Austin's environmental justice organizations, including PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources) most prominently, had to work to get the environmental community to realize that people were part of the environment, and that building toxic technology manufacturing plants in areas where lower class communities of color live and work and where their children go to school and play is an environmental issue. PODER’s success in placing restrictions on Sematech’s use of chemicals was largely due to their ability to win over Austin’s other environmentalist groups to their cause (Tretter 2016). By demonstrating that nearly all locations of high technology manufacturing firms in Austin were located in non-white communities, they enabled these groups to recognize how the mainstream environmental movement was embedded in a racist, colonialist history, and thus to see racism as an environmental problem and not just a social problem.
Today, concern for equity and environmental justice features prominently in most of Austin's environmental organizations. However, these organizations still struggle with how to represent and bring local communities of color into their movements. Austin's Office of Sustainability has also identified equity as the central theme and organizing principle for revising its Community Climate Plan (CCP). They are piloting a new Climate Ambassadors program that attempts to enlist members who are embedded in diverse communities as mediators between these communities and the city. All advisory group and steering committee members of the CCP were also required to attend an 8 hour workshop on anti-racist planning put on by Dr. Tane Ward of Equilibrio Norte. The Steering Committee used this experience to collaborate in generating the core principles of planing this year's revision of the CCP.
The Electric Utility Commission and Resource Generation Planning Working Group (RGPWG), by contrast have not been as receptive or responsive to calls for diversity, transparency, and inclusion. As a "working group," the RGPWG is an appointed group that is not subject to the Open Communications Act, and yet this is the group charged with updating the city's long-term resource generation plan. That being said, their bi-monthly meetings are open and community members are allowed to attend, and there is 15 minutes set aside every other meeting for public comment. Sunrise Austin recently read a critique of the working group as a public comment where they identified many barriers to participation. These include the fact that it is held at 4pm on a work day in a high-traffic area of town, the language used is often dense with highly technical jargon and community members are restricted from asking for clarification, non-members are unable to come prepared as meeting materials (agendas, studies, presentations) are not posted beforehand, and working group members are not reflective of Austin's diversity.
