potrero view

February 2009

Multi-Million Dollar Environmental Justice Fund Scheduled to Make Final Pay-Outs in 2011

By Herman Wong

A year ago the dirt patch at the corner where Bridgeview Drive slopes down to Newhall Street in the Bsyview District stood empty.  Today it’s a vibrant community garden, with 12 volunteer gardeners.  Green beans grow on three terraced levels, like giant steps; a concrete path connects a row of sunflowers to a new fence along a dirt path.  The garden has beautified the hillside and provided food for its growers.  It’s also created its own community.  “I get to know my neighbors and that’s our biggest push, to get people out of their homes and learn to grow with us,” said Anthony Tarket, one of Bridgeview Garden’s green thumbs.  

Bayview residents invested their own time to create the garden, but they got a hand – $30,000 worth – from a City program that supports environmental improvements in Southeast San Francisco.  For the past eight years the San Francisco Department of Environment’s (SF Environment) Environmental Justice (EJ) grant program has helped start community gardens, installed free solar power systems and, soon, may create the first environmental education center in the area, though not without some controversy.

With more than $11 million of its original $13 million endowment spent or committed through 2009, the grant program is nearing its end.  The funds have enabled a diverse set of organizations to bring a bit of the green movement to neighborhoods that are marked by poverty and crime.  “I think many of the projects, even if they were very small and seemed limited in scope, were part of a stepping stone for people,” said Anne Eng, EJ program manager.

At Bridgeview Garden the tools, sunflowers and fence bought with an EJ grant helped make a barren stretch of land a community focal point.  For Lena Miller’s nonprofit, Hunters Point Family, SF Environment funding made it possible to turn a fallow two-acre field behind the Alice Griffith Housing Projects into a flourishing garden growing a host of fruits and vegetables, injecting fresh fruit into an area where such produce is scarce.  

Since 2001 Hunters Point Family has received more than $270,000 in EJ grants, mainly to support programs that employ community youth to grow crops, and to teach them healthier eating habits.  “We’re not just telling them what they should be doing but providing an opportunity to access it and truly understand about it,” Miller said.  

The Hunters Point Family garden led to the creation of the Bayview Farmer’s Market, and then a fruit delivery business, Something Fresh.  According to Miller these efforts are an attempt to change Bayview residents’ poor eating habits. “What we’re trying to do is change the norms and behaviors in our community,” Miller said.  “People have become so accustomed to eating processed foods, they’ve lost a lot of the craving for fresh food.  So what we’re trying to do is make it accessible.”  

Gardening projects have received the second largest portion of EJ funds.  Monies have also been invested in San Francisco Community Power – which, with funding from the San Francisco Public Utility Commission, is currently fielding a team of community members to offer high efficiency toilets to low-income families and small businesses; the nonprofit was founded and still managed by View publisher Steven Moss – to bolster food pantries, and to install new air filters in low-income housing.  Grants range from $12,000 to boost a middle school’s environmental curriculum, to $1.5 million for a 14-month horticulture job program at the San Francisco Botanical Garden.  

Current grantees include Asian Neighborhood Design, which is offering workshops on environmental issues; Global Exchange, to support a green jobs training program; and Urban Sprouts, which will establish a school garden and associated curriculum at the International Studies Academy.  

The majority of EJ grant expenditures over the years have been spent on programs that focus on energy issues, mainly because the grant money was provided by Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) as part of state-imposed conditions related to the sale of the Potrero Power Plant to Mirant Company.  From 2001 to 2005 EJ grant recipients – who weatherized homes and swapped old refrigerators for more energy-saving models, among other things – produced roughly 1.7 million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy savings, according to a SF Environment-commissioned report by the consultant group TechLaw.  During that same period 40 solar systems were installed with EJ grants, with a total capacity of 64.61 kWh.   A typical PG&E customer uses 540 kWh each month.  

The San Francisco Food Bank on Pennsylvania Avenue received nearly $100,000 to replace light fixtures with more efficient models, as well as to install solar panels.  These measures have contributed to a 16 percent year-to-year decrease in energy costs, $13,500 in annual savings, according to Marguerite Nowak, San Francisco Food Bank spokesperson.  “For every $1 we save we can distribute $9 worth of food out to the community,” Nowak said.  

The EJ grant program has endured its share of criticism, most notably for the environmental education center at Heron’s Head Park.  In 2001 the Bayview-based nonprofit Literacy for Environmental Justice, or LEJ, was given an $897,941 grant to build a 1,500 square feet environmentally-friendly teaching facility.  The center was supposed to be a green building, with hay bale walls and its own power source.  But by 2003, nearly $380,000 had been spent without a hay bale being laid, according to a 2007 report from the Office of the Controller.  

LEJ contends that the numbers don’t tell the entire story.  Building a green building that was off the power grid and hosted its own waste water treatment presented unprecedented challenges, such as asking public agencies for unusual variances, said Pamela Calvert, LEJ’s deputy director.   “We were working through an incredibly complex series of permitting processes because we were doing something on the very edge of green building,”  Calvert said.  Recently, construction of the facility has been threatened again, this time by state budget cuts, but Calvert hopes to be able to host the opening ceremony on Earth Day, a year after the groundbreaking.   

The original $13 million is slated to be fully dispersed by 2011.  SF Environment’s Eng said her department will continue its EJ work by directly engaging neighborhood groups, and by distributing smaller grants received from other sources.  

And more work needs to be done.  The Hunters Point Family fruit delivery business shuttles its produce to customers in a Dodge Ram truck running on biodiesel, thanks to an EJ grant.  But whether this matters to residents in the neighborhood is unclear, according to Candice Pierson, who runs Something Fresh.  “I don’t think a lot of people actually know what biodiesel fuel is,”  Pierson said.  

There are also signs of progress.  Grid Alternative received its first EJ grant in 2005 to install solar power systems at low-income homes in Potrero Hill and Bayview-Hunters Point.  Local residents didn’t embrace the program right away.  “People were a little skeptical and it was kind of hard to get our first few clients signed up,” said Tim Sears, the nonprofit’s director.  Attitudes soon changed.  The barn-raising installation of solar power systems – where friends and family of a house join a supervisor and job trainees to put panels on the roof – caught the neighbors’ attention.  The number of applicants rose.  In the past year Grid Alternatives installed another seven solar power units with a $100,000 EJ grant, with another $100,000 slated for 2009.   The resulting savings can be seen right away, a joy for the homeowners.  “To see the meter spin backwards at the end of the day, people get really excited,”  Sears said. 

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