of these groups indicated that their annual budget was $250,000 or more with the majority (52.6 %) funded by private foundation grants. Forty-eight percent (48.4%) of these groups disclosed that they had a very formal budget planning process that included planned meetings and approval by some type of oversight body such as a board of directors. For their decision-making processes, almost fifty-two percent (51.6%) of these organizations revealed that they hold moderately formal meetings on a regular basis.

The demographic and organizational variables depict the current environmental justice groups to be nonprofits with a more formalized or institutionalized organizational structure who are able to garner funding from private foundations in order to engage in activities to promote environmental justice.

Tactics

Both interest groups and nonprofit organizations engage in similar tactics with the exception of lobbying politicians for access to the political system and policy process. For the groups in this study, twenty-seven percent (27.1 %) of their time was spent in the educating and training activities while almost nineteen percent (18.8%) of their time was used to organize other groups and almost fifteen percent (14.9%) of their time on researching issues. These groups also networked with other groups (12.4 %) and provided technical support to other groups nine percent of their time (9.3 %). Only six percent (6.5%) of their time was reported for lobbying politicians. These groups indicated that they spend only seven (7.2%) percent of their time engaging in the politics of protest such as demonstrating or boycotting. As nonprofits, these groups spent ten percent as their time on fundraising (10.1%) as well as performing administrative functions (10.3%).

When viewing these activities as whole, it appears that there might be some insularity within the environmental justice groups as they tend to educate, organize, and network with similar groups but not a broader spectrum of other groups. This isolation, in conjunction with their nonprofit status, may restrict their ability to engage in the political process and meet the original goal of procedural equity as described by Miller of influencing federal legislation.⁵

Some Implications

There are both advantages and disadvantages for the environmental justice groups to have elected to incorporate as nonprofits, mostly with 501c(3) status. Nonprofit organizations, or the third sector, have existed for numerous decades, mostly known as charitable organizations. There is a wide range of types of nonprofit organizations with health and human services being the largest sector. The 501c(3) status for nonprofits does not limit contact with the government agencies and many nonprofits not only serve on advisory committees, boards, and other informal groups, they also provide research, technical advice and political support to the agencies as well as local political leadership. This nonprofit status empowers organizational capacity-building and networking.⁶ More importantly, it allows for representation within the regulatory process and more traditional policy-making processes such as identifying problems and presenting solutions.

The primary disadvantage for nonprofit status organizations is that they are constrained by the federal regulations of 501c(3) incorporation status that restricts them from lobbying, engaging in partisan politics, and generally prohibiting the nonprofits to participate in the political process or to advocate for the disenfranchised population they serve. The primary sanction to lobbying (precluding the use of the H elections option which permits lobbying) is the nonrenewal of government grants. Berry and Arons assert that nonprofits are most effective when they work within an established program.⁷

The findings in this study present a mature or institutionalized movement with little variance in the types of activities they perform. The environmental justice groups appear to have increased their organizational capacity by adopting a nonprofit status and inclusion into the regulatory process. For example, forty-one percent of the environmental justice groups in this study reported sitting on boards and committees. Many of the environmental justice issues tend to be local in nature and the nonprofit status may have empowered these groups to effectuate changes in local communities. However, the 501c(3) nonprofit status bars them from lobbying to affect and influence the political process. More specifically, their input into national environmental policies may have been neutralized.

There are some issues that remain unclear and that merit further research. While culling through these surveys, it appeared that there might be a top-down model imposed on these groups. More specifically, what was the driving force that compelled these groups to incorporate as nonprofits instead of evolving into interest groups? What role did the EPA's Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) play? The initiatives and programs administered by the OEJ can be viewed as two basic categories: providing technical assistance and small grant funding. The eligibility for applying for the environmental justice small grants program include 501c(3) nonprofits but excludes those nonprofits who lobby as defined by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. The focus of these small grants is “to build capacity of community-based organizations to address environmental and/or public health issues at the local level.” The Toolkit for Assessing Potential Allegations of Environmental Injustice identifies one the criterion for community participation as the “Number of community residents participating in non-governmental organizations.”⁸ The OEJ regulations and recent implementation plans warrant further investigation. Another reason that the environmental justice groups may have incorporated as nonprofits is to position their organizations to be able to apply for and receive funding. As previously stated, the revenue sources for the majority of the respondents were obtained through private foundations. Other sources included government agencies (27.4 percent) and fundraising (26.1 percent). In order to be eligible for competitive grants, a nonprofit designation is usually the norm. It is apparent that the nonprofit status has been beneficial to these groups in terms of acquiring resources.

A second issue that merits further research is that of extent of inclusion and influence. While these nonprofit groups have had some success at procuring a seat at the table it is unclear if they have a voice at the table such as identifying problems and providing solutions which would signify that they have been successful in influencing the policy process. Since about half of the environmental justice groups in this study serve multiple populations including Anglos, a subpopulation analysis stratified by race and ethnicity would shed some light on the subpopulations that have prevailed.

Conclusion

Environmental justice emerged as a grass roots movement to battle the injustices of inequitable enforcement of national environmental laws that affected people of color. A Web-based survey was conducted to gauge what these groups look like today in terms of their organizational structure and the types of tactics they use in their struggle to combat environmental racism. The findings indicated that these groups have lost many of the characteristics of social movements. They have also defied the traditional trajectory of transitioning to interest groups. Instead, the vast majority of these groups have incorporated as 501c(3) nonprofits. Their organizational structure is more formal or institutionalized in terms of staffing, resources, budgeting, and decision making. More than half of these organizations reported success in acquiring funds through private foundations. The tactics they primarily use include: educating and training other groups, organizing other groups, and researching issues. These groups have been in existence for an average of nineteen years and serve multiple populations including Anglos. As nonprofit organizations, they appear to have gained access to the regulatory process by serving on boards and commissions; they may have contributed to the policy process by identifying problems and providing solutions although this remains unclear. However, they have excluded themselves from the political process since nonprofit organizations are barred from lobbying and, thus, attempting to influence federal environmental legislation which was a goal prescribed in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit.

Footnotes

Jo Marie Rios, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi.

1

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2

Environmental Justice Resource Center. People of Color Environmental Groups Directory. <http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/poc2000.htm>. (Last accessed on May 18, 2010).

3

Michael D. Kaplowitz, T.D. Hadlock, and R. Levine, “A Comparison of Web and Mail Survey Response Rates,” Public Opinion Quarterly 68 (1) (2004): 94–101.

4

Jo Marie Rios, “Environmental Justice Groups: Grassroots Movement or NGO Networks? Some Policy Implications,” Policy Studies Review 17 (2000): 179–211; Doug McAdam. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970. (Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1982).

5

Vernice D. Miller, “Building On Our Past, Planning for Our Future: Communities of Color and the Quest for Environmental Justice,” in Toxic Struggles, the Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice. Richard Hofticher, ed. (Philadelphia PA: New Society Publishers, 1993).

6

Jeffrey M. Berry and David F. Arons. A Voice for Nonprofits. (Washington DC: Brookings, 2003); David Schlosberg. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. (Oxford EGN: Oxford University Press, 2007); Daniel Faber and Debra McCarthy. “Neo-liberalism, Globalization, and the Struggle for Ecological Democracy: Linking Sustainability and Environmental Justice,” in Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, Julian Agyman, Robert Bullard and Bob Evans, eds. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003); Anne Schneider and Helen Ingram, eds. Deserving and Entitled: Social Constructions and Public Policy. (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2005).

7

Jeffrey M. Berry and David F. Arons. A Voice for Nonprofits. (Washington DC: Brookings, 2003).

8

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental Justice Small Gants Program Fact Sheet. <http://www.epa.gov\compliance\environmenal justice\grants\ej-smgrants.html> (Last accessed on April 23, 2010); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Toolkit for Assessing Potential Allegations of Environmental Injustice. <http://www.epa.gov\oej>. (Last accessed on April 23, 2010).