Last updated: March 2, 2022
Article
Richmond, California: Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands
By Tomas Deza
Matt Holmes gets right to the point - “We are coming out of a century that left tens of millions of people wildly underserved in this country.”
In California’s Bay Area, where Holmes is the executive director of Groundwork Richmond, this legacy lives on in the freeways, refineries and negative public health outcomes that define the landscape. The future looks different though thanks to Groundwork Richmond, a community organization that is writing a new story for the city as it works to reverse decades of economic and environmental injustice.
Founded in 2010 as the twentieth ‘Trust’ of the Groundwork network, Groundwork Richmond develops community-led projects that generate sustainable, safe and healthy spaces, and provides the local community with the resources to have more agency over their environment.
“Our goal is to help raise youth leaders who are literate on the inequalities at play between Richmond and neighboring communities that have substantially longer life expectancies than Richmond residents can expect,” Holmes said.
During World War II, Richmond became famous for its role in both the shipyard industry and the woman’s labor movement. Home Front workers, primarily women and people of color, produced an unprecedented 747 ships for the war effort at four shipyards in Richmond, one of which is today the site of Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park. New opportunities for women, and the hard conditions in which they worked in, led to numerous social and regulatory changes benefiting them and people of color.
In the decades after the war, new freeways and the already established large refineries were the main contributors to Richmond’s contaminated air, making its neighborhoods undesirable for economic development and leading to disproportionate asthma rates among residents. A 2009 Richmond Health Survey Report by the Communities for a Better Environment, found that Richmond youth are twice more likely to suffer from asthma than the national average.
The National Park Service – Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance program helped establish the Groundwork Richmond Trust, in part because the local environmental and socioeconomic challenges were similar to those addressed by Groundwork. From 2010 to 2015, the National Park Service assisted the trust in articulating the organization’s goals and vision, developing a strategic plan, hiring an executive director, establishing a board of directors and connecting them to funding sources.
“Without the support of the community, Groundwork Richmond would not be sustainable,” said Barbara Rice, program manager for the National Park Service – Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance program. “It’s a great feeling to have been instrumental in starting an organization that is now thriving.”
Groundwork’s Green Team
The Richmond Greenway is a 3.5-mile pedestrian and bicycle rail-trail that connects some of the poorest neighborhoods of Richmond to outdoor recreation, conservation and education opportunities. In 2012, as the National Park Service was working with Groundwork Richmond and other local partners to enhance the greenway corridor, the team brought in Holmes who at the time was a park ranger for the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park. Holmes identified ways that his youth partnership program, Hometown Richmond, might support the Richmond Greenway. This opportunity quickly became a sustainable youth partnership program between the National Historical Park and Groundwork Richmond.
“I joyfully directed all the funding I had been using towards them [Groundwork Richmond]. We were able to provide meaningful and visible place-based projects, restoring parks, planting trees, and, most significantly, helping local youth visit national parks around the country,” Holmes said.
As a community liaison for the National Historical Park, Holmes was looking for ways to develop a program that would have a lasting impact in the local community.
Groundwork Richmond’s flagship youth program, the Green Team, was established in 2013 to provide hands on environmental education
experiences to youth. Since then, the program has successfully provided place-based service learning opportunities and nature immersion experiences to hundreds of youth in the area.
“The problems in the neighborhood were, and continue to be, displacement, poverty, and the poverty-related trauma and violence. This all comes out of the fact that most of the young men of color are struggling to find work,” Holmes said.
As a response to the community’s repeated demand for job opportunities and living wages, Groundwork Richmond launched its Green Corps job-training program. “With our Green Corps program, we start people with no experience, some whom are living in their cars at first… at $16 an hour, doing park maintenance and urban forestry work. They are connected to wrap around services and eventually graduate into seasonal hires with the City of Richmond and other agencies,” Holmes said.
Richmond Greenway’s Unity Park
Over the years, Groundwork Richmond’s Green Team has been at the forefront of many of the community’s urban resiliency efforts. Unity Park, a 12-acre linear park along the Greenway that provides local residents with a safe place to convene and play, is perhaps their most iconic and collaborative project. For more than six years, a group of 17 nonprofits under the umbrella of the Friends of the Richmond Greenway involved hundreds of Richmond residents in the design, plan, and construction of Unity Park, employing dozens of Green Team members throughout the process.
“[Residents of] Richmond showed that we know what’s best for us and we actually are smart enough, gifted enough, talented enough, and skilled enough to do that for ourselves,” said Sherman Dean, workforce development manager for Groundwork Richmond.
Richmond’s Air Rangers
Holmes said Groundwork Richmond’s urban forestry work is not just about planting trees, though. “It is about addressing economic inequalities and historic pollution burdens. We've added a significant layer to that with our work with our Air Rangers program.” A first of its kind operating at this scale, Groundwork Richmond received a $500,000 grant from the State of California Air Resources Board in 2019 to perform community-led air quality monitoring projects.
“Based on the Flint, Michigan lesson that the only data you can trust is the data you collect yourself, we are training and hiring 16 to 28 year-olds with zero experience to install very expensive remote sensing networks that will provide Richmond residents with near real-time air quality data that very few cities in the country have,” Holmes said.
Groundwork Richmond’s citizen science work helps residents understand their environment in order to make better decisions. Soon, Richmond residents will have direct control over the data and will be able to identify the city’s main polluters. In this way, Groundwork Richmond plans to deliver actionable information to help local residents move towards a more equitable environment.
Through projects like the Richmond Greenway and programs that provide unique opportunities for youth, Groundwork Richmond is helping the community take charge of its environment and heritage by improving their access to open spaces and community health.
“Tying the Rosie the Riveter story to the threat of habitat loss, invasive species and global climate instability, we can once again say that women and people of color are going to be the solution to this problem. This can only happen by getting our whole workforce activated in addressing the great challenge of our time,” Holmes said.