LETTER FROM OUR ADVISORY COMMITTEE
As 2024 unfolded, we didn’t know what lay ahead in 2025. Yet the importance of remaining consistent and nimble in our constantly shifting environmental policy landscape is more clear now than ever, and we have balanced short-term responsiveness with long-term preparation and strategy.
For most of 2024, EDGI’s core focus was supporting participatory democracy and advocating for longterm, robust interventions to achieve more just environmental governance. With the Biden administration’s government-wide environmental justice (EJ) work, EDGI’s primary strategy for impact was to expand our role as a boundary organization, deepening our relationships with EJ communities and other movement partners as well as with federal agency personnel. We facilitated relationship building, conducted research, and developed tools, resources, and services to support people in leveraging data and information in their civic engagement.
To this end, in 2024, EDGI: (1) launched our Public Comments Initiative to help guide the public through the process of researching and writing effective public comments; (2) pioneered Community-Based Participatory Historical Research, including FOIA projects to support EJ communities to utilize public records in their advocacy; and (3) developed workshops for building and using civic technologies for environmental data justice.
In the latter part of the year, our strategies adapted to the shifting political landscape. We focused the final months of 2024 on preparing to safeguard federal environmental data and information and document and analyze changes to public data, information, and governance practices. The foundations we laid through relationships with advocates, activists, academics, and agencies made it possible for us to pivot and prepare for what was to come.
To begin safeguarding information, we: (1) joined the End of Term Archive team; (2) re-launched our Website Monitoring Program; and (3) spearheaded an environmental data preservation coalition, the Public Environmental Data Partners.
The Environmental Right to Know is more important than ever, as data and information are scrubbed from federal websites, government programs are shuttered, and agency personnel are laid off in droves. EDGI’s most critical short-term interventions right now come in the form of public knowledge. We will watchdog, and we will play the long game to develop and prototype solutions to build justice-based environmental governance.
We are grateful to do this work and to be in partnership with so many others who are united in this purpose. Collectively, we will succeed. Thank you for being a part of this work.
In Solidarity,
EDGI’s Advisory Committee
“EDGI