Tri-Valley CAREs is pleased to share that our Environmental Program Manager, Anoushka Raj, has been invited to join the board of the California Environmental Justice Coalition (CEJC)!
Tri-Valley CAREs is a co-founding member of CEJC. Since 2014, CEJC gatherings and organizing efforts have brought together environmental justice organizations from across California. Anoushka’s new board role represents a meaningful next step in that long-standing partnership: one that connects our local work in the Tri-Valley to a broader statewide movement for justice and accountability.
CEJC is a grassroots statewide coalition organized around bringing about systemic change in environmental policy and enforcement. From the start, CEJC’s vision was bigger than any one issue or any one place. Member organizations confront hazardous waste, toxic contamination, regulatory failures, public health inequities, and environmental racism in many different forms across the state.
Tri-Valley CAREs work is deeply rooted in Livermore and the surrounding region, but our mission has never been limited to one zip code, nor has the Lab’s environmental impacts. We monitor nuclear weapons and environmental cleanup activities and advocate for stronger protections for all communities affected by contamination. Across California, communities are too often asked to bear environmental burdens without having real power in the decisions that affect their health, neighborhoods, and futures. CEJC has helped connect those local struggles into a broader shared fight.
Too often, regulatory agencies and polluting industries hide behind complexity. Communities are expected to respond to systems that were not designed with them in mind. Organizations like Tri-Valley CAREs have long tried to help close that gap by making environmental oversight more understandable, more accessible, and more democratic. Our Environmental Program Manager Anoushka’s work reflects exactly that tradition, and her presence on the CEJC board strengthens the connection between our local oversight work and statewide coalition-building.
In the past, we have participated in CEJC “Days of Action” and other coalition events in Sacramento, where member organizations came together to strengthen shared strategy and engage directly with agencies and elected officials. Those gatherings reflected one of CEJC’s core strengths: building relationships across geography and issue areas so that communities are not isolated in their fights.
Whether an organization is working on refinery pollution, hazardous waste facilities, pesticide exposure, contaminated groundwater, or nuclear cleanup, the underlying issues often overlap with similar concerns like unequal exposure, unequal access to decision-making, and unequal protection from harm. CEJC has created space for those struggles to inform each other and move together.
Tri-Valley CAREs has long understood the importance of that statewide solidarity. Our local work is stronger when it is connected to a larger environmental justice framework, and when we are in conversation with organizations confronting different but related forms of environmental harm. CEJC has helped make that possible.
One of the clearest examples of the coalition’s impact has been its role in pushing for reform of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC). In 2014, the coalition issued a detailed reform platform calling for stronger enforcement, tighter permitting, independent testing, cumulative impact analysis, and stronger safeguards for public participation, including multilingual access.
CEJC continued that work through comments, campaigns, coalition mobilizations, and civil rights and language access advocacy related to hazardous waste permitting. Its work on DTSC reform helped elevate issues that environmental justice communities had been raising for years: that legal process alone is not enough if communities cannot meaningfully participate, and that technical standards are not enough if agencies fail to account for cumulative harm. The coalition’s advocacy helped shape the broader push for structural DTSC reform, including changes enacted through SB 158 in 2021, which created new oversight and accountability mechanisms at the agency.
Communities need transparency, language access, continuity, and the ability to hold decision-makers accountable over the long term. These are values that have defined CEJC’s work and that continue to shape our own.
Environmental justice work can be fragmented when each organization is forced to focus only on its immediate local crisis. Coalitions make it possible to step back and build power across regions. CEJC has helped organizations learn from one another, coordinate strategy, amplify campaigns, and frame local fights as part of a statewide political reality. Its membership and allies span California’s urban, rural, and Indigenous communities, creating a network that is both grounded and wide-reaching.
Anoushka joining the CEJC board reflects Tri-Valley CAREs’ continued commitment to the coalition work that has shaped environmental justice advocacy in California for more than a decade. We want to keep building those relationships, keep contributing our perspective, and keep learning from organizations across the state that are fighting for healthier, more just communities
Learn more about the California Environmental Justice Coalition here: https://cejcoalition.org/