The HellerSchool for Social Policy and Management

BrandeisUniversity

Assisting The Water Haulers:

Using Grassroots Driven Development

to Secure Environmental Justice

Submitted by

Rita Monestersky-Sebastian

A paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree

In

Sustainable International Development

______

Academic Advisor Date

______Director of the Sustainable International Development Program Date

Table of Contents

Abstract

Executive Summary

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Description of the sustainable development problem

Problems faced by the water haulers

Efforts to Improve Access to Water

Access to Water as an Environmental Justice Issue

Development question

EPA History of Collaborative Partnership

Methods

A Community Learns about Participatory Development

A Collaborative Project to Provide Safe Water

Limitations of the Learning Method

Literature Review

The Historical Context

Government/Grassroots Partnership Models

EPA/Grassroots Partnerships

Discussion

The Partners

The Work

1: Process v Blueprint

2: Agency

3: Participation

4: Capacity

5: Utilitarianism

6: Interlinkages

7: Power redistribution

8: Cultural Relevancy

Conclusion and Implications

Measurements of Success

Implications for Water Haulers

Implications for Grassroots Organizations

Implications for EPA

Appendix :

Appendix A: Community Mapping Project

Appendix B: Project Partners and Contributors

Appendix C: EPA Signage

Bibliography

Abstract

This paper reviews a collaboration between a grassroots organization on the Navajo Nation and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the purpose of providing safe drinking water for families located in remote areas where local sources were contaminated by uranium and other pathogens. The project was sponsored under the Environmental Justice (EJ) program at the EPA. EJ began as a grassroots movement to prevent minority communities from suffering a disproportionate share of environmental threats. The EJ movement has expanded to include the assertion of positive liberties, such as when minority communities lack equal access to services such as the provision of safe drinking water. As a result, the EJ movement became involved in community development and needed tools and strategies for allowing grassroots empowerment within these efforts. These can be provided by grassroots driven development (GDD) approaches that have emerged within the field of development theory and practices. The project was coordinated by a graduate student from the Heller School for Sustainable International Development, which integrates the principles and techniques of GDD into its core curriculum. This paper discusses how the tools of GDD were used to organize the project and how they affected the collaboration with the EPA and other government agency partners. The project can serve as a template for how GDD can be used to empower communities to participate as full partners in development projects conducted in collaboration with the EPA.

Executive Summary

This paper describes how the tools of grassroots driven development were employed within a collaboration between the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and a grassroots organization on the Navajo Nation. The purpose of the partnership was to provide access to safe drinking water for the community of Black Falls, where the local sources were contaminated by uranium and other pathogens. The project was funded under an Environmental Justice (EJ) program grant. Access to drinking water has been identified as an EJ issue because a disproportionate percentage of Native American households lack sanitation and piped water. The situation in Black Falls also qualified as an EJ issue because the presence of abandoned uranium mines in the area contributed to the contamination of local water sources. Both the siting of the mines in a minority community and the failure to take remedial action on the abandoned sites follow the patterns of discrimination which gave rise to the EJ movement.

The involvement of an EJ program in providing access to safe drinking water reflects an evolution in the EJ movement from its initial focus on blocking developments that were harmful to communities. Instead, the EJ activity was to become part of a development project. For an EJ project, the means through which a development takes place can be as important as the output. EJ is a grassroots movement and the directly affected people must be an integral part of every aspect of the process. The empowerment of the people is an essential part of achieving EJ. The EPA created a Collaborative Model for partnerships between grassroots organizations and the EPA to serve as a template for this type of project.

Modern development theory can contribute to these efforts. The original top-down development approaches have been supplemented with an increasing emphasis on community driven development (CDD) in which local governing bodies and organizations play an important role in the process. At the Heller School, emphasis is given to a bottom-up approach in which grassroots organizations serve as the vehicle for the local participation. In this paper, the term "grassroots driven development" (GDD) will be used to describe this type of project. The goals and processes of GDD match the principles of both EJ and the EPA's collaborative model.

In the Black Falls project, the GDD methods and strategies were used to guide the community involvement in a partnership with the EPA. This paper looks at how eight of the central components of GDD were implemented and how they affected the collaboration:

  1. Process v Blueprint: Traditional blueprint approaches try to specify project activities and results before the project starts and they do not work well for a collaboration with a grassroots organization. For the Black Falls project, a spiral development process was employed in which the final plans evolved via the interaction of all stakeholders.
  2. Agency: In order to work effectively with its partners, the Black Falls community had to evolve from a needs-based or dependency approach to the agencies into an assumption of full responsibility for their own development. This paper documents specific techniques utilized in achieving this transformation, as well as the profound effect of the transformation on the community.
  3. Participation: The direct participation of a community in the development process has been described as an instrumental freedom, providing intrinsic value to the community as well as improving the execution of the project. This paper discusses ways that the depth of participation was maximized, as well as the impact of the participation in achieving the partnership objectives.
  4. Capacity: Building community capacity is a goal of the EJ program in the EPA. The project adopted the philosophy that the community already had the capacity to achieve its goals, and that what was needed was a way to 'actualize' this preexisting capacity. This actualization was achieved using various organizational methods. The end result was to improve the sustainability of the project and enhance the ability of the community for executing future projects.
  5. Utilitarianism: Prior to this project, the government agency partners mostly adopted a utilitarian philosophy of delivering the most benefits for the most people. The project sensitized the partners to the concept of providing services to those most in need of assistance.
  6. Interlinkages: Prior to the project, the agency partners tended to focus on solving a single problem in a development effort such as providing a water supply. The project helped the partners to understand and respond to the interlinkages between multiple vectors, such as health issues, education, poverty, and environmental issues.
  7. Power redistribution: The empowerment of the local community is a goal of both EJ and development organizations. Empowering a grassroots organization redistributes the power in a local community in ways that may not be universally supported. The partnership structures have to anticipate the artifacts from this redistribution.
  8. Cultural relevancy: The incorporation of cultural factors into project planning occurred naturally through the community's direction of the process, and the agency partners accommodated these customs. Livestock are an essential part of Diné culture, and some issues in this area were not fully resolved.

This paper outlines a series of methods for empowering a grassroots organization to work effectively in partnerships with government agencies and it makes suggestions to the government agencies how they might improve their operations in these collaborations. The methods are presented as suggestions for the reader to evaluate, as the paper does not offer proof of their effectiveness for two reasons. The first is that the author was a central player in the program and is not in a position to offer objective critique. Secondly, insufficient time has elapsed to determine long-term impacts. What can be stated is that the project achieved its tangible goals, in that the water systems were installed in the homes and the community is working cooperatively to deliver water and maintain the systems. At the conclusion of the project, both communality members and partners in the government agencies stated that the project had been successful not just in achieving its tangible goals, but also in introducing an effective approach for bottom-up development. A final point is that the organization is running effectively two months after the scaffolding has been removed. To the extent that a development planner can play a central role in a project, a key issue is how well the organization functions after the support is withdrawn. In this case, the community has started a new agricultural cooperative, and representatives from Black Falls are working directly with the government agencies concerning outstanding water issues.

Acknowledgements

This paper is dedicated to the partners who made it possible

to the families in Black Falls

to Clancy Tenley and Zoe Heller from US EPA,

to Kurt Kesteloot from US IHS

to Forgotten People CDC

Abbreviations

ATSDR: United States Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

EJ: Environmental Justice

FP CDC: Forgotten People Community Development Corporation

GAO: Governmental Accountability Office

GDD: Grassroots Driven Development

IHS: Indian Health Service

IWG: Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice

NIMBY:Not-in-my-backyard: refers to disputes over siting of development projects

NNDWR: Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources

NN EPA: Navajo Nation Environmental Agency

NNTC: Navajo Nation Tribal Council

NTUA: Navajo Tribal Utility Authority

PPAS: EJ guidelines for public participation

RESEP: Radiation Exposure Screening and Education Program

USDA: United States Department of Agriculture

US EPA: United States Environmental Protection Agency

Introduction

This paper resulted from an internship with the Forgotten People Community Development Corporation (FP CDC) conducted between September, 2008, and March, 2009, as part of a program funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The FP CDC is a grassroots organization representing communities in the western half of the Navajo Nation. The communities are spread over almost 2 million acres of remote desert terrain in the northeast of Arizona. Only 3 percent of the families in these communities have electricity and only 10 percent have running water (HR5168, 2004).Most practice a subsistence lifestyle of herding sheep. Many of the older people speak only Dinè, which they use instead of ‘Navajo’ to refer to their tribe and language.

The FP CDC started as a political organization called Sovereign Dinè Nation which advocated on behalf of the Dinè communities subject to forced relocation by the United States government as a result of a land dispute between the Hopi and Navajo tribal governments. The relocation program was begun in 1974 and continued until 2007. From 1966 through 2007, the communities were also subject to the Bennett Freeze, which was issued by Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner Robert Bennett and prevented constructing or repairing homes, water supplies, roads, and other facilities on land that was subject to a land dispute with the Hopi Tribe. With the ending of the relocation program and the lifting of the Bennett Freeze, the group reorganized itself as a community development organization dedicated to the rebuilding of the communities.

The internship position was conceived during a conference on Environmental Justice (EJ) sponsored by the US EPA in Billings, Montana, in June, 2008. Representatives of the EPA approached FP CDC and asked if they would be interested in helping in projects to provide safe drinking water in their communities.

The EPA was involved in a major effort to improve access to safe water on the Navajo Nation as a result of two pressures. The first was a commitment made by the EPA at the 2002 United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in which the US pledged to reduce the number of its citizens lacking access to safe drinking water and sanitation by 50% by 2015 (US01, 2005). The largest concentration of such people was on the Navajo Nation, especially in the communities served by FP CDC. The second was pressure by Congress for the EPA to redress problems resulting from the legacy of uranium mining in the 1950s and 60s. Over 1300 mines remain unclaimedand the leeching of uranium from the slag piles into drinking water supplies was damaging water supplies (McSwain, 2007). The EPA and Indian Health Services prioritized the regions of Black Falls and Dennehotso, where local sources were uranium contaminated and safe water was not available within 10 miles (EPA01, 2008).

Access to water was also one of the highest concerns of FP CDC, and the organization agreed to help in the effort. A project proposal and funding request were submitted and approved by the EPA. The initial proposal was for a needs assessment for all communities, but at a meeting in August, 2008, the EPA asked if instead the project could be restructured as the planning of a short-term solution to getting safe water to Black Falls.

Over the next few months the project expanded to include the construction of water storage and distribution systems for 10 homes, creation of a community water hauling service, and working with both the EPA and Indian Health Service (IHS) to design sanitation systems for the homes. A map of the community showing the locations of homes, water sources, and abandoned uranium mines is provided in Appendix A. The completion of the construction and launching of the water hauling service was celebrated in a ribbon-cutting ceremony on February 24, 2009 attended by representatives of the partner agencies as well as representatives of the Navajo Nation.

The internship involved coordination of the project from the initial planning through the implementation of the systems. The Heller School taught that the role of a developer is to build the capacity of the community to perform their own development, so the internship was not as much process of fulfilling these tasks, but rather of identifying resources in the community and enabling the community to do the work.

The Heller School teaches a participatory "bottom-up" model for community development. These tools and approaches were used through throughout the project. This paper analyzes the application of these tools to the collaboration between the grassroots organization and the EPA.

Description of the sustainable development problem

The internship program was part of an effort to provide safe drinking water to communities in the former Bennett Freeze area on the Navajo Reservation. Over 90% of the homes in this area do not have access to piped water, so that the families must haul their water from other locations (HR5168, 2004). While health risks exist in the storage and transportation methods, the main concerns are the sources being used. While some regulated sources are available, thousands of unregulated water sources (EPA01) are also used on the reservation. These are subject to a variety of chemical and bacteriological contaminants, but most attention was focused on uranium contamination. While this can occur from natural sources, the major threat was contamination arising from the legacy of uranium mining in the region. Resolving that specific threat required a comprehensive solution to providing safe water supply systems for the communities, and this in turn was complicated by the other developmental issues affecting the communities, such as inadequate housing, roads, and poverty. Because the environmental harm was impacting minority communities, the developmental problems were treated as an Environmental Justice issue by the federal government.

Problems faced by the water haulers

Families forced to haul their own water suffer both economic and health impacts. Water hauling serves to trap residents in a circle of poverty. The cost to haul water on the reservation has been estimated at $113 per 1,000 gallons, whereas a Phoenix homeowner pays less than 70 cents for the same amount(Helms, 2007). The constant struggle to meet the most basic human need diverts the human resources needed to overcome poverty in communities where most people live below the poverty line. Some of the health impacts derive from the methods used to transport and store the water. The containers used for transportation are often used for both livestock and drinking water, so that the contaminants in the unsafe sources can be introduced into the drinking water even if the drinking water was collected from a safe source. High levels of bacteriological contaminants are often introduced in the improvised storage systems used at the homes, and the containers themselves may be recycled drums formerly used for hazardous chemicals.