The Environmental Justice team at COPAL works to ensure that all Latine families in Minnesota can live with dignity in safe, healthy, and thriving communities—regardless of race, income, or culture—in the places where we live, work, play, learn, and pray.
The Environmental Justice team works to fight these injustices, lift up community voices, and make sure families can live in neighborhoods that are healthy, safe, and sustainable. Latine communities disproportionately face unjust environmental harms—from heightened exposure to polluted air and water, to fewer parks in green spaces in predominately Latine neighborhoods and bigger risks from climate change. These problems affect our health, safety, and daily lives, and they come from systems that put profit over people. Many families arrive in the United States after leaving their homes in Latin America, where US-backed governments have cleared land for large mining projects, big farms, and lumber operations.
This has left the land damaged by droughts, pests, heat waves, and hurricanes. When families come here, they often face more challenges, including physical, emotional, and systemic violence. In Minneapolis, for example, long-standing redlining has placed polluting factories and busy highways in BIPOC working-class neighborhoods. That means less tree cover, fewer green spaces, more polluted air, and contaminated soil.
The extractive fossil fuel economy, encompassing natural gas, petroleum, and coal used for heat, electricity, and transportation, not only alters our climate but also leaves a legacy of injustice in our homelands and communities today. Indigenous lands are mined, water is polluted, and refineries along with coal/gas plants contaminate our neighborhoods. Toxic fertilizers and pesticides affect farmworkers, and high energy bills for heating homes impact our economic security. COPAL is dedicated to advocating for a transition from fossil fuels to a renewable energy economy that benefits our communities.
Our communities and homelands stand at the forefront of a shifting climate. Alterations in weather patterns directly impact land-based livelihoods, access to clean drinking water, and the capacity to thrive in a stable political and economic environment. As the climate crisis intensifies, individuals are compelled to migrate because of natural disasters. COPAL endeavors to spotlight the narratives and necessities of climate-induced migration within our communities.
Fostering sustainable employment opportunities that safeguard worker health and have a positive environmental impact is essential for enhancing Minnesota’s economy and long-term viability. COPAL’s Worker Center is dedicated to placing and training individuals in green jobs, aiming to contribute to the construction of a more sustainable future.
Fossil fuel and toxic industries tend to concentrate in low-income and communities of color, resulting in a generational legacy of health crises within our communities. This concentration isn’t incidental; rather, it is a deliberate outcome of policies that permit the siting of polluting industries, fostering environmental injustice. COPAL is actively engaged in reshaping these policies to diminish this cumulative harm and restore health to our communities.
Tune in to ˘Qué Onda, Minnesota? / What’s up, Minnesota?, our weekly environmental justice radio show Thursdays at 5pm on Radio Jornalera!
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COPAL’s Minneapolis administrative offices and the Primero de Mayo Workers’ Center are now located at the Coliseum building:
