Winning Environmental Justice One Bus Pass at a Time:Interview with Huy Ong
OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon was established in 2005, with an initial focus on the environmental health concerns of Portland’s low-income communities and communities of color along the I-205 corridor. Today, OPAL is the “grassroots hub for the regional Environmental Justice movement,” with strategic alliances with groups working for justice on interlinked issues such as transportation, housing, health, and climate. Using deep analysis of intersectionalities, OPAL’s members identify the issues they want to solve and the solutions they want to see, and OPAL’s community organizers provide training in skills and campaign tactics, “cultivating leadership where we need it the most: among people decision-makers usually overlook.”
Interview edited for clarity.
Lindley Mease: Let’s start with who you are. Can you tell us the story of how you got involved in this work?
Huy Ong: My name is Huy Ong and I’m executive director of OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon. OPAL stands for “Organizing People, Activating Leaders,” which is the core of the work. I have a long history of different types of organizing — student organizing around global sweatshops, farmworker justice, labor rights, racial justice. I’ve been organizing for 20+ years now. I started pretty young! It’s from my history as a refugee coming into the U.S. at a very young age and seeing the complexities of being a person of color growing up in Portland. Some of those experiences led me to choose a path that looks at root causes. The whole premise of OPAL is an organization that organizes with directly impacted communities. That was an attractive draw for me.
Lindley Mease: Tell me about OPAL’s work. Give the spiel of what you do, why you do it, and a couple milestones.
Huy Ong: OPAL started out in air quality work, organizing in predominantly black communities in north and northeast Portland around freeway projects. The organization started with door knocking to learn about people’s understanding of the freeway project: what its impacts might be on their health, their commute, their community. Organizers quickly learned that although there was a rich understanding of the impacts this freeway posed to this black community, folks were also concerned about what their transportation would end up looking like — how do they get to and from services, daycare, jobs. So the organization started doing more transportation justice organizing. We don’t look at the issues as siloed. We are very keyed in on the intersectionalities of housing, transportation, safety, and our access to a clean environment. Over the years, we developed a intersectional analysis knowing that transportation is a key lifeline for a lot of low-income folks and folks of color. It’s a key piece for us to build a strong racial justice and transportation justice lens around.
We organize two bases of community folks. We have Bus Riders Unite!, who are transit-dependent folks that are low-income, people of color, people with disabilities. They are the ones that are most impacted by decisions about our transportation system. We’ve won significant victories. Most recently, we won a Low Income Fare, so incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, instead of having to pay a $100/month pass, now have access to a $28/month pass. Our second base that we directly organize is our Youth Environmental Justice Alliance, low-income students and students of color in east Portland schools. A community organization that no longer exists, called Sisters in Action for Power, that was predominantly young girls of color, led a campaign to start a YouthPass. They won it for the Portland public school system, but two school districts that were in the city limits, with a high population of free and reduced lunch students as well as students of color, didn’t receive that YouthPass. We believed that it was fundamentally an equity and racial justice issue. Last year were able to win expansion of the YouthPass program. So for the first time these two school districts, led by students of color who won this campaign, got YouthPass.
Lindley Mease: Congrats!
Huy Ong: What we think is exciting is the research being done by our membership, and they help shape our campaigns and they lead the work. We go on the buses, we talk to people and we get a sense of their daily lives, their experiences, the racial profiling that happens on our transit system, the targeting of low-income folks and people of color on our system. You get to know where people work, how they get to and from places, and you get to see the racist investments [that are made] without engagement of those directly impacted. That’s the core of environmental justice, that those that aren’t directly impacted are the ones that are having meaningful engagement with decision-making processes. So we create that space. We agitate and build real successful campaigns. Every campaign OPAL has taken on, we have won.
Lindley Mease: Wow!
Huy Ong: It’s a nice reputation to have. When I came on to the organization, it had an amazing track record, badass organizers, amazing members, but was relatively unheard-of. And a super shoestring budget, I mean, people were putting stuff on their credit cards. I wanted to put it on a bigger stage, release resources to support more organizers actually having a living wage in their work. We’re really trying to develop leaders and having them take on broader roles on the organization, in our fundraising, our campaign strategies. We have an all-people-of-color staff, which is very rare in Portland.
Lindley Mease: What’s the magic that makes it work, the enabling conditions where you are, the specific tactics you use?
Huy Ong: I think it’s a little bit of an inside-outside strategy. Sometimes community organizations get pigeonholed to only have expertise around their narrative and lived experience and stories. You try to tug at the heartstrings of progressive whites to do the right thing. That’s important narrative work, but we dive deep into the nitty-gritty and actually provide solutions in a way that really challenges their beliefs that our communities can’t come up with the solutions. They give you this menu of options to choose from and we fundamentally say, “Your menu is not healthy for us and we want to create our own menus with our own ingredients. This is what it should look like.”
It’s not just about the campaigns, it’s also about fundamentally shifting decision-making bodies. We actually created for the transit agency the Transit Equity Advisory Committee. We helped build out the Environmental Justice Task Force on the statewide level. No other state has an EJ task force that actually looks at projects and investments on a state level and all the different agencies with an EJ lens. So we have some level of leverage on these different agencies and departments on a statewide level.
Another huge bucket of work for us is around housing, because a person’s ability to have stable housing is so critical to someone’s ability to shift their economic conditions. Housing and transportation are so interlinked. If you don’t have access to public transportation, you’re being pushed further and further out from the central core where the jobs are, where the services are, and your options are limited. Folks end up having to drive old vehicles that haven’t been repaired, which is not very good for climate. We led a coalition to remove the statewide ban on inclusionary zoning and won a policy in the city of Portland that has inclusionary zoning. There’s going to be housing units for low-income folks for buildings over 20 units.
We’re moving now to establish just-cause eviction standards. Moving statewide policies to address meaningful renter protection is an uphill battle. If you look at the demographics of the Oregon state legislature, even though progressive leaders control both house and senate, a lot of them are actually landlords. It’s super challenging to be in a state where there’s a perception of progressive politics and yet some fundamental pocketbook questions hit some of our “leaders.” They tend to be very shy to fundamentally shift some of that power. We know we can’t win this on our own, which is why we are fighting that one with some great partners.
We’re also building up Oregon Just Transition Alliance, an alliance of frontline communities to really start looking at a fundamental shift of the economic system that’s causing a lot of the harm and damage to our communities. It’s deep analysis around the issues impacting farmworkers, day laborers, refugee communities, people in rural Oregon, climate refugees coming in from the Marshall Islands… We’re drawing connections of economic systems that displace all our communities. It’s been challenging but super exciting and fun because where another organization might get pressured to fall in line around “progressive” pieces of legislation, we actually hold a value-centered approach. For us it’s important to hold the line. The decisions we make here in Oregon have impact globally. It’s not about just the short-term wins. So for us, we have to hold that anchor. But we want to be strategic, too. You don’t want to be seen as just a fringe group that has no deep analysis and can’t win anything. It’s because we’ve built out alliances that people listen to us.
Lindley Mease: Could you talk a little bit about agitation vs. collaboration? How do you think about that in your work?
Huy Ong: We have a general strategy that frontline communities that are most impacted should be central to decision-making. We hold EJ principles core. That leads us to be really accountable to the impact the decisions we make will have on those communities. We do have to weigh the calculus around, “do we alienate and lose supporters?” But we fundamentally believe that it’s based off of the relationships we’ve built over time. People know our values around this work. Sometimes they’re actually reluctant to have us be part of some conversations because they know we’re going to ask really hard questions and create that space that challenges some predetermined campaigns. We’ve been able to build relationships with folks on the inside that feed us info and give us analysis that they see on the inside, and our external analysis helps us make that hard decision. We’re guided by our values.
Lindley Mease: Can you give a specific story of choosing between inside and outside, or about a relationship that you know might get burned if you come out with a particular political line?
Huy Ong: Sure. We also sit on Cleaner Air Oregon Advisory Committee, because we have a deep history around air quality. We have to come out and really name the fact that industry has a lot of representation in this Cleaner Air Oregon process. As one of the frontline communities, we were outweighed in terms of the power on this committee. We had to hold a hard line around health-based standards for a new permitting process. It was a hard thing for the governor and key allies that were supportive of us but necessary to actually move policy. That’s one example.
I would also share that I work closely with a good legislator around some diesel work. It was challenging because he’d also been championing a carbon cap-and-trade bill and when we came out against it, he was both confused and worried because he wanted to support us but yet he had to support what was politically feasible in the legislative session. We had to create tension within his own caucus and in the statewide coalition. It was helpful because they are re-looking at a different pathway, trying to explore what frontline leadership can look like in trying to shape a different carbon policy.
That tension we hold with key leaders, the relationships we’ve built with them over the years has helped them make a phone call to us — what is the situation, what is the ask we have? We try to be smart about not placating to the narrative that you have to either support, oppose, or be neutral. It’s more nuanced than that. The instant we say we support a bill, we’ll never hear back from the same folks. And if we say we oppose a bill, we will never hear back from those same folks. Because they got you already, they know your position. We articulate that it’s not as easy as support or oppose. It actually keeps us in the decision-making process. As new development occurs, they check back in with us. Versus, you know, “Oh, we already got them to sign off on the full campaign, we don’t need to engage again with the people of color group.”
Lindley Mease: Community organizing is not just about getting a win. Yes, you are getting tangible wins, like with transit passes. But community organizing is more than that — it’s about power-building. Can you tell us a story about that?
Huy Ong: I want to paint a super exciting portrait, but what might be more helpful for your members is how hard it is to do community organizing. Doing deep leadership development, deep relationship-building among a wide range of communities, is one of the core bases of us building resilience in the community to both make the concrete wins but also sustain the wins. Oftentimes, you have the win, the press conference, the implementation, and then how the implementation happens looks very different. But in our community, particularly when you organize low-income communities, folks of color, we face a huge onslaught of issues. We have members that we’ve had to actually physically help relocate because they had a no-cause eviction.
Sometimes we talk to funders and foundation folks and they talk about deliverables, benchmarks. We fundamentally want them to understand the impact that OPAL has on communities is a deeper part of an ecosystem that’s so vital because services, education, legal, can only do so much.
When folks who are directly impacted understand their own power and hold on to that power and know what that power means in terms of changing, if they’re able to directly talk to decision-makers and feel the full breadth of their power in that room, it’s unmatched.
It’s a challenging thing to do over and over because we get hit with more and more systemic repression, and after Trump got elected, heightened fear. We would have events where, because there was a community alert that there was ICE checkpoint at a major intersection, half the folks texted us to let us know they wouldn’t be out on the roads that day because they wanted to avoid any possibility of a run-in with ICE. We found out it wasn’t true — there was ICE in just this one house — but people thought it was a checkpoint. That type of organizing challenge is huge. How do we create space where people are really grounded in their realities and the organizing conditions we’re operating in, but still bold enough to figure out the vision of the world that we want to create? I think that commitment to that level of leadership development and support is one of the fundamental pieces of our organizing.
The issues are so complex that if we don’t build deep analysis and deep leadership, our folks will just win their victories and take off; they won’t stay. But if they know there’s always going to be a new piece of the struggle that they want to take on, they stay for the long haul.
Lindley Mease: You mentioned the importance of partnerships and connectivity across movements. I’d love for you to do an under-the-hood look at connectivity, particularly for folks that don’t have any experience with community organizing. What are some examples of how you build collectively in the Oregon area, or transit space, that is greater than the sum of its parts in terms of winning long-term power?
Huy Ong: The discipline of EJ is the intersection of disciplines: understanding how race, poverty, gender, etc., all interplay in the ways decisions are made in the built environment where we live, work, play and pray. Some folks might come in with a very specific issue silo, whether it’s housing, food insecurity, safety, and we provide intersectionality of, “How does gender justice or reproductive justice issue intersect with where you live?” or “How you get to and from places?” The relationship building provides a deeper analysis of root causes and it helps folks determine the structural changes that need to happen.
We’re trying to move whole systems to be different. That’s built off of relationships.
For us, that is organizing in the Portland urban core. Building an analysis and understanding of what happens to poor white folks in rural Oregon or poor people of color in rural Oregon or tribal communities is so critical because we just don’t have that type of exposure or understanding.
One of the things we want to do is create opportunities for member-to-member engagement. So, people from different communities of organizing and base-building, who have their own analysis of their own lived conditions in their communities, get a chance to meet each other. Folks that are facing food insecurity or facing militia in Eastern Oregon and those that are here fighting white supremacists and white nationalists — how are those folks sharing stories and histories and struggles and tensions that they carry?
For movement building, we need to be a little bit vulnerable and learn from each other’s lived histories and challenge each other to build something collectively, to look at root causes.
That’s the thing we’re hoping to do with the Oregon Just Transition Alliance: creating space for folks to articulate different challenges, imagining and envisioning what food systems look like, what transportation, housing, jobs, job security could look like.
It’s hard because you have to pick and choose and weigh your capacity to take on some things and not all things. Some of our members are also coming from migrant and immigrant rights communities. How do we take on the most pressing issues that some of those communities are living right now, even though we have some core campaigns on other issues? With the increase in the militarization of our transit system and our city, how do we draw that connection back to what it means for our communities? For example, they’re adding more police onto the system. For us, one of the key strategies was building relationships with drivers. A lot of tension happens because drivers and riders are sometimes pitted against each other. Our strategy was, we’ve got to know what drivers’ conditions are. What is happening? What does a work day look like for drivers? We were able to build a deeper relationship and analysis, and now we’re at a point where there’s an agreement that more cops on the system will not make drivers or riders more safe, particularly riders of color and low income riders. That’s a huge step. We’re able to reveal the fact that a lot of tension happens because people without fares are questioned by drivers, because drivers are almost mandated to ask for fares, even though that’s not part of their job.
One of the most beautiful moments was when I testified alongside the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union on the same issue at the same time at a board meeting. And you could see the transit board look a little nervous ’cause they see the leadership of the EJ riders group and the leadership of the union representing the drivers. That’s not a relationship they normally see! Movement building is about building relationships and revealing the fact that we are oftentimes pitted against each other — rural communities, urban communities, poor white folks and people of color. It’s a tension that’s there and we have to reveal it and create our campaigns and our narratives to start breaking those down and drawing out the vision of a world where we all actually prosper.
Lindley Mease: When you think about speaking to folks who are not part of your movements but want to show up in solidarity with them, what are some of the important things that you’d like to convey?
Huy Ong: I always like to pose the question to folks that, if there was a decision that was going to happen that would have a drastic impact on your life and your family’s life, would you not like to have access to impacting those decisions? Community organizing on a very fundamental level is just removing barriers to participation. That could mean on some technical level, providing food, translation, child care. That’s some of the nitty gritty stuff, but there are deeper pieces: Does the community, or folks that are directly impacted, understand the processes? Have they ever had access to the processes that impact them, in terms of the decisions? If those decisions are structurally built in a way that excludes some communities, is there an opportunity to start having those folks articulate and shift those processes, so there are not always decisions that are made at 8:30 in the morning downtown? They have to start coming out in the community and engaging folks where they live.
Most folks want to see their families thrive and be healthy and safe. The more chances we get to realize that people’s lived experiences are different and wide varying, the better we are and the more compassionate we end up becoming because we understand people’s concerns. That comes from everything from what houselessness looks like for some of our communities, what does food insecurity look like for some of our communities, when you’re on a transit platform and even though you have a fare you see a uniformed officer coming your way, as people of color, what does that mean? Those are real issues that are happening and I think some folks, because that’s not their lived experience, they may never be exposed to those realities.
Organizing helps build both the opportunity for folks to fully engage, by helping remove some of those barriers, so people feel safe to be part of those conversations on decisions that impact their lives.
