Researchers proposed several activities to identify research questions for the project that would respond to community concerns. “Our aim is to complement the community’s agenda and efforts and to support the community in dealing with the environmental justice issues it identifies as a priority.” “This is a community-based research project, so the broad research agenda we began with is continually being reshaped by the specific research questions raised by our community partner and the community members themselves,” said Kay Jowers, senior policy associate with the Nicholas Institute’s State Policy Program. This Kenan Creative Collaboratory project will eventually lead to proposals of policy mechanisms to address those impacts. It is in that broad environmental justice context that the Nicholas Institute, along with the University of North Carolina (UNC) and North Carolina State University (NCSU), is engaging with Communities in Partnership, a new East Durham neighborhood non-profit, to document the unintended and collateral impacts of the city’s revitalization. Environmental Protection Agency memorandum defined as “the fair treatment of people of all races, income, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government.” More recently, the concept of environmental justice has evolved to reference equitable distribution of environmental benefits and even recognition of local ways of life, local knowledge, and cultural difference as well as communities and individuals’ capacity to flourish.
The concerns of those long-time residents are now part of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions’ first project on environmental justice, which a 2001 U.S. Many of those who remain are concerned about the changing character of their community-a community that increasingly reflects the desires of new affluent and predominantly white residents but not the needs of the mainly African American and Latino middle-class and blue-collar families and business owners who have lived through the city’s leaner times. Many are being pushed out of an area that they no longer find affordable. For at least a decade, long-time residents of Old East Durham have witnessed a redevelopment effort that has swelled the city’s population and brought new businesses and jobs but that has done little to protect them from rising housing prices and has even cut them off from some traditional support systems. The fate of the Kilombo Center has become a cautionary tale for another Durham neighborhood.
Its relocation away from Geer Street was one more sign of Durham’s physical and economic transformation. But the center had no answer for the area’s rising rents.
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For nine years, the center had been the site of free health clinics and legal counsel, tutoring, art and theater programs, computer literacy and language classes, community research seminars, public events on race and urban development, and weekly dinners-all volunteer efforts generated by and for local residents. Last year the Kilombo Community Center on Geer Street in the heart of one of Durham, North Carolina’s, metamorphosing neighborhoods closed its doors.
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