Initiatives

• Great Communities Collaborative
• Strength from Within
• Dow Chemical Settlement – Improving Environmental Health
• Oakley Settlement – Protecting Farmland

Great Communities Collaborative

The Great Communities Collaborative (GCC) is a group of organizations dedicated to ensuring that the San Francisco Bay Area is made up of healthy, thriving neighborhoods that are affordable to all and linked to regional opportunities by a premier transit network. The GCC connects local residents with the tools and resources they need to influence decision making, forge diverse partnerships to craft lasting strategies, and harness the means to help move visions to reality.

The GCC was formed in 2006 to work towards a future where mixed-income transit-oriented communities would become prevalent in the Bay Area. The founding organizations, the “core partners,” share a keen awareness that the region’s trend of growing by sprawling was socially and environmentally unsustainable. There are presently seven core partners: Greenbelt Alliance, Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, TransForm and Urban Habitat, Reconnecting America, The San Francisco Foundation, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The strength of the GCC core partners has always been complemented by the local expertise of grassroots community organizations that work within specific communities, and by technical assistance providers who create tools and additional expertise on specific issues like community health and mixed-income housing. In total, the GCC presently consists of 27 nonprofit partners throughout the Bay Area.

The GCC was instrumental in catalyzing an initial $10 million grant from MTC that led to the creation of the Bay Area Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing (TOAH) Fund. The Fund will strategically buy sites to develop into affordable housing near transit. The fund was launched in March 2011 and is now capitalized at $50 million. For more information, visit our Environment News page.
 

Strength from Within

Stronger, more effective and better-equipped organizations are needed to address the multitude of equity, environmental and social justice issues that our communities currently face. Non-profit leaders undertake the challenge of creating and sustaining organizational infrastructure and systems with limited resources, time, and management skills. Strength from Within was established to support the development of financially strong and organizationally stable grassroots environmental health and justice organizations in the Bay Area region.

Now in its final year, Strength from Within is a three-year initiative funded by The San Francisco Foundation (TSFF) and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to provide capacity-building grants to a cohort of nine organizations devoted to grassroots organizing, addressing health disparities and tackling environmental injustices. Grants are intended to build the capacity of environmental justice organizations so that they can achieve their long-term vision, become more programmatically effective and deepen their impact. Strength from Within grantees include Bay Area Environmental Health Collaborative, DataCenter, Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative, Greenaction for Health & Environmental Justice, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Mandela Marketplace, Inc, Movement Generation, People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights, and Youth United for Community Action.

Dow Chemical Settlement – Improving Environmental Health

In 2005, two local nonprofit organizations filed a public interest lawsuit, alleging that the City of Pittsburg improperly approved the replacement of a smaller existing plant in the City of Pittsburg with a larger facility and that Dow's activities (tripling Dow's on-site production of the pesticide sulfuryl fluoride to 18 million pounds per year) would negatively impact the local environment and community. Rather than fully litigating the case, the parties agreed to settle the lawsuit. As part of the settlement, the plaintiffs secured meaningful mitigations by Dow to limit environmental and public health impacts by the company's activities. Additionally, Dow agreed to provide $1,000,000 in funding for projects geared towards community and environmental health and benefit in the Pittsburg, Bay Point, and Antioch areas. The funds for these projects – $500,000 each – would be administered independently by The San Francisco Foundation and the East Bay Community Foundation.

In 2007, TSFF completed analysis of local environmental health issues and helped seed the formation of the East County Environmental Justice Collaborative (ECEJC) to work jointly with residents, organizations, governmental agencies, and other agencies to identify and address environmental justice concerns related to health, environment, and quality of life in east Contra Costa County communities. ECEJC partners include the Center for Human Development, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, Contra Costa Health Services Public Health Division, and La Clinica de la Raza. Allies include Center for Human Development Promotoras and African American Health Conductors, CCISCO, Bay Point Partnership, and Mount Diablo Unified School District.

To date, The San Francisco Foundation has provided $490,000 to the ECEJC. 

Oakley Settlement – Protecting Farmland

In June 2011, The Greenbelt Alliance, City of Oakley, and The San Francisco Foundation completed an agreement to set up a fund that would support the permanent protection of farmland. The agreement was based on a settlement that was reached in the Contra Costa Superior Court requiring the City of Oakley, landowners, and developers to compensate the surrounding environment when developing on prime farmland.

At issue in the case were 828 acres of prime farmland of statewide importance in the City of Oakley. The landowners aim to convert the farmland and other acreage in the area of the East Cypress Corridor Specific Plan into over 3,000 housing units. As the houses are constructed over the next several years in Oakley, it is expected that the fund will generate approximately $7 million to acquire and preserve farmland.