Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability (LCJA) is helping ensure that communities in South Fresno and across Fresno County are shaping the climate and environmental policies that affect their lives.

LCJA partners with residents in rural Inland California to advance policies that reflect community priorities and address pressing challenges related to climate, health and environmental justice. The organization supports community-led advocacy on issues ranging from land use and agriculture to wastewater and extreme heat.

Through participation in Kresge’s Climate Change, Health & Equity (CCHE) initiative, LCJA is strengthening its work in Fresno, one of four focus cities where Kresge supports long-term, place-based efforts to advance equity and opportunity.

LCJA recently shared how its commitment to justice, equity, and accountability guides its advocacy, helping ensure that lower-income communities are not disproportionately burdened by environmental and health challenges such as poor air quality, inequitable land-use decisions, and extreme heat.

Q: Tell us about your organization and the work you do.

LCJA: Leadership Counsel for Justice & Accountability works alongside the most impacted communities to advocate for sound policy and eradicate injustice to secure equal access to opportunity regardless of wealth, race, income and place. We work toward the following outcomes in South Fresno:

• Transportation funding that prioritizes clean transportation networks and increases access to opportunity
• Land use planning that aligns with community priorities and contributes to healthy land uses
• Community-centered and community-driven decision-making wherein impacted residents guide the future of their communities
• Equitable investments in community-serving infrastructure and amenities

Q: How do you expect participation in CCHE to influence or strengthen your work?

LCJA: Participating in CCHE will resource our community-led efforts to shift the status quo of local planning and investment surrounding air quality, land use, extreme heat and transportation in Fresno, addressing widely felt disparities with community-identified solutions. Our 13 years of work alongside South Fresno residents have led to key opportunities to make this happen.

CCHE will also help expand our engagement to build lasting community power and unite several efforts surrounding these individual policy mechanisms. It will also support our efforts to uplift a community-driven narrative about Fresno’s most pressing issues and mobilize a long-term, sustained climate and health equity movement.

Q: Why is it important to have spaces like CCHE within the environmental and health sectors?

LCJA: CCHE brings community-based organizations and health institutions together to create a unified movement for climate justice and health equity. Through CCHE, we have deepened our partnerships among health professionals and other community-based organizations to strengthen our work toward community-driven solutions.

The opportunities to learn from others and share our experiences have proven to be invaluable to our work to ensure the communities we work alongside are healthy and thriving. Frontline communities have the solutions to our climate crisis because residents know their communities best. Working together, we can ensure these solutions are taken seriously and implemented.

Q: What is one thing you’d like others to understand about your work in the climate change and/or health equity space, or about the city where you do this work?

LCJA: There is a longstanding history of concentrating polluting land uses in South Fresno. The community faces many challenges, including extreme heat, polluted air, and limited access to opportunity. The entrenched culture of local decision making fails to include impacted residents and relies on closed-door processes in collaboration with profit-motivated industries.

At the same time, momentum is on the community’s side. South Fresno has many assets, including its resilience, network of organizers, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create more responsive and accountable government actors and, potentially, a new transportation sales tax measure which would impact land use decisions for decades.

Want more stories about our partners in Fresno? For season 2 of Kresge’s PathBreakers podcast, we took the show to Fresno, California to explore how local leaders are shaping the story of their city. Listen or watch on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.