Clean Air Coalition

Have you ever seen something happening in your neighborhood that you wish you could stop, but you didn’t know how? Like a truck running for an extended period of time, forcing your neighbor’s kids to go play inside because of the fumes? Or smoke billowing out of a nearby industrial plant that tells you that you will not be going for a walk tonight because the stench is nauseating? Well, there is something you can do about these things, and the answer lies at your finger tips: Text us!

Through the support of the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Grow 716, a community journalism project, has been created so that you can report what is going on in your neighborhood.

Currently, we are working with the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York to hold polluters accountable!

• It’s illegal for a truck to idle for longer than five minutes. Don’t put up with the fumes! Text TRUCKS to 877877 to report them.
• Have you stepped outside only to be greeted by a foul odor? Report it! Text STINK to 877877.
• Do you see dark, dangerous looking smoke? Let us know by texting SMOKE to 877877.

The exhibition is the result of months of hard work by Tonawanda residents. The work began with a community mapping exercise where residents plotted where they lived, and identified locations that promote and harm public health. The group identified similarities and differences between each neighborhood. Residents then headed into their community to capture images of Tonawanda, both the good and the bad, that community members live day after day.

Today has been a day of back-to-back presentations from UN agencies and participating countries. The presentations have been about the progress the agencies have made setting up chemical inventories. Here's the day by numbers:

34 - The average number of months it took participating countries to implement the project. This included the time it took people from industry, the public and the government to decide the priority chemicals, who would report  and how the data would be disseminated.

Today, I spoke about the Clean Air Coalition's work to train teachers, parents, and the general public on how to access information and make it relevant to people who are not technical experts and use it to drive policy change. The participating countries have set up good systems for collecting data, but now are asking questions like  "What's next? What do we use this data for?"

The presentation was very well received. Many of the government representatives found the partnership we've developed with the EPA on the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) project fascinating, as they have been worried about the consequences of putting data into the hands of environmental groups. It's great to be able to show that government and civil society groups can work closely and effectively, and that regular people can use data intelligently to improve their lives.

Geneva is just as beautiful as everyone said it would be. The view from our conference room overlooks the UN gardens and Lake Geneva.