REC has educated hundreds of members of Worcester’s Spanish-speaking communities through our SPIN/Tesh program (Safe Products in Neighborhoods/Tóxicos en su hogar) about how to protect their health from the harmful effects of the toxic substances commonly found in homes. Spanish speaking communities in Worcester frequently have less access to this information because of linguistic, cultural, and economic barriers. As a result of this outreach, between 20-30% of the people who have participated in a SPIN/Tesh workshop changed their purchasing behavior to reflect the use of healthier, lower-cost household products. REC collaborates with Massachusetts’ Toxic Use Reduction Initiative (TURI) to work with residents to inventory household use of toxic household products, educate about their safe use, choose safer substitutes, and ultimately reduce household use of toxic products by changing consumer behavior and raising risk awareness. Currently REC is working with faith based organizations in the Main South and Piedmont neighborhoods to educate parishioners about alternatives to toxic cleaners.

The Alliance for a Healthy Tomorrow is a citizen initiative in Massachusetts to establish new government policies to prevent harm to our health from toxic hazards. We believe that each of us has a right to an environment that sustains health and life, not one that harms it. Unfortunately, current environment and health policies do not protect us. Our individual rights and our quality of life are threatened by harmful pollution and products.

The Toxics Use Reduction Institute helps Massachusetts companies and communities find innovative ways to reduce toxic chemical use at the source, rather than treat wastes once produced.

Chemical Body Burden: The information on this site has been developed through the collaboration of health professionals, scientists, citizens groups and environmental organizations concerned about the chemical body burden we all carry and its health effects - known and unknown.

NOFA Massachusetts Organic Accredited Land Care Professionals

REC works closely with the local organization Clean Dirt to provide residents with information about how to test homes for indoor contaminants such as lead, asbestos, arsenic, radon, mold and bacteria, among others. Clean Dirt offers a variety of products and services to help you screen your home and yard for contaminants in air, soil, and drinking water that may pose health risks. For more information about home test kits, call 508-757-0484 or visit www.cleandirt.net.

REC also works with Clark University who received an environmental justice grant in 2004 to do work in Main South and Piedmont, including environmental soil testing of brownfields and abandoned lots and air quality testing at major intersections, outside of factory buildings, and in commercial areas. REC supported the development of the toxics advisory group, who guides Clark students in their research in the neighborhoods, and advocates for neighborhood resident participation throughout the process. Clark University’s environmental justice office can be reached at 508-751-4601.  

The Community Environmental Health Resource Center (CEHRC) is a resource for grassroots groups working for social justice in low-income communities around the country. CEHRC (pronounced "search") helps community-based organizations develop their capacity to document environmental health hazards in substandard housing and to pursue effective organizing and advocacy strategies for corrective and preventive action.

Worcester is in the heartland of the American Industrial Revolution, a city with a significant historical and ongoing pollution burden. The city is home to a highly socio-economically and ethnically diverse population. The poorest neighborhoods include large proportions (about 1/3) of Latinos, and another 20-30% of refugee and immigrant people. Much of the neighborhood population (30-40%) lives below the poverty line in dilapidated housing, adjacent to abandoned factories and brownfields (Census 2000). Green space is scarce. Environmental justice imperatives abound and appear intractably persistent, calling out for a concentrated, creative, collaborative response.

Police statistical data show that these neighborhoods have the highest number of reported incidents (roughly 25% of all incidents in 2000) and the highest number of arrests for the following violent crimes: assault and battery (27%) and simple assault/threatening (22%) (Worcester City website 2003). There is an extensive array of neighborhood development, social service, and grassroots organizations working to combat these negative neighborhood conditions, but most of these organizations are under-funded and do not have the capacity to implement, evaluate, and sustain community-based environmental health enhancement projects.

The two pilot neighborhoods are very dense built environments. In Worcester, as a whole, there are 8.4 housing units per residentially zoned acre, but in Main South there are 25.5 housing units per residentially zoned acre and in Piedmont there are 30.2 housing units per residentially zoned acre (RKG Associates, 2002). In addition to contributing to a very densely settled neighborhood, the majority of these housing units are old (built before 1940) and renter occupied (Census, 2000). This combination leads to high rates of residential mobility, further eroding social capital. There is little relief in terms of maintained green space. In Main South, only 3.4% of the land, or 13.7 acres, is park space; in Piedmont, a mere 1.2% of the land, or 3.2 acres is green (RKG Associates, 2002). The lack of maintained green space is clearly shown in Map 1. Numerous brownfields – polluted (or suspected-to-be polluted) abandoned and vacant industrial lots - have become sites for illegal trash dumping (see Map 2), magnifying highly visible physical blight and encouraging flies and vermin to breed. Residents interviewed detest this blight yet feel powerless to do anything about it. After sporadic cleanups, it returns.

Our interviews, census, police, toxics releases (TRI) and public health data all strongly suggest these three factors conspire to drive residents’ increased vulnerability to poor health outcomes and that these factors are concentrated in the proposed study sites.