Carbon League Community Change Grant 2024 - East St. Louis

November 2024: United Congregations of Metroeast, Macedonia Development Corporation, Advanced Energy Group, and the Carbon League partnered to complete a $20 million EPA Community Change Grant to transform the environmental justice (EJ) community of East St. Louis, IL. A full breakdown of the planned project and the EJ parameters for this community can be found below. Notable items include:

• Potter's House redevelopment of a brownfield site to build affordable housing.
• The creation of solar/battery-powered community resiliency hubs at 4 churches across the community.
• A building retrofit program for residents to provide energy surveys, building envelope improvements, and electrification.
• Includes electric vehicle chargers installed across the community alongside outdoor air quality monitoring.
• Workforce development to provide skills to locals to take advantage of the planned construction and electrification jobs.
• Creation of a community dashboard for stakeholders to track project progress and key community metrics.

In total, we expect to see the following, specific improvements from this grant (if funded):

• ~440 metric tons of CO2/year expected emission reduction per year
• ~1,050,000 kWh of energy (renewable) produced/saved each year
• ~200 workers trained in clean energy jobs.
• ~550 homes impacted directly by this project.

The Justice40 Atlas is a national measure of social and environmental factors that contribute to our understanding of environmental justice and the vulnerability of communities. includes a collection of maps of communities that are disadvantaged according to   Justice40 Initiative criteria  in the U.S. and its territories.  We invite you to discover and investigate these communities using the  Justice40 Atlas .

This map assesses and identifies communities that are disadvantaged according to updated Justice40 Initiative criteria in the U.S. and its territories. Census tracts that meet the Version 1.0 criteria are shaded in semi-transparent blue colors.

Source:   Justice40 November 2022 Version 1.0 

To better understand the identification of energy justice communities, we took data from the  Environmental Protection Agency  (EPA)  Environmental Justice (EJ) Screen  and  Argonne National Laboratory 's  Geospatial Energy Mapper (GEM) . This allows for a greater, block-by-block understanding of the relevant health, social, and economic factors surrounding energy justice. Explore below to see maps of these metrics.

EJScreen is an environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach that combines environmental and demographic indicators in maps and reports. This can help to highlight geographic areas and the extent to which they may be candidates for further review, including additional consideration, analysis, or outreach. The tools also allow users to explore locations at a detailed geographic level, across broad areas or across the entire nation. For this Story Map we will focus on the detailed geographic area of East St. Louis, IL. We invite you to explore other cities or the nation as a whole using the  EJScreen App. 

This section of the story map features a collection of data from the EJScreen. The data was sourced from    https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/    using the ArcGIS REST endpoint.    Learn more about Environmental Justice at EPA. 

This story map features a collection of data from the EJScreen and Justice40 Atlas. The EJScreen data was sourced from   https://ejscreen.epa.gov/mapper/   using the ArcGIS REST endpoint.