Durham County’s next health assessment to have environmental justice chapter, a first
Durham County is planning to include an environmental justice chapter in its community health assessment for the first time, a step state health officials and advocates are hoping spreads to other health departments in the state.
Each one of the state’s 86 health departments write community health assessments every three or four years as part of their accreditation process. The extensive assessments are meant to figure out what is impacting a community’s health and what resources are available to address those problems.
Typically, advocates say, environmental justice is included in the reports in veiled references, often those describing health disparities suffered by people of certain ethnicities and races or those with lower income levels. That was the case in Durham County, said Rania Masri of the N.C. Environmental Justice Network.
Masri praised the county’s 2020 health assessment but said its references to disparities were often actually references to environmental justice even when not referring to them as such. The Environmental Justice Network is working with the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services and Durham County Department of Public Health to organize a workshop that will shape the environmental justice chapter of the upcoming report.
“Environmental justice denies the passive voice. Things don’t just happen. People’s water doesn’t just get dirty. There is a decision that is made that these communities are disposable and their lives are disposable,” Masri told The News & Observer.
Redlining in Durham County and dispossession of land are inequities that could be discussed in the environmental justice chapter, Masri added.
A spokeswoman for the Durham County Department of Public Health did not respond to a request for comment. A draft of the county’s full health assessment will be released for public review in March 2024 and then be revised before the final version is published in the spring.
Alamance County was the first health department to publish an environmental justice chapter in its assessment, with the chapter from its 2021 report serving as a model for others. The county health department invited the West End Revitalization Association, a nonprofit that has long worked on environmental justice in the county, to write the chapter.
That effort caught the attention of the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services.
Soon after, the Department hired Joe Bowman, a registered nurse and fellow with the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, to work with other health departments in the state to include similar analyses in their community health assessments.
A chapter allows health leaders to be more intentional in how they think about inequities and disparities across their communities, Bowman wrote in an email.
“It is more deliberate than an anecdotal reference or several paragraphs referring to the inequitable impact of environmental factors on these affected communities which are largely comprised of Black, brown, Latin, indigenous or low-income white residents,” Bowman wrote.
Brown is a term used colloquially to describe people of races and ethnicities with darker skin tones. By Latin, Bowman is referring to people of Hispanic or Latino descent.
Bowman and DHHS are also working to develop environmental justice chapters in Anson and Montgomery counties, as well as in the Appalachian Health District covering Alleghany, Ashe and Watauga counties.
Omega Wilson, one of the founders of Alamance County’s West End Revitalization Association, said other places should clearly consider indigenous representation as part of their health assessments.
Wilson also emphasized that each county needs to work to identify the exposures or potential environmental factors that are influencing health there.
“You have to find the areas of concern, if you have water and sewer pollution in your county. If you have old mills or plants like a Western Electric or something else like that or a Stericycle plant in your county, you have to identify it,” Wilson said, referencing the contaminated Western Electric-Tarheel Missile Plant in Burlington and a medical waste incinerator that has raised community concerns.
Once community members identify those sites, Wilson added, they can start to consider what exposures they could be causing or the health impacts.
Masri, of the Environmental Justice Network, said follow-up to the health assessment is a vital step.
“If we’re simply publishing to publish, then there’s not much good that could come of that. It becomes a rather futile exercise,” Masri said. “So the follow-up becomes key.”
Saturday’s event starts at 10 a.m. at the People’s Solidarity Hub, 1805 Chapel Hill Road, Durham, NC 27707.
This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and 1Earth Fund, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.
This story was originally published June 3, 2023 at 5:30 AM.