California Air Resources Board

East Oakland (Bay Area): East Oakland Senior Center, 9255 Edes Ave, Oakland, CA, 94603

Background: There were two people from the organization Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and a staff member from the Senior Center in attendance. The presentation was skipped (after asking the attendees’ preference) and instead held a focused group discussion.

Summary: On December 11, 2023, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) hosted a regional in-person meeting in East Oakland to seek recommendations from Bay Area residents on ways CARB can better engage communities when developing programs, policies, and regulations. The discussion started with a round of introductions by the participants and CARB staff (nine present). CARB staff then provided a brief overview of CARB, the purpose of hosting this meeting, and the overall effort around the Community Engagement Model. There was an unstructured back-and-forth conversation among the participants and CARB staff. Participants provided their experience on addressing barriers to participation, emphasizing how government agencies like CARB and others need to do more than the standard practice when communicating and engaging with communities. Topics such as outreach, relationship building, accessibility, and follow through came up as core issues to address.

Detailed Notes

Outreach

• The low attendance tonight is indicative of how difficult outreach is and demonstrates the importance of having relationships with the communities we work in.
• How do we meet community where they are?
• Some people have specific ways that they want to be engaged with—need a way to share that with CARB.
• People don’t know how to engage with CARB, even when they need or want to. CARB needs to make itself known by reaching out to and participating in communities.
• Shift post Covid—there's been a lot of training and resources to get people familiar with tech so now it’s more challenging to get people out for in-person meetings when it is easier to participate from home. This is especially true when a meeting is after school, during dinner hours. People need to get dinner for their kids so being in a dinner-time meeting is not feasible. They may also not have the resources to pay for childcare to come to a volunteer-basis meeting.
• What works: in person, first point of outreach then follow-up. There’s pre-work to get folks into these spaces.
• How to reach other CBOs/people CARB doesn’t typically work with:
• AB 617 folks (CBOs) maybe have other connections (residents)
• Timing is essential! Need to give community time to get excited and able to participate.
• Meeting topic is critical, should better communicate the impact to them.
• Currently, some folks may ask “Why are we going? To comment on a draft that’s mostly done?”
• For rulemakings, coming with things too over-baked or under-baked can be counterproductive. Need to find a middle-ground.
• Replace the word “draft” with “outline”, “draft” seems too over-baked. It gives people the impression that the project is already decided and that staff won’t actually take community input into account
• Meetings to review 100-page drafts make the community disinterested and feel ignored because it doesn’t seem like giving input at that stage will change anything – the product is too complete. Also balance with enough context and concept to allow critique.
• Putting out an outline is okay
• A whole draft seems like it isn’t genuine – that we are checking off a box to obtain community input rather than actually wanting to incorporate it.
• A resident member thought we were here to talk about air. The purpose was not clear (words like engagement are likely too jargony for the public). It is important to be clear about the project and how it will impact the community.

Relationship Building

• Barriers to participation. Think about what is preventing community members from working with agencies. CARB needs to become more personal with CBOs. Agency relationships aren’t personal so CBOs are less invested in helping.
• To build relationships and trust, begin in-person interactions (even if small turnout), then follow-up with virtual sessions and then follow-through.

Accessibility

• Evening meetings require food and childcare. Incentives like gift cards help. Secure transportation is important. This helps make people feel welcomed and valued. You want to support people to get their opinion. Don’t be extractive.
• Communities for a Better Environment provides transportation via Lyfts and Ubers for community members to attend meetings.
• Virtual meetings are easier and take less effort to attend due to participation barriers, especially for elders who don’t want to catch sickness, those who lack transportation, are care providers for their family, and need to make dinner/etc.
• Language accessibility is important. Some folks don’t speak English
• Try to reach the young people too
• CARB’s Scoping Plan was accessible to those who speak Spanish, make all CARB documents accessible like this
• There’s a spectrum of making your project accessible. Infographics, podcasts, in writing, different media types. PDF can be poorly accessible. Providing both PDF and word document is important. The word document reader function works much better than the PDF version. The PDF version misses words etc.

Follow-Through

• There is distrust with the community. Sometimes the community doesn’t see their feedback reflected in the final product.
• Not seeing feedback incorporated makes it hard to continuously engage.
• Responses to feedback aren’t direct or clear which makes it not genuine. Have track changes so folks see what’s been included.
• For this effort, include information on what will be done with feedback on the flyer.
• Follow up from this meeting should include typed up notes, themes of what we talked about, next steps.

Specific Comments on Oakland

• Each week the East Oakland Senior Center gives out five thousand pounds of food. During an event like this, everyone in the neighborhood shows up to help and/or receive. THIS is where to meet the people in their space. Get to know the community and where these spaces exist. Use them wisely to avoid burnout.

Photos of White Boards