Principal Investigator:

Bill Whitlow, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University - Camden

Funded by Johnson and Johnson Family of Companies

Bill Whitlow, Professor of Psychology, spoke to a large audience of interested scholars about "Community-Based Research: Potentials, Problems, and Prospects." Dr. Whitlow, who has been working with educators and community groups for decades, is planning to create a Center for Environmental Health and Wellness in the Waterfront South section of Camden. This center is intended to be community-based, research-capable, and capacity-building. At the Associates' Seminar, Whitlow discussed some of the complexities involved in trying to create a community-based research program.

The Waterfront South neighborhood of Camden is an area of about 2.7 square miles acres with 2350 residents. Once the location of bustling residential and industrial uses, Waterfront South now shares a similar social, political and economic history with other areas across the country experiencing disproportionate environmental hazard exposure (e.g., Bullard, 1994; Foster, 1998).

Waterfront South contains a regional sewage treatment plant (the Delaware No. 1 Water Pollution Control Facility of the Camden County Municipal Utilities Authority Regional Wastewater Treatment System, or CCMUA), built in 1987, a major trash-incinerator (the Camden County Trash-to-Steam incinerator), built in 1989, a significant number of local industries and storage facilities (a query to the US EPA Envirofacts Warehouse retrieved 86 facilities in the area that are EPA-regulated as of July 16, 1998), as well as a highly contaminated radiation site (the Welsbach/General Gas Mantle site, a Superfund site) and a highly contaminated chemical dump site (the Martin Aaron Drum Company, another Superfund site). These industries and facilities, along with the associated truck traffic, generate noxious odors, unidentified particulate matter, and a wide range of known air pollutants, such as ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxides. As in other instances of environmental injustice, much of the industrial production of adverse environmental impacts has been added to the area despite the already existing residential use.

To address these problems in an effective way requires both a community commitment and a community capacity for education and outreach. Neither of these requirements is easy to come by. The human capital capacity of Camden continues to diminish, as businesses and other community anchors leave the city. In addition, the question, 'Who is the community in Waterfront South?' does not have a simple answer. There are, in fact, a number of community groups in the area. Among them are the Heart of Camden, which works to provide affordable housing, Youth on the Move, which works to provide youth-oriented activities, the Rescue Mission, which works to provide resources for homeless adults, and South Camden Citizens for Action, which works to redress the environmental injustice experienced in the community. The difficulty of identifying the community has been highlighted recently by the introduction of the St. Lawrence Cement Company, which produces a cement additive from the slag by-product of steel mills. SCCA has filed a lawsuit to prevent the company from operating, but there has been a continuing struggle over the identification of community voices, with some groups claiming that SCCA does not speak for the community.

With funding from the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies, Whitlow was able to hire the Camden Area Health Education Center (Camden AHEC) to conduct focus group sessions with 3 different constituencies in Waterfront South - SCCA, Youth on the Move, and Heart of Camden. Across all 3 focus groups, 41 residents participated in sessions that were energetic and productive. The focus groups followed a structured protocol that also left room for open-ended contributions. From these focus groups, 3 issues emerged as the principal concerns of the community: living quality, such as dirtiness and disorderly activity in the neighborhood, air quality, with odor and possible airborne pollutants being the main topics, and water quality.

Dr. Whitlow and the Camden AHEC are developing programs to help the residents address these concerns in a positive, proactive manner. These responses will include training residents to do air quality monitoring, training them to do water quality testing, and helping them create a center with resources and information for community.