The Good Neighbor Project for Sustainable Industries

Description

The Good Neighbor Project (GNP) provides an innovative approach to empowering local residents to promote only sustainable, non-polluting industries within their communities. GNP provides legal, technical and strategic expertise to help residents secure "Good Neighbor Agreements," which are legally-binding documents signed by the corporation and all community stakeholders that contain solutions to the community's environmental and economic concerns. About 75% of the recipients of GNP's services are low-income and minority communities.

A key to the GNP approach is to identify and enlist the support of community stakeholders, particularly the community workforce. The solutions that are promoted -- accident prevention and pollution prevention -- are not neutral in regard to labor. In working to reduce pollution, a plant might automate, thus cutting jobs. Alternatively, a plant may save jobs if an inefficient and endangered production line is brought back from the brink of extinction through toxics use reduction (TUR), which can cut waste elimination costs, compliance costs and other overhead costs. In any case, strong participation on the part of the workforce will help ensure solutions that are beneficial to labor, the corporation, and the community.

In addition to providing solutions that reduce pollution and save money, by encouraging principled negotiation between communities and corporations, the goals of both participants can be identified early in the process. This way the corporation can avoid the "moving target" phenomenon so common when community objectives shift from week to week as a result of a lack of a stable relationship between the corporation and the community.

Everyone wins with this approach to reduce pollution, protect the environment, and create sustainable industry: the Good Neighbor Project helps save jobs, increases corporate donations to affected areas and improves the quality of life in neighborhoods, thus elevating property values. Industries benefit by gaining new information, better community relationships, potential for cost-savings in the solutions that are developed and avoidance of adversarial relations that can lead to costly liability suits.

Program Highlights

Principles

• The Good Neighbor Project trains community activists to engage in principled negotiations with corporations toward the establishment of Good Neighbor Agreements that meet the community's needs and concerns.
• Community stakeholders are included in the plant review process so that corporations are motivated continuously to improve on environmental safety and to maintain a strong, healthy link to the community. At the sites where the GNP approach has been employed, safety and environmental performance have been improved.
• Corporations are encouraged to hire outside firms to conduct health, environment and safety (HES) audits. A thorough audit can help firms save money by reducing materials and energy waste or curtailing chemical accident risks. Internal audits can be hampered by a corporation's internal bureaucracy or politics, resulting in the possibility that certain HES risks may go unidentified. Conducting outside, community-involved audits significantly reduces this possibility.
• At a number of sites, environmental monitoring of the industry's impact has been expanded, resulting in improvements such as split sampling, the drilling of more environmental monitoring wells and the installation of advanced air pollution detectors.

• GNP teamed up with the West County Toxics Coalition and several community groups to help a predominantly African-American community in Richmond, California communicate their concerns about pollution generated by the Chevron Richmond Refinery located in their community. Through a series of negotiations, GNP helped secure a Good Neighbor Agreement among the parties in which Chevron agreed to:
• Install 350 "leakless" valves in a new project and retrofit 200-400 valves in the existing refinery.
• Continue to reduce toxic emissions from the refinery beyond the 60% achieved between 1988-1992.
• Provide skilled job training to 100 local residents.
• Contribute $2 million to a local health center.
• Install sirens and computers, train emergency workers and establish and fund a city Emergency Services coordinator position for five years.
• Redirect $5 million in corporate philanthropy to nearest and poorest neighbors over five years.
• Spend $100,000 over 3 years to restore native vegetation along bayshore property.
• Work with East Bay Regional Parks to complete a feasibility study for constructing a bike trail from Pt. Richmond to Pt. San Pablo.

• GNP worked with Citizens for a Better Environment and other groups to represent the residents of Rodeo, California, who were concerned about a planned expansion to a Unocal hydrogen regeneration plant. A leak from the plant's existing facility had recently occurred, and chemicals had drifted over the community where more than 300 people complained of ill health effects. In the Good Neighbor Agreement that was created during negotiations, Unocal agreed to:

• Create a community-labor-management committee to conduct its own audit of safety and pollution prevention at the Unocal Refinery.
• Allow a community advisory panel to review the firm's own annual audits of safety and compliance.

Vital Statistics

Program Management/Partnerships: The Good Neighbor Project (GNP) is a project of the Tides Foundation. GNP has entered into partnerships and/or cooperative agreements with numerous organizations and agencies including Sustainable Milwaukee, the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal, the Environmental Law Network International, the National Environmental Law Center, the Environmental Health Network, Citizens for a Better Environment, Clean Water Action and the DataCenter. Generous funding for GNP has been provided by the Bauman Foundation, the Beldon Fund and the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program at Shelter Rock, among others.

Budget: $150,000 annually.

Community Served: Primarily low-income and minority residents working to help develop sustainable industries within their communities.

Measures of Success:

Four Good Neighbor Agreements have been reached with refineries in Contra Costa County, CA.

Between 1991 and 1995, GNP has consulted at fifteen sites, about 75% of which serve low-income or minority communities.

During the last year and a half, the Good Neighbor Project has provided technical chemical consultation for 7 sites.

GNP has conducted approximately 10 day-long workshops and 40 panel discussions. Roughly 75% of these were for low-income or minority populations.

GNP helped convince the Environmental Protection Agency to make $4 million in pollution prevention grants available to community environmental justice groups during 1995.

GNP has provided, or plans to provide, support to communities in Philadelphia, Chicago, California, Baltimore, Buffalo, Louisiana and South Carolina.

A community group in Institute, WV, released a GNP report indicating new strategies for chemical accident prevention available to a local industry.

Strong coalitions of labor unions and community groups have been forged in Detroit, New York State, Philadelphia and West Virginia.

The Environmental Protection Agency has called upon the Good Neighbor Project for advice on an emerging program on corporate environmental leadership. GNP was one of the few environmental organizations recently called upon to attend a White House conference on pollution prevention.

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