 Thank you Lindsay and thank you everybody who shared in that conversation. Our next panel is three presentations that really bring us lessons from a very particular project that we would consider to be environmental data justice project. So our first of the of the next three speakers is Olga Batista and Olga one of the lead organizers for the Southeast Side Coalition to Ban Petcoke. And Olga led the fight that forced the state and local politicians including Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office the Chicago City Council and the Illinois governor general governor's office to address the pressing environmental issues in the Temple Ward of Chicago. So really excited to hear the lessons that Olga has to share. Welcome Olga. And in the 70s the mill started to close but because that that part of the late late Michigan was all industrial and zoned for that kind of dirty industry when the steel mills closed it became a site for companies to store bulk material. So if you drive through any industrial neighborhood you might see like mounds of roads sometimes like in areas where there's a lot of snow and other things just kind of high up high and in this day in August there was these huge piles of petroleum coal so like our sister from Detroit was talking about Petcoke from the Marathon company we had Petcoke stored at a company called KCVX which just happened to be owned by the Koch brothers and the first thing that I guess signed that you know we were involved in as a media community and organizers that started to use social media to figure out like what was happening. So this picture this is a picture that was taken that day it was immediately shared on social media and then one by one people started to make comments like oh I saw that too I thought there was a fire and then people from a little league that was having a game that day actually was hoarding that they called the game because it got there was a fire nearby so then they just wanted to be safe and they said okay we're calling the game we're going to go home but if there was no fire there was less of calls to 911 and we didn't know what was happening. The city calls it a wind event but this is Chicago so it's always windy I mean they're nicknames so this is something that happened and it could happen again in the future so through Facebook I'll show the next slide we put a message down like hey let's like we had already been talking about like you know who the owners of this company were who started to learn through people posting articles about the Koch brothers and how they fund you know studies to the fund universities to the studies to people you know climate change and climate change facts and all kinds of craziness and that they were like anti worker and anti union and we're a blue collared neighborhood so we're like you know as the Koch brothers we don't want them here and we don't want the Koch here either so like after doing some door knocking and putting on Facebook that we were going to have a meeting we had a packed house we also invited the EPA to that meeting and they didn't know what they were using it to they had no answer to you know the question basically what had happened was that there was no like it was actually okay like the company wasn't doing anything at all. There wasn't any regulations that prevented them from starting to control the Koch and it's important to mention to that the reason that there was so much control of COVID 6070 but high amount of this stuff was because right across the border from Chicago there's a deep pure binary that had just under massive upgrade to process tar sands that were coming from over in Canada and so this is Tarzan and he hiked down. It's actually and the rest of it is way more ways and the ways had to go somewhere. So it was being stored on the county river access to have an international port and it just went through the lens itself but I kind of think right around the same time a community member who heading away and with a professor is a professor at MIT, Christina Walney had just direct up her documentary called Edges Zero about our neighborhood about how industrialization affects communities of mine and a very personal story about her family and she was in the neighborhood she was going to be in Chicago to talk about her both in the documentary she was working on and we met with her and we were talking to her like this is what's happening and she told us about public lab. Public lab is an awesome, awesome organization that had these really cool toolkits to do a balloon mapping and why this was important was because as all of this was happening and we were learning about the petroleum coke that was sort of the river. We were like not taken seriously by our elected officials, and we really didn't have any proof that this stuff was bad. All we had not say that it wasn't enough, but a lot of the stories from the newspapers from Detroit actually and how the families in Detroit organized this stuff and the stories of the petroleum coke along their shores and so we started to make the case like look families and folks in Detroit are fighting against this stuff because it's not good, it's not good to have this kind of thing in the air, we should also have similar protections. And since we didn't have any data on the next slide, we had a little workshop at a local park and we put this big weather balloon out that is tethered to a little makeshift box that we use in the ocean spray container, a juice container to hold a camera in a rubber band and a little pebble to hold the camera in continual shutter mode and then let it go into the air and then the balloon just flying in the air like all those milley and taking pictures and everything underneath. And if you go to the next slide, you can see this really, really important image. And we can't really zoom in all the time in this picture but we were able to throw this picture up and on the frozen river of the stone, you could see the petroleum home head landed on the river. And Illinois has a water in it, so we went to the general and this is like when all the alarms went off. It was our aha moment, often right handed. And we also got, because none of the co-brothers, this issue was like super sensationalized, like the tribute, the sunshine, you know, all the local papers, like everybody was covering it because of the co-brother, the company, even, you know, the senator, the chairman, our state representative, like everybody wanted to get at the co-brother, right? So, you know, we were able to get a lot of attention and the senator actually asked the CDC to do an investigation, and petitioned them to force the EPA to put air monitors up at KCVX right across the street from this company. And those monitors went up and it's been also put up some other stuff. Before I get to that, we'll go to the next slide. This is what it looks like. This is the CDC itself. That's how massive the holding company was. This is right up against the neighborhood, right? Like there was like probably any buffer. There was a little field that called the game. And we looked at the next slide. We started to have these meetings in the neighborhood, being a lot of attention, and the city finally decided that there had to be a new rules, right? They had to think about the new rules saying that anybody handling the current code had to cover their operations, had to cover their conveyors, had to like wash frogs, couldn't have had a code that was falling off, you know, on the ground and it just went in my way. But they also put that anytime the wind was 15 miles an hour or higher, that people should go inside. They should not be outside. So then, we went to the next slide. We went to this group of really cool group here at Chicago that are like programmers and hackers and people who like to create things like apps and whatnot. And we did a presentation for them. There's like literally like 40, 50, 60 people that gather once a month. And we told them what's happening. And because these new rules had just come out, they asked a bunch of more questions, like, and we realized that there was actually like, like the weather, the news like the monitors that come over to tell the weather my voice needs. And this is what is used to, you know, follow the weather, follow the news, and you can tap into this. It's like public information. So they created this thing where every time the weather, the wind was 15 miles an hour or higher, that it would send a text message alert to people who signed up to get a text message. And I mean, it was literally in the beginning and, and, you know, we realized that we needed to make it so that, you know, you only got messages from like 10am or like 16th and you know, other things. But then, you know, I would say like, okay, you got a text, you got a technical alert. It's dangerous. And this is both before that before that it was like illegal for them to have for the High Court. This is like right between those times that they were just figuring out the regulations. They have submitted some regulations with an anxiety committee and they were like in the process of figuring out. Well, when we, when you, you know, you would click on this thing that was sent to your home, it was like, well, what can I do? And there really wasn't much that we could do other than call the mayor. So then there's a way to start thinking about what to do. So then the mayor can be like all these calls to demand that code, basically. And it was really helpful to have one social media to get the message out, you know, to the balloon that we could read the pet co-cow lords. And I think that it was really powerful for folks who didn't really have access to these things and like didn't want to have access to it because there wasn't much research, I truly hope, that we were able to draw a lot of attention to this issue. But I do want to point out that, you know, situations like this are fascinating all over the country. And it's not always a bad after like the co-brothers, you know, that won't burn in this kind of attention. And even though we had data, our, our older men discovered that he was receiving a lot of money from these companies, like every time elections even came around. So through social media, we also share that information out. And we also, you know, lost the job, you know, from the older men. But I think it's important when we, I guess the biggest takeaway for me was that, you know, even though you have data, you have information, if you don't have the political will to change the situation, then it is important. So I went from being somebody who did not believe in the electoral system to my brother. Because my here and my colleagues told me to. And I didn't win, but hope also didn't win. So that was it. Great, because I think we're at time is such an important story though. So I want to make sure you get in your final word. Yeah, I'm going to wrap up the next slide. The monitor is also picked up. So to the black side, that's the, although Petco across the street is another across the river. And across the river, I mean, is another company that is storing many that's competitive to make a snow. And when this is airborne and you bring it in, it's a neuro toxicant. The next slide. So we've been organizing around that there are folks in the neighborhood. One of the companies called SHL which range with hell. So I like that side. The next step is we're doing the house study with some of the university help us with that we also that funding through one of our partners do a policy scan of all the environmental justice policies across the country and I'll share that with the group as well. It was just published by the new school. That's like two weeks ago, and we're doing training for the residents and we're also building up so the information right by data collection and then also Thank you so much. That's such an inspiring story. It's nice to hear such a great success. Thank you. So our next set of presenters is a whole team of people from the environmental Chelsea organizers group. It's a team of Chelsea teams working to improve the community by engaging other youth in campaigns and projects to bring about environmental economic and social justice. ECO works on projects identified by themselves or peers that are worrisome or concerning to use and we've got at least six folks here involved. Shakaia Perkins, Jasmine Lynette, Catherine Zalea and Alanis Munoz, Jari Perez and Brian Hernandez as well as Leilani Merck. I'm not going to get this right. Merckowski. Maybe I'm close. So, and then we also have Laura Parovich is one of the collaborators who worked with the MIT media lab at the PhD student there. So welcome team. Hi. So we're really excited to talk to everyone today about the chemicals in the project. And this project is the data physicalization of the water data. And it's in collaboration between ECO group, Northeastern University and MIT. Next slide. Right. So I'm going to talk to you a little about Chelsea, Massachusetts, we're a small city just north of Boston. So the Chelsea Creek separates East Boston from Chelsea. Our city is 1.8 square miles big two thirds of which is zone for commercial and industrial use. You have about 45,000 residents of which 73% identifies ethnic minorities. 65% of those are Latinx and a quarter of our population live below the poverty line. We have the highest rates of childhood hospitalizations for asthma in the state of Massachusetts. And Green Roots is an organization, environmental justice organization that has been organizing and working in Chelsea and in East Boston for the last 25 years. Next slide. So here's some images just of what Chelsea Creek houses. We have 100% of the jet fuel used by the Boston Logan Airport and 70 to 80% of the heating oil used in New England. These are a picture of the tanks that have been emitting a lot of waste into our creek. Next slide. We also have about 400,000 tons of road salt that is supplied into over 350 cities and towns in New England. Next slide. We have the second largest produce center in the nation. Next slide. So, hi, we are the eco crew and for those who don't know, eco stands for environmental Chelsea organizers and the eco group consists of six youths from Chelsea including myself, Jasmine, Brian, Jari, Shakaia behind me and Catherine. So currently we're working on three projects, all of which are new fled, which include free public transport youth jobs and a team space here in Chelsea. This is also a great example of a community and academic collaboration. So also on the team. And I'm at MIT at the Media Lab. I do research and art and technology, as well as Sarah Wiley, who's at MacUstern University in sociology and health sciences. Next slide. Chelsea's waterfront is home to seven oil storage facilities. Each of the facilities has a permit to emit waste into the creek under the Clean Water Act, including car synergents such as Benzie. Historically, Clean Water Act enforcement has only been limited to severe or significant non-compliance six months in a row. Unless violations are ongoing and dramatic, EPA does not have the resources to work to enforce the Clean Water Act. Under the Trump administration enforcement is declining further. Last year, the EPA inspected the lowest number of facilities on record. These inspections are important. Next steps to enforce action. Next slide. In 2015, we were asked Laura, Sarah and Eagle to look into the aggregated impact of the oil storage facilities. We found that despite claims to be in compliance, facilities have violated their requirements a large number of times. If you want EPA enforcement and compliance history online database, we found that the data to be misleading as well as hard to interpret and compile. We discovered how to create a more accessible and publicly meaningful presentation of important data. A year's worth of discussion, development and iterations led us to data lanterns. Next slide. So here's a picture from our brochure that we distributed at the event. And as you can see, each of the chemicals is represented by a different color that the lanterns lit up on. And they were organized by year that the companies emitted these toxins into our creek. Next slide. We organized a group of 18 volunteers that was led by us and we took them down to a dog on Chelsea Creek. Community members were invited to this event on a cold November. Next slide. Next slide. In the community event, we invited community members and our friends. We were surprised by the great turnout. The event was also on Facebook live and I was responsible for the introduction. Next slide. In this photo, you see these are the lanterns when they're turned on. Next slide. Here's some more. Next slide. Here's the lanterns when we retrieve the background from the dog. Next slide. Okay. So after the performance on the Chelsea Creek that Shakaia just described, we all went back to the Green Roots office along with everyone who watched us release those lanterns. And then we had a larger, more important discussion about the gravity about what the oil companies were actually doing in our community. And all we made sure that the public was informed which was a success because everyone saw and understood what we were doing. And more importantly, it helped open up a new conversation about how to proceed now that they know what's happening. Next slide. So we have had meeting with the oil storage facilities and this has been effective in getting through attention. We have a website at the end of our presentation which gives us specific instructions on how to host a similar event like this. The environmental justice principles we demonstrate in this event are that we as a community have the right to protect ourselves from toxic waste and not ask like the nature should be protected. Next slide. Because the majority of our community speaks Spanish, we made the data easy to understand by using visuals and pamphlets also translated to Spanish presentation also both in Spanish and English. We made the data physical to remind people that these aren't just numbers, this is waste going into our grade. Next slide. Alright, so these are the EDGA principles that we suggest that allow youth voices to be present and invited. We believe that youth have to understand what information is given to them. You have to feel empowered and you have to learn leadership to become said leaders. So we do this by combining art, science, activism and projects to make participants feel more involved. Next slide. This is a quote I had about the vet and it was being on the other side. What being on the other side needs to be is finally having the knowledge to in a platform where I can speak to adults. Because I'm usually used to them teaching me and me being a student but I finally felt like a teacher. And I was in a position where they were listening to me and what I have to say. Next slide. Thank you all for listening and learning from us. We want to say thanks to all of the volunteers and students and organizations that help make this project possible. And if you have more questions or want to learn more about eco or green roots or our project, please check out our social media and our website. Thanks. Awesome. Thank you. You all were so on point. That was great. Way to go. That was such a good presentation. So our next speaker is Aaron McElroy who is a doctoral candidate in feminist studies at UC Santa Cruz and works on techno imperialism and gentrification in Romania. And what Aaron, why we invited Aaron here today is that Aaron is the founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. A critical cartography and digital humanities project mapping, dispossession and resistance in the Bay Area, New York City and Los Angeles. And recently Aaron co-founded the Radical Housing Journal to help form solidaries amongst anti-displacement struggles among scholars and organizers worldwide. So thank you so much, Aaron, for joining us today. Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me. It's really wonderful to be here and to be so inspired by all of these projects. So thank you to everybody. Yeah, I'm going to talk briefly about the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, which I helped co-found in 2013. Right now, there are chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York City, but we began in the Bay Area. And it's a volunteer-led organization. We probably got about 60 folks working on it right now in the three different regions. And so I'm just one of many, and we'll be representing a little bit of it today. So you can go to the next slide. Yeah, so I wanted to kind of point out that when we emerged in 2013, it was the beginning of this era that people call the tech boom 2.0, or the second dot com boom. And it is this era in which techno capitalism and real estate speculation have entangled in novel ways, leading to a lot of evictions and new forms of real dispossession. And so we think of evictions and the loss of access to housing as an environmental justice issue, and that's kind of how I'm positioning the project today. We also do work specifically on environmental racism and environmental justice and have a new Atlas project that we're producing that has a chapter specifically on this in which we're thinking about those intersections in very concrete ways. I'm going to just overview the project generally right now. So these are some maps that came out when we began in 2013 that are real estate speculative maps. You can see here, a real estate speculator rebranded part of the mission, which is a lefty next working class neighborhood as the quad, a place for people who work in Silicon Valley to reside. This other map came out that was published by a data center based in San Francisco trying to position West Oakland with the, which is a historically a black working class neighborhood as this new edge of Silicon Valley. You know, borrowing these sort of frontier metaphors, which are obviously very colonial in nature. And so these are these very like normative maps that are popping up right now and have been popping up for the last several years. And so if you go to the next slide. We consider ourselves in this way counter mapping projects are critical cartography project and that we're making maps that kind of counter these very normative capitalist techno imperial map making projects and practices. And, you know, this is the very first map that we made on the right. It's a map that is online. We add to it every few months but it's a map that details the accumulation of a particular form of eviction in San Francisco. It's called the Ellis activation and I'm not going to get into the nitty gritties of this particular type of eviction, but it is one that is being used by what we call real estate speculators, more than any other type of eviction. I mean, landlords and people interested in the value of a property once it's vacated of the people living in it once it's vacated of those tenants. So we found that, you know, with this particular type of eviction. It was, I think was it about 80% of them were happening within the first five years of ownership property ownership and that 60% of them were happening within the first year of ownership alone, which shows us that what's happening is that these people are buying up buildings and evicting tenants. Just a profit and often they'll flip the buildings and turn them into condos and this just happens to rent controlled buildings. So in California, cities that have rent control can't create new rent controlled units. It's a kind of a depleting resource. And when Ellis activations like this happen we're actually using rent controlled units. And rent control, of course, means that rent is somewhat stabilized and can't go up more than about 2% every year. And we made this map because we knew that these evictions were happening, members of our community were being evicted but we didn't know where they were happening, who the evictors were, and how to connect the dots. Often these evictions are happening by LLCs limited liability companies so it's hard to know exactly who the evictor is. For example, like a friend of mine, Benito, got this eviction by what was called Pineapple Boy LLC and he knew his landlord before his landlord had sold the building to Pineapple Boy LLC. Suddenly Benito had to start paying his rent checks to Pineapple Boy LLC, but didn't know who this LLC was. And then within three months he got an eviction notice from Pineapple Boy LLC. So we did a lot of research and realized that Pineapple Boy LLC was actually the shell company of a real estate speculator named Michael Harrison who had co-founded this real estate company called Vanguard Properties. And so with that information we were able to figure out who else Michael Harrison had evicted, join up with them and then also produce a series of occupations in Vanguard Realities building. And on the fourth time they pushed us out so violently that they thought we would sue them and then they would drew the eviction. So in this way with this sort of information we were able to keep Benito in his house. We also produced a bunch of these sidewalk stencils that you can see here on the left so that people could mark properties where evictions had happened. And again, one of the ways that these speculators are able to maintain impunity is by hiding, you know, who they are and also hiding where these evictions have happened. The sort of data is not very easy to access. So by putting it online and making it accessible we're hoping to create a lot more visibility about these evictions. So if you go to the next slide. Yeah. So some other early maps that we made were looking at correlations between tech, no capitalist infrastructure and evictions. And so up here on the right you can see we were interested in understanding the correlation between what are called tech bus stops and evictions. And back when this tech boom began, this phenomenon emerged in which Silicon Valley tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, etc. started implementing what they're calling tech buses. But these basically private luxury shuttles so that, again, people can live in quad like neighborhoods in San Francisco or in Oakland or Berkeley or have you. And then reverse commute to Silicon Valley and it's, you know, very campus like suburban geographies. So you can live in this like cool hip neighborhood. And this is all in scare quotes and, you know, work in Silicon Valley. But what we found was that properties were going up in value approximate to the deep like the basically the public bus stops that these private tech companies were using. They were also setting up their own bus stops. We found that 69% of evictions were happening within four blocks of these bus stops and you can just go on Craigslist and see that properties are now being like advertised as two blocks from the Apple bus stop or one block from the Google bus stop. So this was important information for us in organizing against these companies and in pushing for more regulations. We also found very concrete correlations between Airbnb usage and evictions and of course Airbnb started in San Francisco in 2008 and has been trying very hard to make it so that you know landlords can evict and then put those units on Airbnb and profit. There are more, you know, full time vacation rentals of course in San Francisco than non full time vacation rentals and forever Airbnb has been trying to get off without paying taxes. So we've been able to figure out certain speculators you have indeed actually broken the law and evicted tenants and put units on Airbnb. And we've also found that that neighborhoods with the highest Airbnb usage also have the highest eviction rates, which is not surprising. So if you go to the next slide. We've been working in partnership with a bunch of different housing clinics to understand more about the demography of displacement and we all know this. There's a lot of us on the ground organizing but it's been important for us to prove that disproportionately in San Francisco for instance evictions are impacting black and Latinx neighborhoods and tenants. Black residents are over represented by 300% in terms of eviction data from one housing clinic with whom we partner very regularly the eviction defense collaborative and they represent 90% of tenants use eviction cases go through court. So by understanding that we can push for anti racist approaches to understanding that it's this placement crisis, which is very obvious to us but can can be important when we're dealing with policymakers and policy. We've also been able to map where people go after they're displaced. This map on the right shows a map that we produced in collaboration with the eviction defense collaborative where we followed up with 700 folks who were evicted in 2012 to see where they were a year later. And we found that while about half of the people were able to stay in the city a lot of people had to leave. Some people ended up houseless and a couple of people had passed away due to displacement so of course evictions are deadly and you have deadly effects especially for seniors and folks with disabilities. We're using a lot of narrative work as well it's a different type of data that for us is very important and this is a mural that we made in an alley called clarion alley which is a very touristic alley in San Francisco and the Mission District. And we've produced at this point over 150 oral histories, not just in San Francisco also in the other cities and regions and in which we're working. We have the wall mural so we have our oral history mural of San Francisco mapped and there's a phone number that people who walk by it can call and hear stories directly. But they're not just stories of evictions we've strategically also included stories of how people have fought back. So the folks who you see on this this mural who are featured here are still in their homes because they've through direct action fought back so we wanted to really shed light on those those ways of resisting and kind of refuse these dominant narratives that do you want to just portray the city as has this very depressing landscape, which it can be at times but there also is victory so we want to highlight that. We also included the portrait of a man named Alex Nieto who was killed by the cops in 2014. Again a very deadly effective gentrification, what happened was for white men racially profiled Alex he was on his work break as a security guard and because he had a laser and because he's the person of color these these people who all worked in tech called the cops you then showed up and killed him instantly so we have history here as narrated by his parents to bring those connections together. And the mission police station, which houses the four officers who killed him is directly across the street from this mural. So, next slide. Yeah, the next slide, please. Okay, thanks. So, another thing that we do. Oh, if you can go back one. I think it just kind of went too fast. Well, yeah, there we go. Thanks. So we do a lot of work to figure out who these speculators are, like I mentioned with pineapple boy LLC, but we have web pages for a lot of them. And we also do a lot of this kind of mapping of their connections to this company up here on the right for instance, it's called urban green investments. It pretends to be a green, you know, green friendly environmental friendly real estate company in San Francisco It's not at all. It's a subsidiary of a bigger company based in Colorado. And it's, it's owned by this family that goes back at least four or five generations in the sort of first Democrat but now Republican political sphere with strong connections to the Aspen Institute. But they've also bought up a lot of properties in San Francisco now also in Oakland and have evicted tenants through a number of different LLCs that all have different names so they have the 55 Dolores Street LLC the 49 Guerrero Street LLC, so forth and so on. So by figuring out that all of these LLCs belong to the same family we've been able to organize against them and keep people in their homes and connect tenants so that they can they can organize together. And, you know, we found for instance this other speculator here on the bottom left William Rosetti has issued over 4000 evictions in Oakland since 2008 alone and he sits on the mayor's housing cabinet so that's important information that we've been able to put a lot of pressure on him through that sort of research. Yeah. Next slide. So yeah, just to conclude. There's there's been this kind of growth of web maps and you know big data around evictions as of late. And for us, this is very interesting but potentially also scary because a lot of the data that we're working with is very sensitive data and, for instance, with our oral histories. The stories of tenants who, you know, are in the middle of still fighting their evictions may end up in some court case in a year or two years and we don't want to, you know, hand that data over archive that data with a body in which we wouldn't have some agency and in which the tenants themselves wouldn't have agency. So we've refused to archive our data. For instance, with the library, even though we love the library, the public library, but we want to be able to take a story down should a tenant end up in a court case, or should a tenant decide that they don't want their story public anymore. And the same goes with, with other types of data that we collect with with the folks and, you know, fighting their evictions on the ground. So there are big projects like the eviction log right now, for instance, which is in some ways we could say doing important work, but they're taking a very like macro view of evictions and trying to compile this national database and what we found in California is that their data doesn't actually reflect on the ground eviction data work that we're doing and that other groups like tenants together are doing the same was found in Portland and some other cities in the US. So we're, we're very interested in thinking about how these projects and practices of collecting eviction data and producing work with the aim of fighting evictions and stopping evictions. And how that needs to be local and grounded in local organizing and how it really can't be this big universalizing endeavor so. Yeah, on the left you can see some projection work that we've been doing again to create dialogue and not just have our work live online but have it interact and interface with the city. So yeah, I'm going to end it there. I just, I feel like this weight of being so disconnected right now and I'm really sad that we're not all together in the same room, because these presentations are so powerful. And we're also limited by time. So I'm just going to ask really quickly if people wouldn't mind adding 10 minutes on to the schedule for this online event, and we're going to keep this panel discussion short. But we did have a couple questions. One came from Ayanna asking about how this work has funded the work in Chicago, the work in Chelsea and Aaron your work. It's in the Bay Area, but it's also another city. I also had a question just about data collection and if we can get to it. And Aaron it really struck me when you were talking like the murals that you do the ways that you mark the city that they're all these different embodied data collection processes that you're a part of but there's like there's so much within your work that any organizations work that has a really broad sort of social movement tactic approach. So maybe we'll open it up quickly to the panelists to talk about how their work is funded. If they don't mind sharing. I would like to share. We've gotten funding from Lush Cosmetics. They fund stuff. They don't fund things like materials and stuff like that. And they gave us, you know, $15,000. We were able to buy computers for people, you know, good computers. And so screen set sort of a drone stuff like that. And then we've also gotten funding by from the National Resource Defense Council here in Chicago, who are really close partner and ally. And they offer a lot of legal help and help us with policies that have been enacted here in Chicago. They gave us some, you know, like, I think our budget has been like around $40,000 or less. And that's gone to pay people to do canvassing. It's gone to get, you know, like food and stuff like that for meetings, transportation, you know, paying the stipends here and there for people to testify in city council. So it may be a few different families in the neighborhood, like I mentioned before, there's no callers. No folks need that kind of assistance to get to meetings and, you know, pay for childcare. Our project in Chelsea, it's been a sort of a patchwork of a few different funding routes. So we had one grant vote that was internal to a Northeastern, another one that was through an organization that Sarah is tied to that I believe is through NIH or NIHAS, ultimately upstream. Sarah correct me if I brought up that one. And then also, as a grad student, my time is paid through a fellowship that's internal to my school, and I also have some money in there to do project work. So it's really been putting a lot of pieces together to be able to do this project. Yeah, and the mapping project, like I mentioned, we're all volunteers, so we don't have any paid staff and it's not a nonprofit. We technically don't exist on paper, but we are given space from the San Francisco tenants union, which is a union that represents tenants in San Francisco. So we have free meeting space there. And we have applied for grants and we have gotten grants through the tenants union to fund specific projects. So we'll get funding sometimes to work in a particular project. But it's, yeah, sometimes we wonder if we should do something else to kind of make our own project infrastructure more sustainable. We do crowdfund also for specific projects. So we do have revenue that comes in, but not enough for, yeah, any sort of full time or even part time job. Hey, it's Nesma here. I was going to say that we got some of our funding from Mozilla Foundation. So definitely, like, they don't have like specific granting areas, but if you get an in or want a connection, please let me know. And so they're a pretty good partner in some of this work. And then also what we've been trying to do at the lab is is really, really try to have some sort of sustainable funding model, because at least in the Canadian space, there isn't a lot of. Well, it's not just in a cane space, but there's not a lot of funding for this kind of work without people trying to directly shape the work. And so what we what I've noticed was super helpful was actually consulting. So just doing like tagging into like organizations that are already doing like large grants and like supporting them on that, or cities that are trying to do better and helping support them in that process. And, you know, providing those opportunities, like really trying to do consulting work that actually pays for also the law of the public facing work, but does not does not actually compromise any of the work and actually helps get the work out there and faster. And so that's been a tactic that I actually got from white men, oddly enough, and it's been super helpful in actually being able to do some of the work. So thank you all. Unfortunately, we have, I'm going to turn it over to Lordus, but I do just want to just reflect that this is about environmental data justice but all the different embodied practices from running the office to doing girls that are involved in this kind of work. It's pretty remarkable. So thank you all so much. I've, there's so many points that I'm taking away from this and I find inspiring. So this is so now we thank you for taking another 10 minutes and being part of our next steps discussion. This is going to be a full discussion, not just among panelists but also any attendee who is interested in participating, either by video audio or chat please. Feel free to join and be part of this conversation on a more active way. And we're hoping that this final discussion will get us to a vision of next steps, such as what would be helpful to your work at the intersection of environmental and data justice. And I know we can't get up to everything tonight, but what have we missed that you want to emphasize or share. So if you would like to take part in this conversation, through video or audio, please click the raise your hand button, and I'll give you a second to do this. As Damian showed you at the beginning, the raise your hand button is at the bottom of the of your screen. And this is great. I see raised hands already. Yes, I'm really excited. So keep in mind that your video is it'll automatically turn on once you re enter the room so you'll be bumped out, and then you'll be bumped back in. So if you don't want to be seen, then you can make sure to click stop video in the bottom bar, and also make sure that your microphone button is muted so we can avoid echo and you can tell it's muted. If it has a diagonal red line over it, and then you can unmute it when you're called on to speak. So once we're in the discussion, please put your name in the chat. And if you want to say something will put you on stack so I'm going to just give Damian a minute to promote people, or have you re enter people into the gallery. And really to anybody, you know, come on come on. We want to make this a real co learning experience. And as we're waiting for people to come in. Um, I just want to share so I want to share one takeaway for myself. I've really what really resonated me especially as a former environmental science teacher is just how much you can bring to this environmental data justice conversation. And I'm really excited about eco crew in there, and your, your work. So our people in is there anymore. Oh, and then so. Okay, we have four attendees come on we need more people, more people. Okay, and I'm being told to stop sharing. Oh, but before we, before I stop sharing though. Um, so this discussion again will be recorded and shared publicly. And then once we get going will we'll get a flow of calling on people to be part of the conversation. And we follow edgy's code of conduct, which you received in the email and it emphasizes respectful communication. Um, so I want to go over some next steps to just to start this conversation. So Sarah drops the next steps document into the chat. And after some conversations at the data for black lives conference. We thought it would be a good idea to have a EDJ slack. And because there really is a needed space for environmental justice organizers to connect with technologists in order to, and others in order to meet their data needs. And we wanted to create an ongoing EDJ community. So I'm really excited to have this space where, you know, a part and beyond this event, we can share exciting projects, offer to share skills and tools, and just have a place to answer and ask questions about our collective struggles with environmental data. So the doc that Sarah shared in the chat room that has a link to the slack if you would like to join the slack. We've also been starting to create an online and public environmental data justice syllabus that we can circulate in order to foster co learning from each other. And we've collected some ideas from speakers tonight, but want to hear from all of the attendees as well. So please feel free to contribute to the syllabus with whatever resources you think would enrich this discussion. And really any resource so books, articles, toolkits, movies, blog posts, artwork, anything. And then we also wanted to talk about setting up some more meet some sort of meetings that can happen monthly or or by monthly and some more informal meetings where activists can present their projects just like we did tonight, get support and continue discussing these points. So one question is that people would be interested in attending these meetings and then finally we have our environmental data justice principles document and these presentations have really given us some new some additional principles to think with. And we know that EDJ principles are constantly evolving so we please feel free to take a look at this document and add your own and comment on them. So now I'd like to open up the floor I'll stop sharing and start the broader discussion. Okay, so if you So since we only have a few people on video you can raise your hand if you'd like to say something and I can call on you, or you can put your a question or comment in the chat. Okay, so we have some people still getting into the dock. I would like to, if no one else has a question or comment I would like to talk about this question that came up before about consent and how our panelists are thinking about consent related to data and their projects. So I'll start, because I think this is kind of the elephant in the room and a lot of the work that we do around indigenous data sovereignty is this notion of individual consent, you know, we know that there's IR, you know, IRBs and various ethical processes for research and data. And then those are typically typically driven from at the individual level to ensure that there's, you know, no harm being done. And so this is something that that that the indigenous data sovereignty networks across the world are really grappling with. And if we're thinking about data as a collective entity data as originating and belonging to a collective. How do you, how do you engage in individual consent does a tribal nation, a native nation, have the right to individual tribal member data, if that individual tribal member does not consent to release it to the nation right and that's a very real dilemma. And so my response to this is that we are thinking through this very hard. So there's a big meeting happening in June, which is really at the intersection of data sovereignty and the law. And so we're having a big international indigenous law and data symposium in in Spain, because we're trying to figure out. Some frameworks for moving forward in that in this space and so I'm really open. This is not an organic discussion but I want to address it because it is absolutely. I would say probably the biggest elephant in the room for the work that we're doing. Any more responses. I could chime in real quick. So, I think I mentioned towards the end that we the same company that it's in my neighborhood is also in in Ohio and in Ohio there was principles that couldn't figure out how come kids from one school district were scoring so much lower than the other. So they they the principles and people and parents reached out to Cincinnati University and they did a health study, and they were able to show that the kids who were exposed to it affected their IQ. And, you know, fast forward to our neighborhood when the story broke about Megan is being emitted from SHL and the other company Watt Co. A journalist was looking for an expert to comment on the story in Chicago and reached out to the to the researcher in Ohio, and then she found out that we were organizing and then reached out to us, and then we started to to talk about like, you know, how people were able to get tested here in Chicago because the EPA was sending people to Cook County, and which is like the county, like the free clinic, you know, where they can go get tested. But one, you had to pay for it with your own insurance, it wasn't free. So like you had to have insurance to pay a cold payment. If you were undocumented didn't have a bomber care didn't have insurance, then you had to pay up front. And then it was unclear. A lot of folks who are undocumented who live in my neighborhood did not want to go get tested because they were afraid that it would be like, they'd be at the center of a very politicized issue and and a target for immigration. So it's been like pulling teeth working with the Department of Public Health here in Chicago, like we're literally coming up with a strategy to bring one that the results would be people who are getting tested and their children, and that they would choose if they wanted this information to be submitted to the county for proof that that there is exposure that people have been impacted by the by this but it's still not flushed out. It's been very difficult to move this. It's been a year now that we've been working with city officials, county officials, and researchers to figure out a plan, and there still is not a plan is very difficult. So we had we, I'm sorry I don't have the answer. I just know that for us it's worth it to be part of this fight and we don't want to relinquish any opportunity to protect our community and the integrity of health studies that are being done in our in our neighborhood. Michelle has a suggestion question, and I'm going to pass it over to Michelle to pose it. Okay, thank you. Thank you everyone. I learned so much tonight. One of the ideas we had when we're organizing this meeting is we were wondering if there would be interest to have future meetings that were less like, you know, a whole bunch of presentations but having a kind of more like a demoing set up where we could go one by one and people like we could have a meeting and one person or organization would bring its project in progress to that meeting. Say what's going on with the challenges are and kind of build support. You know, one of the things that will often come is if there's not people often need even technical help. And something more like that as a kind of set up for regular meeting do is that of interest to people do you think that would resonate with with the needs of projects or just curious what people think. I saw some jazz hands and the idea of quarterly, which it might be a good pace. Sorry, trying to find my mute button. I love the idea of the meetings and I'm really struck by the comments you just made all go about the challenges of getting consent and participating in this kind of bio monitoring. And then also the frustration that there doesn't need to be consent for storing the manganese there or for why do you need to prove that it's in bodies if it's in dust and could get in bodies. You know, so this kind of infuriating insistence for more and more evidence of that when, you know, it's totally known that harm is possible. So how do we shift the discussion away from proving that harm has happened and putting you putting people continually in the position to prove that they've been harmed rather than just this can cause harm. Therefore, and it's, you know, and there's already exposure to improve proven. I was just agreeing that I would love to participate in quarterly meetings or any future meetings. Just a couple more minutes. Do we have any more questions or suggestions, comments, reflections. Anything from the eco team or from Sarah's class Sarah. I just want to raise up that in the next step stock people are writing a lot of different thoughts. So having meetings sharing resources. Can anybody report on them from here because I'm trying to scroll. I'm trying to use Twitter more so we can be sharing outside more what's happening in the meetings as they're happening and suggestions about having kind of a meeting topic or room space where we can maybe subdivide into different conversations. So sharing those comments on that next step stock. I know that it is it's 909 and it is past my bedtime officially. I do have one more announcement. Again, the last thing I want to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to do before we leave is to participate in our survey. I hope that you've enjoyed this event. It was insightful. It was inspiring. So I want to put a link for our survey. So take some time to fill out a few questions to let us know how we can continue to offer these types of events and also continue to enhance them as we move forward. Okay, so you can go to the chat everybody has it and it's a Google form and please share share with us your thoughts and opinions. Thank you. And I would also like to give a big thanks and jazz hands to Damien and Kevin who helped us put together this event. Thank you to Becky and Garance our note takers and to Lindsay and Michelle for moderating and helping facilitate our discussions to Sarah and her class for helping out. And to our amazing panelists we couldn't have asked for better panelists this is so great. Thank you all for showing up and participating. We have our email address edj at EnviroDataGov.org feel free to shoot us an email and we really look forward to seeing you all on Slack.