One Year Into the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program: Spotlight on the Mid-Atlantic

In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Energy (DOE), recognizing the need for a more holistic, localized, on-the-ground approach to addressing environmental discrimination and harm, established the Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers (EJ TCTAC) Program. This program aims to make the Biden-Harris Administration's historic federal climate investments more accessible to communities that have faced environmental injustice. A key tool to carry out the Justice40 Initiative, the program is designed to help communities increase their capacity to address pollution challenges and adapt to climate change.

Today, 16 technical assistance centers, or TCTACs, are up and operating across national and regional scales. The core centers are bolstered by a broad network of over 144 partners ranging from academic institutions to nonprofits. Over an initial five-year funding phase ending in October 2028, the TCTACs will connect with communities to provide technical assistance and capacity-building services. They will primarily provide federal grant writing support, targeting people and organizations that have been most overburdened by environmental harm, as well as rural communities. The support is focused on accessing federal grants, which often are logistically complicated to navigate and require immense amounts of time and financial expertise. Communities who lack the time and technical capacity that these grants demand are inherently excluded. 

“Historically, our disadvantaged communities have not had access to federal funds—or any funds—because navigating the system is something that they haven't been familiar with,” explained Dr. Adrienne Hollis, NWF’s vice president of environmental justice, public health, and community revitalization. “They’re going to receive training on how to do that—how to become a 501c3, how to navigate a Notice of Federal Funding—because their applications may not look as organized as those from organizations that, say, have a grant writer. It’s important to make [these applicants] competitive in accessing historically unavailable funding. 

Zooming In

The EPA Region 3 TCTAC serves the Mid-Atlantic region of Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia, as well as seven federally-recognized tribes. The National Wildlife Federation functions as the Region 3 TCTAC’s parent partner and fiscal lead, managing the $12 million allocated by the EPA and DOE for Region 3’s operations. The University of Maryland’s Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) and Environmental Finance Center are core partners in leading this TCTAC. These core hubs support 10 secondary, community-based hubs, including grassroots organizations and historically Black college and university partners. The TCTAC recently brought on three new partners—Appalachian Voices, the UrbanKind Institute, and Virginia State University—to broaden its service delivery to more diverse geographic regions.

But more than one year into the program, many regional leaders have found that setting up a TCTAC is no easy feat. For Dr. Sacoby Wilson, director of CEEJH and co-director of the Region 3 TCTAC, it has meant building upon pre-existing programmatic infrastructure, establishing relationships with frontline communities, and securing private foundation funding to support financial gaps—in addition to coordinating across the TCTAC’s onion-like layers of partnerships. 

By way of pre-existing programmatic infrastructure, Region 3 has leveraged the Mid-Atlantic Climate Action Hub (MATCH), an initiative that CEEJH has led for the past 20 years with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Many of the community-based organizations that are a part of the TCTAC are groups that we’ve been working with for a decade or more,” said Wilson. Indeed, most of these organizations are MATCH members. 

Region 3 has also had to develop the framework for its grassroots community hubs to effectively respond to service requests, using a “train-the-trainer” model. “We build the capacity for the hubs, and then they do outreach, engagement, and capacity-building of organizations who are trying to address climate justice issues in their geographic area,” Wilson explained.

In addition to juggling training and the build-out of administrative and programmatic infrastructure, the TCTAC also prioritizes connecting with communities in need through a streamlined intake process. NWF assesses intake requests to best match prospective participants with technical experts. “Our priority is communities who haven’t traditionally received services and haven't been competitive in that space,” Dr. Hollis clarified. The intake process opens the door to myriad resources and tools for participants, including a comprehensive grant database produced by the Environmental Finance Center, the lead hub for funding-related technical assistance. But even before attempting to build up participants’ capacity to apply for funding opportunities, the TCTAC works to strengthen them as stable organizations, boosting the fiscal, leadership, and programmatic capacity essential to navigating grant-writing and management processes.

Partnerships in Practice

CEEJH’s work focuses on air quality monitoring, community-based participatory science, health impact assessments, and geographic information system (GIS) mapping. CEEJH has already built over a dozen hyperlocal air quality monitoring networks across the D.C. metropolitan area and is currently creating a “library” of air pollutant sensors, which community members can borrow to run short-term air quality monitoring campaigns. CEEJH has also developed several GIS mapping tools to identify areas of environmental justice and health equity concern, and the organization provides technical assistance to teach people how to use these tools.

As one of the Region 3 TCTAC’s community hubs, Empower DC, with additional financial backing from the federal TCTAC grant, has been continuing its grassroots organizing work in historically Black neighborhoods across D.C. to hold polluters accountable and involve community members in decision-making processes. 

“A lot of our work is helping people navigate these different systems and arenas where decisions are being made that are really, for the most part, built to exclude people. They're not built to be responsive to the most impacted communities,” said Parisa Norouzi, Empower’s executive director. “[The TCTAC has] been a great opportunity to work with other partners regionally…to pool our knowledge, our resources, our relationships with technical experts and try to begin to rectify these multi-generational injustices in communities.”

Empower DC, along with other community hubs, offers regular workshops and training opportunities, including its first annual Environmental Justice Action Summit, a webinar on grant opportunities in partnership with the Environmental Finance Center, and a resilience workshop. CEEJH also hosted its 10th annual Environmental Justice and Health Disparities Symposium in September, with more than 75 sessions ranging from workshops on air quality and GIS mapping to in-person grant coaching. Community members also had opportunities to engage with the TCTAC’s community hub representatives. 

Looking for Longevity 

The initial funding phase for the EJ TCTAC Program ends in 2028, but Region 3 TCTAC co-directors Dr. Sacoby Wilson and Dr. Hollis stress the importance of maintaining the TCTAC’s work past the program’s end date. They say it will take finding and securing additional forms of funding, through federal, state, and private partnerships, to increase the budgets and durability of community hubs. Hollis envisions the development of a long-term center that “assists communities in their journey to become thriving…that people know to go to for assistance that’s not dependent on financial considerations.” 

“It can’t end at year five,” she underscored. “Even if the grant ends, the work continues.”

In a time where historic investments have been made available to address environmental justice concerns, impacted communities must be equipped to competitively and equitably access the federal grant system. The EJ TCTAC Program strives to bridge barriers that prevent communities from applying for federal funds and empower community-driven efforts to mitigate the cumulative impacts of environmental hazards.

Authors: Ainsley Ogletree and Nicole Pouy

Contributor: Emily Philips

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