Describe yourself in three words.

I’d say curious, thoughtful and I enjoy taking time to enjoy small things. I like to meet people and hear their stories and be in community spaces. I also feel like I’ve been coming out of my shell a little bit with some of these things I did within this project, it pushed me to do things that I haven’t done before.

***Jordan Salcido***, 2024 CSS Liberation Generation Fellow

Tell us about the work you brought into your Fellowship and why this work is important to you.

I came in with the idea to use the tools to support the work I am a part of with the LA County Youth Climate Commission because that’s a space we’ve been building and working together to craft a vision and plan for what the youth commission will be and do.

Then there was the more urgent and quickly moving campaign I was supporting with Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech. This campaign is focused on the ongoing issue of living next to a polluting industry and the endless hoops that community members have to jump through to see that they’re regulated and managed properly. It often falls on neighbors and community members living near the facility. There's not a lot of resources and support for getting that done, and it’s all done on a volunteer basis.

Youth-led action with Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech & Clean Air Coalition

Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech is a group that has been around for several decades, advocating for community health and demanding that serial polluters like Phibro-Tech and the agencies that oversee them be held accountable. In California, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) is tasked with regulating and issuing permits to these facilities. They have a long history of failing to protect community health and recognize generations of community voices urging them to do better. Phibro-Tech is located 540 ft. from homes and less than a mile from numerous schools, a library, a community center, and a senior center. So it’s in the heart of where we live and where our families are. It’s also very hidden. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you looked for it. I grew up and currently live less than a mile away, but I had not heard of it until the beginning of this year.

Summarize your fellowship project and how you are using narrative strategy to expand the impact of your work.

We used the tools to build community among our coalition and develop a shared narrative, to unravel the history of pain and resilience, to tell the story of what it’s like living next to a polluter from the perspective of multiple generations, to put pressure on DTSC with a series of actions and to envision what we dream this space could be in the future.

Community Art Build with Neighbors Against Phibro-Tech

Overall the tools just really got us excited and engaged. We had so much fun going through them and when they were presented to the group it wasn’t even like we were using a formula or method it was so much more playful and relaxed and a really joyful experience to do together. We got to know one another better in creating together and felt so connected in our shared experiences. The tools facilitated a lot of this connection among our community.

We also knew exactly where we wanted to start once we went through the cornerstones. It became really obvious where we should put our efforts and who our characters were.

Explain to us why you are doing this work and at what stage you are in your process.

We have focused our efforts on building our coalition because we’re one community facing a polluter, but if you look nearly anywhere, you’ll find toxic sites surrounding communities of color. It was really important for us to highlight this, bring in voices from neighboring communities, and work alongside one another. Generations of people have spent their lives fighting for safe and healthy communities, and there are so many layers to that story. Unanswered questions, mysterious smells, chronic illness, fear of opening your window for fresh air.

Yet DTSC’s task is so simple, to manage and oversee polluting industries across the state, but it’s rarely done. We are at a pivotal moment where DTSC is set to renew the polluter’s permits any day now. We will be delivering love letters community members wrote expressing their love and appreciation for their neighborhood and the generations of people who’ve fought for safe and healthy communities. We are also holding more community events to generate support and opportunities to learn more about the campaign and identify what concerns community members have that will inform our youth-led data collection project.

How would you describe Story-based Strategy (SBS) to someone who has never heard about it?

I would say that SBS is a set of tools and exercises to support folks in their organizing work, focusing on the power of stories. The tools are offered simply with a lot of wiggle room and flexibility which allows for creativity and playfulness. For us it definitely helped us to be able to expand our vision of what we thought was possible while generating endless ideas for actions and various avenues to tell our story and reach our target.

How did SBS affect your work on the project? What specific SBS tools did you use or center in to move forward your fellowship work?

Cornerstones immediately made the campaign come to life. Once we worked through that, our characters became very obvious, so we began to outline our actions with Points of Intervention. Fairytales helped us all create a shared vision and overarching narrative. It also gave us a lot of imagery to play with.

We used Battle of the Story to challenge polluters' claim that they’re “an essential service” and uplift dozens of community voices sharing their experiences of what it’s actually like living next door to a polluter.

We had a roadmap and were able to weave all the elements together to create our story, our coalition and our campaign. And there’s still so many more ideas that we haven’t even gotten to yet, more to come!

If you could have another iteration of your work, how would it have changed?

We tried to be aware of the balance between having information and events available online and in person, listening to our community when they shared how they received information, and trying to create content or dialogue in both places and bridge the two. I think that’s something we are still learning.

Slide From Glover’s Fellowship Presentation

One way we tried to do this was with a zine as a way to share our stories, learn more about our campaign, and hear from the greater community through a printed document that can live at a bus stop, in a coffee shop, or at a community center. It offered space to reflect, draw, and add to our collective vision on paper. I think it would’ve been great to have this available earlier in the campaign to share with folks! But there’s definitely still time. Also, it could be something that’s created more frequently with brief updates that are more easily digestible.

We also documented a lot of our work! We took many photos of one another, our signs, and our gatherings and also tried recording audio when we could. It’s so important to capture these pieces of our work. The zine was a great place to put a lot of these elements and let them be seen.

Do you think SBS will change how you relate to future work in collaboration with others? How? And why?

Absolutely!! I’ve referred to them in other projects and campaigns and found them just as easily applicable and useful. I love thinking about our work in terms of characters and our “battle of the story.” It just made things click for me and make sense more easily. Even something like target vs. audience, I may have thought of them interchangeably before, but the way it was presented helped me to differentiate between the two. I think that alone it made our campaign stronger by enabling us to differentiate those things and plan accordingly.

Share how folks can get involved with your work or see your work’s final product.

We have some very exciting things in the works! More community events, such as a “toxic car wash” and “comedy night” to bring attention to our campaign. We also will begin to uncover answers to decades of unanswered questions through our youth led air quality monitoring project, challenging who can be a scientist and provide information to the community. There will also be more opportunities to engage with us online, @NeigbhorsAgainst and @CleanerGreenerWhittier on Instagram. Our community interviews can be heard on YouTube.