YUCA in East Palo Alto fights for for Environmental Justice in our community. We are doing this by addressing two major problems that the community is facing: Gentrification and Environmental Racism.

Gentrification
Already, our office has been moved around a five times because of redevelopment in our community. Over the last 3 years, we worked to educate and organize the community to speak out about redevelopment projects that are taking advantage of the city, displacing people and making misleading promises to the community. Through our efforts of petition gathering, outreaching, protesting and mobilizing folks to speak at City Council meetings, we were able to help stop a "University Palms" office development from coming in.

Unfortunately, after a new round of city council member elections, the proposal came back on to the table. Though we organized again, this time the proposal passed. The community was able to get better concessions or benefits because it was stopped the first time. The revised proposal now provides concessions that the developers said earlier were impossible to do, proving that they were trying to take advantage of us all along. Now, we are strategizing on a new campaign to deal with gentrification and redevelopment.

Environmental Racism
In East Palo Alto, US Liquids operates a Romic facility that has been operating on an expired permit for over 10 years. YUCA, Ujima Security Council and other community members have been working to get the Department of Toxic Substance Control to hold Romic accountable for completing an Environmental Impact Report and Permit Application for public review for over 5 years. Last year, DTSC agreed to regular monthly meetings so we could hold them accountable to the timeline that they provided us. We are currently developing ways to make sure that community members voices will really be heard in this process.

As a part of the Romic campaign, YUCA is also conducting a community-wide health survey to get information about health conditions in our community. Nothing like this has ever been done and we hope to use this information to show how traffic and toxic environmental sites are affecting our community. In the summer, we completed a pilot health survey ,for which we surveyed 275 young people in the community and found high incidents of asthma and other conditions. We will use our experiences from that survey to get better results for the community-wide survey.