 Last month something big happened in my hometown of Bell Gardens, California. Let's talk about it. In February of 2024, Bell Gardens passed the first ever groundbreaking Climate Emergency Declaration. In doing so, Bell Gardens became the first and Southeast LA to move such a measure forward and endorse the International Call for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Now this didn't happen overnight. Last summer, East York's Communities for Justice, along with the Safe Cities team, first petitioned Bell Gardens to pass the very first Climate Emergency Resolution. For context, Bell Gardens is a predominantly Latino working class majority renter city in southeast Los Angeles. The city historically lags behind others in Los Angeles County when it comes to progressive climate action, and it has unfortunately endured years of environmental injustices, ranging from air pollution to toxic releases. Now I grew up in Bell Gardens, so I know what it meant to have this really innate sense of what injustice feels like. It feels like trying to breathe in air that's thick and dense with smog from the countless diesel engines idling on the 7-10. It can also feel like the soles of your swamp meat shoes literally melting as you walk home from school in the summer. And inevitably, it feels like being the first to receive power outage notices during the sizzling summer heat waves. Safe to say, no pun intended, that this has been a long time coming. I'm extremely proud of my hometown and its local leaders, as well as all of the folks that have been working on environmental justice issues in the region that helped make this declaration possible.