Environmental Justice

Low income, diverse, and minority communities are not afforded safe and legally adequate occupational health and safety practices nor equal environmental protection, access, and benefits under the law and local policy.  This campaign will strive to organize and empower these communities to protect themselves from environmental contaminants and to help them gain access to increased interactions with functioning and beautiful ecosystems.  

This campaign is also about promoting an understanding that environmental protection encompasses all citizens and living beings in a watershed and in the world, and that achieving sustainable conservation results requires respecting and providing living essentials for everyone in our local and global communities.  Environmental Justice runs throughout all of VCK’s campaigns.  

For example, in its Agritoxins campaign, in addition to protecting the ecological integrity and water quality of Ventura County’s inland and coastal waterbodies, VCK strives to improve the inadequate occupational health and safety protection for migrant farm workers and eliminate the disparate threat that agritoxins pose to Latino communities and schools in Ventura County, as detailed in Wishtoyo Foundation/VCK’s White Paper, Agritoxins: Ventura County's Toxic Time Bomb.