Contact: Klare Allen
Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Location: Roxbury, MA
Issue: Environmental Health
Sub-issue: Hazardous Material
Web site: Go to website
Statement on the U.S. Biodefense Program from Communities Living in Its Shadow
Multimedia Presentation New Mission High School Students & EJMedia
Safety Net’s mission is to develop a proactive strategy for fighting gentrification and displacement by ensuring that future development not only alleviates existing environmental problems, but also brings the economic and social opportunities necessary to achieve a healthy, livable, and sustainable neighborhood. The group’s goal is to create a movement of people of color who have been excluded from the decision-making process to confront power directly and demand fundamental change in the rules of the game, so that people can achieve their right to a healthy environment.
The group’s successes so far include: meeting with Energy & Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles and Governor Deval about the concerns and risk of operation of the Boston Univeristy lab. The MA Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs paid the National Research Council to determine whether supplemental risk assessment adequately addressed worst case scenarios, examined alternate sites, and was scientifically sound. The council’s report concluded that the assessment that the risks are ‘negligible’ and ‘vastly overstated’ can appear ‘unfounded and dismissive of public concerns. On December 13, Massachusetts highest court ordered that an ongoing environmental review should continue. The Supreme Judicial Court also agreed with a 2006 ruling from a superior court judge that the state’s original environmental analysis was ‘arbitrary and capricious’.
Safety Net, located in Roxbury (MA), received its latest Boston Grants Initiative grant in September 2008 to