30 years of grassroots, community-driven organizing and advocacy supporting environmental justice issue.
When communities organize, change follows. Our work has led to meaningful, measurable outcomes—protecting residents, challenging polluters, and improving quality of life across North Texas.
These results show what’s possible when people take action together.
The city of Dallas you’ve failed West Dallas again. You had the lead smelter plant and now you have these other plants that are still in West Dallas, hurting people. Shame on you! How much are black and brown lives worth?
Sophia Graham
We are the 11th polluted community in the United States of America. It’s my duty to stand up and be a part of the fight.
Mr. Davis
As fracking operations expanded across North Texas, we successfully campaigned for and won stronger local ordinances in Dallas, establishing stricter buffer zones between drilling sites and homes, schools, and hospitals to protect public health from drilling-related pollution.
For decades, the TXI-Martin Marietta cement plant in Midlothian held the largest hazardous waste incineration permit in the US. We waged a successful 13-year battle to stop the burning of toxic waste at TXI and passed new regulations that made it harder to burn toxic waste in any US cement plant. We accelerated the modernization of all three Midlothian cement plants, including the installation of new pollution controls that have dramatically decreased air pollution from these large sources.
We successfully petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to bring Ellis County into the DFW “non-attainment area” for ozone pollution so that cement plants would need to continue to reduce their emissions as part of the larger effort to reduce smog.
We led the fight to remove “Shingle Mountain,” a six-story-high, illegal dump of toxic roofing shingles that loomed over a residential neighborhood in Southern Dallas. Our organizing and advocacy resulted in a city-led cleanup, removal of a major environmental hazard, and a new precedent for municipal accountability.
After the mountain was gone, we continued to push for a solution to the root cause of its formation; industrial zoning near homes. With the community, we drafted the first bilingual neighborhood land use plan, advocated for its adoption, and won zoning changes that set up the community for positive growth not industrial encroachment.
We were approached by residents in the heavily industrialized Joppa neighborhood to monitor the quality of their air in 2018 because of two pending concrete batch plant permits. The monitoring results showed dangerous levels of pollution exposure, and thus spurred our commitment to fight for resident health in this Freedman town.
We stopped the addition of two concrete batch plants in 2018, launched our air pollution monitor network in Joppa in 2019, partnered with Texas A&M researchers on a 3-year public health study in 2020, won the relocation of a major polluter (Austin Asphalt) in 2023, and successfully changed the City’s land use plan in 2024 to move away from heavy industry.
We continue to push for the complete rezoning of the neighborhood and the establishment of a permanent clinical presence.
We worked with neighborhood coalitions to have the City of Dallas create dedicated environmental justice goals within the ForwardDallas 2024 comprehensive land use plan update. This will drive consideration of environmental justice in all land use planning decisions within the city moving forward.
We are committed to transparency and accountability. Our annual reports provide a detailed look at our work, our finances, and the impact we have on communities across North Texas. We invite you to review our progress and see how your support is put into action.
