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Over half of the neighborhoods in Santa Ana (shown in pink on the map below), California are designated disadvantaged communities (DACs) by CalEnviroScreen, the leading tool for assessing environmental injustice in California. GREEN-MPNA, a community-based organization in Santa Ana, is working to change this through its DAC-X campaign: an action-oriented movement to reduce disadvantage through pollution reduction, health equity, economic justice, and inclusive governance. Aware of the risks of gentrification, the goal is to x-out disadvantage in a way that empowers rather than displaces current communities. The University of California EcoGovLab has worked closely with GREEN-MPNA on the design and development of the DAC-X campaign. The four pillars of the campaign were chosen, in part, because they align with the State of California’s own criteria for designating communities as disadvantaged. DAC-X’s design also draws together a diverse array of advocacy organizations, government agencies and schools working against issues that contribute to disadvantage, knitting together threads of work that often run in parallel. The long term goal is to increase these organizations’ collective capacity to address disadvantage – in a way that recognizes the intersectionalities and cross-scale interactions that produce it. One tactic we have used to advance the DAC-X campaign is the staging of Environmental Justice Stakeholder Meetings that bring relevant governmental agencies together in one room to speak and respond to Santa Ana residents.Thus far, these meetings have focused on pollution reduction and inclusive governance. Going forward, we will continue to grow our network of alliances in Santa Ana by organizing Environmental Justice Stakeholder Meetings to address other pillars of the DAC-X campaign, bringing for example, health equity advocates to the table, or educational institutions that could support workforce development. The DAC-X campaign itself – and this poster – also results from an alliance – between EcoGovLab (Browne, Adams, Fortun) and GREEN-MPNA (Flores, Gutierrez & Rea).

Browne, Aiden, James Adam, Jose Rea and Kim Fortun. 2023. "GREEN-MPNA's DAC-X Campaign for Environmental Justice: Designing for Alliance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

More than economic activities, this artifact focus on the economic inactivity that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused. More specifically, such a reduced economic activity has reshaped the oil and gas industries, to the point their prices have significantly dropped. More specifically, these impacts can be better seen in energy system's production and distribution chains, where lockdowns and pandemic mitigation practices have sized down the worker-power both on the demand and the production end. The foregoing is reshaping production, supplies, demand, as well as financials. The crisis has risen several major crises, with industries severely unprepared in their contingency planning given world-wide lockdowns have been unprecedented. All of the factors listed are working to reshape how many in the energy sectors view contingency planning for the future and how they plan to re-establish operations, including cutting some operating costs.

This image shows that as the number of family members increase, so does the annual income needed to provide the essential necessities for the whole family. This may be a problem for those working a less-paying job or a job paying the minimum wage. So, although everyone plans to have a family one day, if they want to save money in today`s working society, they either have to have less children or find a good-paying job or petition/request for a raise in their wages.