On a clear, sunny Juneteenth at Palo Alto’s Baylands Nature Reserve in 2023, President Joe Biden celebrated billions of dollars for climate projects and hailed the work of one small local organization in particular. “Climate Resilient Communities,” he said, “gives members a voice in [climate] planning and adaptation.” From those billions, CRC was awarded $1.3 million in grants for environmental justice projects.
“I had residents calling me in tears saying how incredible it was to see their struggle recognized by the president,” says Cade Cannedy, CRC’s program director. Pam Jones, a CRC board member, played a recording of the speech for her community in Belle Haven, a historically redlined, predominantly Latino and Black neighborhood in Menlo Park. It was “hopeful,” she says, “for a moment.”
Then President Donald Trump pulled the rug out—or maybe more aptly, smashed the whole foundation—from under CRC and other organizations focusing on environmental justice (often shortened to EJ). In January, upon taking office, Trump immediately rescinded environmental justice orders back to the Clinton era and froze millions of dollars in grant money. In February, his administration placed nearly 170 employees on leave from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Justice office, which Biden had dramatically expanded. In March, he announced plans to close all EJ offices across the country. “Environmental justice” is a bad word now, in Trump’s world.
But in the whiplash of news on grant freezes and legal challenges, the status of Biden-era EJ grants has been unclear even to grantees themselves. In the latest wrinkle, on Tuesday a U.S. district judge in Rhode Island issued an injunction blocking Trump’s freeze on grants funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which boosted EJ work nationwide.
Bay Nature is reporting on how the Trump administration is affecting nature, species, and environmental work in the Bay Area. Contact Jillian Magtoto at jillian@baynature.org or on Signal at beluga.23 for tips or feedback, and read more stories in the project here.
In recent conversations with 13 Bay Area agencies and nonprofits performing EJ work funded by BIL or IRA grants, Bay Nature has found that over one-third have had to halt or change their work over the past three months due to funding freezes or sheer uncertainty. Some, including CRC, are now struggling to pay their workers. “Those grants were supporting probably 10 of our 15 staff,” says Cannedy. “Small, community-based organizations [are] in very similar positions.”
“The communities hit hardest are going to be the poor communities and communities of color,” says Jones. Eradicating EJ programs, she believes, “is extremely racially driven.”
All is not lost. Some EJ program managers told BN they have been able to access their funding from the EPA or U.S. Forest Service since Trump’s inauguration. They are taking it one invoice at a time. “I successfully pulled down dollars last month,” writes Junko Bryant of Grassroots Ecology, a Palo Alto-based nonprofit that has an EPA grant to restore habitat along degraded urban creeks aroundRedwood City. “We will try again next week, fingers crossed.”
Grassroots Ecology interns Ruby Choy-Angulo and Kapewa Hopfe removing giant reed (Arundo donax) at Redwood High School in April; volunteers planting on Redwood Creek near downtown Redwood City in March. (Photos by Grassroots Ecology)
“Environmental justice” simply means that everyone deserves a clean and healthy environment. The controversial part? This effort is most strongly needed in communities of color disproportionately living near sources of pollution. According to Trump, prioritizing these communities is “discriminatory and illegal.”
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One such community is East Palo Alto, where a predominantly Latino population lives amid 150 registered polluted sites and a history of chemical spills. Residents there live, on average, 13 years less than the rest of San Mateo County. Asthma-related emergency visit rates for children are almost double that of the county.
Last year, the EPA awarded CRC a $500,000 environmental justice grant to distribute air purifiers to 400 East Palo Alto families, many with asthmatic children or seniors. Cannedy hired two people to run the program.
But in mid-March, Cannedy saw CRC’s program named in internal EPA documents, released by a U.S. Senate committee that listed 400 grants targeted for termination. That’s when Cannedy knew it was over, and paused work. “It’s very difficult for us to continue working on them,” he says. “Because at any moment they could revoke those grants.”
CRC has kept the two new hires and reassigned them to other projects. “We don’t want to do any sort of layoffs,” Cannedy says. But the shortfall remains. “We’re cannibalizing next year’s revenue to fund these positions.”
Palo Alto and East Palo Alto divided by Highway 101, with visible differences in canopy cover, in 2019 (Pi.1415926535 via Wikimedia Commons, CC by SA 3.0); Community air quality training and air purifier distribution for East Palo Alto and Belle Haven residents in October 2022. (Photo by Mason Carter)
Also struggling to compensate workers is All Positives Possible, a Richmond-based nonprofit that has been using a Inflation Reduction Act grant to do fish testing in the Carquinez Strait, which is bounded by oil refineries and sewage plants. Along the strait, black Vallejo residents angle for fish like starry flounder, striped bass, and California halibut. “For 30-plus years, there had been no data collection on fish quality, or water quality for that matter, in the area,” says LaDonna Williams, programs director. “We’re [an] invisible community.”
When All Positives Possible was awarded $950,000 in 2023, Williams and her team got moving. “We were finally excited,” she says. They sampled local fish for mercury, PCBs, and flame retardants. In January it was just about time to get started on the second half of the project, and pay people for their work. That’s when Trump’s January executive order was announced. Soon after, Williams’ EPA contact told her to “just sit tight.”
Those were the last instructions Williams received. As of late March she has still received no word. Williams has yet to spend over half of the grant, which she now believes is gone. “I just didn’t think that [Trump] would really try and snatch from under folks that which has already been agreed to and in contract,” she says.
As a result, Williams is struggling to honor her contracts with at least seven people and organizations. “Without the grant money, we won’t be able to pay them,” says Williams. Not only that, but it puts All Positives Possible and other “small grassroots organizations at huge risk of possible litigation.”
Michelle Pierce, executive director of the nonprofit Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates (BVHPCA), says the EPA gave her organization $500,000 to create a seven-member council “with deep community roots” to oversee public health training and pollution testing. The organization hired two staff to coordinate it, promised stipends to each council member, and gave out subgrants to San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and 3rd Street Youth, which each hired their own staff. By the start of this year, they were trucking along.
In February, BVHPCA could not access the EPA’s funding portal, which is how grantees get reimbursements. In March, its name appeared on the same internal list of grants targeted for termination that CRC was on. The last reimbursement the organization got was in October.
Among the unreimbursed costs are wages for the new staff. Subgrantee PSR found other funding for its new staffer—who will work on other projects instead of this one, says SF Bay Area PSR executive director Marj Plumb. BVHPCA has been paying the new staff “out of my pocket,” says Pierce, who is looking for alternative funding. “That has been the hard part, wondering how long we will be able to keep them,” says Pierce. “This is not the time that you want to become unemployed.”
For her, small nonprofits fulfill a key role in society, doing community work that governments cannot. “There are certain parts of society that just do not trust the rest of society,” Pierce says. “It is niche nonprofits such as ours that can actually reach them effectively.”
PSR volunteers tabling at Contra Costa Eco Fair in September 2024, sharing information about the health harms of air pollution from gas home appliances and the benefits of electrification (Photos by SF Bay Area PSR); Bayview Hunters Point aerial view in 2024. (Firstcultural via Wikimedia Commons, CC0 1.0)
A perhaps surprising casualty of the war on environmental justice: some tree-planting programs that were funded by the Inflation Reduction Act via the Forest Service. All of these local programs are meant to fill longstanding gaps in the urban tree canopy that have rendered poorer neighborhoods hotter and less resilient to climate change.
After Trump’s executive order, Napa Resource Conservation District’s (RCD) Alison Blodorn, the forest health and restoration program director, stopped ordering trees to plant in downtown Napa. When the Forest Service didn’t reimburse the RCD for its grant work from October to January, the agency stopped scouting for possible planting spots, and reassigned a staffer who was hired to work on the project. “We really can’t afford to float the overhead and not know if we’re going to get reimbursed for that work,” Blodorn said in late March.
This week, Blodorn sent an update: money has begun to flow again. The RCD has been “cautiously ramping back up” work again. A new hire has gone back to working on the project. But it’s not clear whether next year’s budget will have money for her. With federal funding being unpredictable, Blodorn says, “it’s certainly something we’re keeping a really close eye on.”
The City of Concord planned to plant 500 trees, says city forester Tyce Dekker. As of late February, it had bought only 50 and none had been planted. The grant was meant to pay four part-time employees to plant trees, but Dekker hasn’t hired them because the city put its grant projects on hold after the Forest Service only partially doled out reimbursements. “We’re understaffed as it is,” Dekker says.
Gone is the sunny Biden-era optimism for those working on environmental justice projects. But many people said they aren’t giving up. They see signs of hope, and of communities picking up the slack where they can. Pierce says that even after a month-long delay in paying the BVHPCA’s community council’s stipend, “the majority of them still showed up for free.”
LaDonna Williams has been fighting for environmental justice since the 1990s, when she learned that her townhouse rested on a former toxic waste site after a decade of living there. Many of her neighbors moved, suffered health conditions, and died. She believes the contamination led to family members’ deaths and caused her own chronic skin conditions and breathing problems. “We’re going to continue to fight for clean air, water, and soil,” she says, “for our fair share of living in this world.”
Update, April 17, 2025: After receiving new information from a source, the species of fish found and fished in the Carquinez strait were corrected to starry flounder, striped bass, and California halibut.
