A Collaborative Approach to Assess Legacy Pollution in Communities Near a Lead–Acid Battery Smelter: The “Truth Fairy” Project

Abstract

Advocates for civil rights, environmental justice, and movements promoting social justice require data and may lack trust in public authorities, turning instead to academic scientists to help address their questions. Assessing historical exposure to toxic chemicals, especially in situations of a specific industrial source of pollution affecting a community, is critical for informing appropriate public health and policy responses. We describe a community-driven approach to integrate retrospective environmental hazard exposure assessment with community organizing to address concerns about the extent of exposure to toxic metals in a predominantly working-class, Latinx community living near a now-closed lead–acid battery smelter facility. Named the “Truth Fairy Project” by leaders of the community organization East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, this community–university partnership aimed to assess prenatal and early-life exposures to toxic metals through biomarkers of exposure in baby/deciduous teeth. This partnership integrated community mobilization with empirical research, informing residents about toxic metal exposures and improving the community’s capacity to respond to a public health crisis.

Psychological sense of community and motivation toward collective social change among community coalition members of color in the southwestern United States

“…Community coalitions can be an important location for leveraging access to resources to support | 557 community wellness (Butterfoss, 2007;Butterfoss & Kegler, 2009), as well as extend the power and voices of community members to enact social change (Lardier, Bergeson, et al, 2018;Minkler, 2012). Several studies have specifically positioned community coalitions as a setting to fight racism, socioeconomic inequities, and health disparities (Cooper & Christens, 2019;Johnston et al, 2019). Some research has also focused on the role of coalition partnership dynamics, shared leadership (Reid et al, 2019;Wolf et al, 2019), and the ways coalitions even begin to be created and maintained to fight inequities in the community (Bermea et al, 2018;Lardier, Bergeson, et al, 2018;Peterson et al, 2019;Powell & Peterson, 2014).…”

An applied environmental justice framework for exposure science

“…This practice is likely to vary from community to community and thus requires that researchers center the voices of community members and strive for authentic collaborative partnerships with EJ groups. For example, through a community-academic partnership, investigators from the University of Southern California collaborated with East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice to successfully gather bio-samples, in this case teeth from Latino children [ 78 ]. This partnership, coined the Truth Fairy Project , began many years before the collection of samples and continues to live on through projects aimed at generating data to support policy action and not just documenting injustices [ 79 ].…”

Community Knowledge and Concerns About Urban Soil Science, Practice, and Process: Perspectives From the Healthy Soils for Healthy Communities Initiative in Los Angeles, CA, United States

“…For example, conversations around legacy soil pollution, specifically the former battery recycling plant, Exide, revealed an important legacy of broken trust in community-scientists relationships, with focus group participants sharing that they felt the scientific community remained silent on an important issue of public and environmental health. A lack of trust in public authorities, specifically in regard to this case, has also been noted in the literature (Johnston et al, 2019). This provides important context as to how communities may be thinking about soil contamination issues in their neighborhood as well as how research approaches and methodologies may be received.…”