Advancing Climate Justice Through TCC Evaluation and Spanish Sustainability Access

Leadership Project Proposal

Executive Summary: Elena served as a researcher for the Luskin Center for Innovation for the Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) evaluation plan. TCC program funds development and infrastructure projects that achieve major environmental, health, and economic benefits in California’s most disadvantaged communities. Elena oversees the five grantee evaluation projects in communities of Watts, Ontario, Fresno, Pacoima, and Stockton. She assists in annual reporting and analyzes data relating to project outcomes. Elena has shown leadership in evaluating the impacts of TCC, such as wrangling a diverse set of datasets to analyze trends among key indicators, including those related to environmental quality, public health, and economic prosperity. The team leaned heavily on Elena to develop methods to efficiently clean, analyze, and visualize the data sourcing the evaluation. Elena also helps make sense of the data to help think through the stories the evaluation team can tell with it and identify ways in which those stories are limited by the available data. What made this position standout from other internship tasks was Elena’s creation of a complete Sustainability Spanish Term Book. Many of the jargon used in the sustainability field are focused for academics, government officials or policymakers, majority of which are not in layman’s terms or accessible to many audiences. Elena was able to translate all these terms and concepts for institution wide use and share them to many nonprofit partner organizations for outreach and education uses. The project was not part of Elena’s internship tasks, however, Elena took tenacity and initiative to complete this work out of gauged need.

As someone who grew up in a disadvantaged community in the Inland Empire, one of California’s most polluted regions, Elena has bridged her data scientist background and her environmental justice lens to ensure the most impoverished communities of the state are leading the way in sustainability actions. As a native Spanish speaker, Elena wanted to bridge gaps in sustainable research to reach more non-English speaking languages. She brings passion and enthusiasm to her work and all that she does to lead the way in reaching environmental goals for future generations to come.

Collaborators: UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, Transformative Climate Communities Evaluation Team: Jason Karpman, Project Manager, Kelly Trumbull, Researcher, Colleen Callahan, Principal Investigator

Your Role Well Defined: My role at the UCLA Luskin Center began as a Graduate Student Researcher as the offer was given as part of my admission packet for Fall 2019. I was given the Research Fellowship for Environmental Justice which allowed me to work throughout my graduate program, which for my dual degree is a total of three years. The nature of my contributions is a mix between data analysis, report writing, qualitative interviews, and other tasks. My leadership project went above and beyond as time went by; I was able to formulize the processes which were relatively new now become synthesized for years to come. Additionally, as new GSRs entered the center, I oversaw the work they accomplished as I was the lead GSR for the project.

Goals and Measurable Objects: My goal for the Sustainability Spanish Term Book was to allow more outreach and educational materials to be accessible to non-English speaking populations interested in volunteering at community organizing events. Measurable objectives include the feedback provided by partner non profit organizations that used the spanish term book in their outreach materials.

My goal for the position is to successfully prepare annual yearly reports I already assist with the project. My success is measured by the published reports on the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation website for stakeholders to view. In a near date, with permission with the center, I intend to create an open database or GitHub for transparency reasons of my specific programming codes I utilize to achieve my data collection metrics. Success is also measured by achieving my intended “clients” my project manager’s tasks they hand me.

Anticipated Timeline and Needs: My timeline for my project is complete or will be completed by the end of this academic year. Since I have worked on the project since Fall 2019, I have about three academic years under my belt of annual reporting needs. The Spanish Term Book will be kept for future years to come.

Links: Evaluation of the Transformative Climate Communities Program Investments, https://innovation.luskin.ucla.edu/climate/climate-investments/