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| Donele Wilkins |
It was a turning point for Donele Wilkins.
After having been invited to an environmental leadership conference in 1991, she went home inspired to bring about change in her community. Later that year, Wilkins founded Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice, an organization dedicated to empowering individuals, communities and community organizations in southeastern Michigan to “take a stand for the land in the hood” and advocate for cleaner, healthier communities and environments.
Wilkins began her career working for the Southeast Michigan Coalition on Safety and Health. As the group’s occupational health trainer, she taught factory employees the safety measures that need to be implemented when handling hazardous materials.
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| Donele Wilkins |
Wilkins quickly discovered, however, that most of the workers she educated were people of color. Through her own research, she determined that minorities consistently held low-paying, high-risk jobs and rarely were represented in factory management positions. Moreover, these factories were located in predominantly African-American communities.
It was then, she says, that she dedicated herself to what has since become her life’s passion – environmental justice.
Environmental justice “challenges conventional thinking because it is not just about trees or saving the spotted owl,” explains Wilkins. It investigates whether people are given fair and equal treatment in the cities they live, no matter what their race.
Determining education was the key to tackle this “environmental racism,” Wilkins organized the Minority Workers’ Occupational Health Project. The group helped develop people’s leadership skills in order to combat the serious environmental problems facing them.
It was Wilkins’ work with this group that earned her an invitation to speak at the People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991.
Astonished by the number of attendees and the energy that surrounded environmental justice, Wilkins says, this meeting was truly life-changing.
She left the conference with 17 principles that defined a course of action. She made good on those guidelines, and Detroiters’ Working for Environmental Justice was born.
Until late 1996, Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice was an all-volunteer organization. Now, it is has obtained non-profit status.
Since its founding, Wilkins and Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice have addressed issues such as lead poisoning, fish advisories and air quality. However, Wilkins says it is necessary to look holistically at the process used in placing manufacturing facilities in urban areas.
According to Wilkins, economics is the driving force in the placement of pollution-causing factories in cities. The argument that these facilities are being built in low-income communities in order to provide jobs cannot be upheld, she says. People in these communities are not employed by the factories.
So, explains Wilkins, not only do cities not reap the economic benefits of being host to such factories, but they must also bear the burdens of their everyday emissions.
It is for this reason that Wilkins vows not to rest until environmental racism is eradicated.
“People don’t have to accept what they see,” she says.
