Join NEJA's Campaign for Sustainable Recovery and Development!

National Equal Justice Association’s (NEJA) Campaign for Sustainable Recovery and Development has a goal to build awareness and inspire action toward converting our nation to 100% renewable energy, protecting and restoring biodiversity and stopping global warming. By joining together those in low-income communities hit hardest by environmental degradation with the scientists and organizers leading the environmental movement, our comprehensive approach includes everything from an end to fossil fuel extraction to the provision of living wage jobs.

NEJA promotes environmental, social, health and economic solutions consistent with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals adopted by 193 member nations of the United Nations in 2015, as well as the October 13, 2021 Kunming Declaration of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity, realizing that healthy ecosystems are intertwined with sustainable recovery and development.

The past two years broke records for worldwide climate disaster: In 2021, a megadrought contributed to massive wildfires throughout North America, especially in the U.S. West that burned hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and thousands of residential and business properties.  Multiple bouts of killing heat waves struck the Western U.S. and Canada that made July 2021 the hottest month in 143 years of record-keeping, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Heat by itself kills more people than any other weather phenomenon. More than 700 people are killed by extreme heat in the U.S. every year, but over 500 people died in a few short days during the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest.

In 2020, the U.S. suffered 262 deaths as a record 22 successive hurricanes unprecedented in size and strength battered the Gulf region, the Southeast and Caribbean; while extraordinary earthquakes, flooding, tornadoes, severe drought, ice and glacier melts contributed to sea rise threatening every continent. 

The earth is in the midst of the 6th mass extinction due to continuing man-made ecosystem and habitat destruction, with the survival of one million species at risk within the next few decades and therefore the survival of humanity itself is in jeopardy.

NEJA’s Sustainable Recovery and Development campaign is promoting the 17 SDGs and biodiversity focusing on public speaking, telephone outreach, informational tables, house meetings, conferences and other forms of arms-length, person-to-person organizing necessary to battle the disinformation being promulgated by advocates and beneficiaries of the status quo. Through the NEJA Bulletin and outreach we have publicized, for example, the Standing Rock Sioux’s historic battle for their sovereign, environmental and sacred right to protect their ancestral lands in North Dakota, news of[grouping of young people around the world suing for Environmental Justice to urge courts to order government to take action now for climate recovery.

Through sponsorship, publicity including our independent publication, our network of organizations, religious communities and non-profits, and providing organizational advice and consultation, NEJA assists locally based grassroots efforts that focus on ending patterns of injustice. NEJA has aided associations working for farm worker justice, access to preventive health care for low-income workers, disaster relief for neglected, impoverished minority communities and landmark legal and organizing campaigns.

NEJA has over 40 years of collective experience in drawing together concerned citizens with attorneys, clergy and community activists. Poor communities are natural allies for the environmental movement: yet they remain grossly underrepresented in the struggle for environmental justice. This chasm of injustice has widened as a result of our governments’ mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, where low-income workers have died at twice the rate of their wealthy neighbors, and suffered the most from unemployment and underemployment due to the ongoing economic depression.

• NEJA has supported efforts of organizations of farm workers to secure clean drinking water for their homes instead of well water poisoned by cancer-causing pesticides, and disaster relief efforts for low-income workers.

• NEJA has supported an organization of in-home care workers, domestic workers and other low-paid workers and is organizing for implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and for the full recovery of the Sonoma County community in the wake of the mega drought and fires over the last four years, the impact of which has been intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic, through independent,  self-help, emergency and supplemental benefit programs that help the most vulnerable workers to survive and hence be able to join the struggle to end poverty and to ensure everyone has a home, a job with living wages and benefits, education and health care. The organization brings low-income members together with local businesses, professionals, and religious and social organizations, assisted by non-profits, in this work.

• NEJA is supporting an organization of volunteer legal professionals providing pro bono legal advice and education to the low-income residents of the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco, where an estimated 40% of residents live below the federal poverty line. They suffer some of the highest rates of cancer, asthma and infant mortality in the nation due to decades of military and corporate toxic contamination of the area’s air, land and water. The Environmental Protection Agency has designated them the second most polluted Superfund site in the nation. The group is waging a campaign to demand the site’s clean-up and assisting efforts for legal redress.

• NEJA is aiding a COVID-19 Prevention and Post-illness Follow-up Care campaign of a volunteer group of doctors, nurses, dentists and other concerned citizens in Oakland, California, providing medical education and free-of-charge COVID-19 testing and vaccinations, in addition to supplemental food and hygiene supply distributions, monthly general medical and advocacy sessions for uninsured and underinsured workers and others otherwise unable to afford health care. The organization holds regular medical education sessions to educate low-income workers to the life and death necessity of getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

• NEJA’s campaign also highlights successful local, regional, national and international sustainable solutions to stop global warming through land, water and species protection, stewardship and conservation, carbon capture and stopping the overuse and destruction of the earth’s natural resources, which is accelerating the collapse of species that sustain all life on the planet.

Sustainable and ecologically viable solutions abound: From non-profit organizations educating and training community residents, landowners and students about sustainable and economically viable ways of pruning the small wood from the woodlands for use in construction to reduce the effect of wildfires and restore clean water and healthy soil systems; to businesses developing and spawning kelp forests, which restore the oceans natural ecosystems; to the Great Green Wall project in sub-Saharan Africa to grow an 8,000 kilometer “wall” of trees to bring back degraded land to provide food security, jobs for millions while eradicating drought, desertification, famine, war and migration; to the People’s Republic of China’s rapid move to establish a protected areas system with national parks as the mainstay, designating its first group of national parks that includes the Three-River-Source National Park, the Giant Panda National Park, the Northeast China Tiger and Leopard National Park, the Hainan Tropical Forests National Park and the Wuyishan National Park, totaling 230,000 sq. kilometers, covering almost 30% of the key terrestrial wildlife species in China.

NEJA believes equal justice includes the right to clean air and water, and thus, the necessity to protect the environment and to reverse global warming. NEJA is working locally, regionally and nationally with other organizations to encourage development that brings jobs with living wages, while not being inconsistent with the need to protect our environment, economy and atmosphere. NEJA promotes the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to end poverty in all its forms everywhere; eliminate hunger; ensure healthy lives; promote availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation; make cities and human settlements safe, resilient and sustainable; and combat climate change and its impacts, and other fundamental human needs. NEJA promotes the Kunming Conference Declaration so that we can establish an ecologically sound environment for all, protecting biodiversity.

The fight must go on. Join NEJA’s struggle now. Full and part-time volunteer opportunities are available now. No experience is needed. Put your interest in social justice and for a sustainable world into action. Call NEJA at (415) 552-5833 today.