Fresh Air Vallejo invited community leaders and advocates together for a city-wide conversation regarding the start of EJ4Vallejo — Environmental Justice for the city — at Vallejo’s Norman King Center Wednesday night.

The event brought together like-minded community members for an in-depth look at the new project that aims to set priorities for “cleaner air, safer neighborhoods, and healthier futures,” said EJ4Vallejo Project Coordinator Louis Michael.

In what will be an 18-month project, inviting a series of community conversations and educational meetings, Fresh Air Vallejo hopes to garner a stronger sense of ongoing environmental injustices occurring right here in Vallejo.

The project comes at the receipt of the Windward Fund Environmental Justice Data Grant, which outlines the criteria for collecting data on the Vallejo community, in an effort to understand the environmental impacts and the challenges that they pose.

At the end of the 18-month period, the information gathered will be organized into a report, which will then be presented to the Vallejo City Council, “to help inform their plan for incorporating the environmental justice element into their general plan,” said Michael.

Per the recent approval of bill SB1000, several cities throughout California — including Vallejo — are  required to have an environmental justice element in their general plan. It must also address key areas like green spaces, access to healthy food, air pollution, and more.

The goal of Wednesday’s launch was to get the word out and inform residents about the basics of environmental justice.

Over the next year and a half, “there will be several larger community gatherings,” said Michael, similar to the launch, in an effort to gather mass information about the community. Periodically throughout the project, they are also hoping to host follow-up meetings and listening sessions around specific topics like food injustice, pollution, and housing.

The goal of each of the meetings “is to get specific information and stories from the community around those specific issues,” he said.

Partnering with organizations like the NAACP Vallejo chapter, Citizen Air Monitoring Network, Center for Urban Excellence, and Central Latino, EJ4Vallejo aims to “reach different areas of Vallejo – different demographics – to cover the diverse range of people” that live in the city, said Michael.

During the project’s term, the organizations are also slated to host a meeting in collaboration with EJ4Vallejo to aid in bringing awareness to the issue and help to gather information from each of their unique communities.

While the 18-month project relies partly on data, explains Fresh Air Vallejo member and Lead Consultant on EJ4 Vallejo, Lorene “Lori” Allio, “data can be quantitative and it can be qualitative.”

“What we want to do in our community engagement is try to figure out what that data really means and try to attach some of your experiences to some of that so we can really make a strong case for what you want to see changed in terms of environment,” she said to attendees during Wednesday’s meeting.

In conducting community-driven meetings and swapping stories, the hope is to break the cycle of environmental injustice that exists in Vallejo. Growing up in the Bay Area, Allio says, there was a general understanding — in part due to a cycle of environmental injustice — that all the refineries were up in the Carquinez Strait.

“And if there was going to be a new project, or there needed to be a refinery or chemical plant, the best place for it was the Carquinez Strait because that’s where it already was,” she said. That cycle, which led to furthering those companies’ investments, at times came at the cost of the health of the population in those areas.

“It’s really about trying to break the cycle of putting more pollution where people already have more than their fair share, that’s the basics of it,” she said. Besides reducing pollution, a handful of EJ4Vallejo’s goals include reducing risks to health, promoting safe and sanitary homes, and promoting public facilities and food access.

For more information, visit the Fresh Air Vallejo site.