Beto

Beto is an environmental justice organizer and executive director of CleanAirNow an Environmental Justice Organization and committed to finding ways to improve environmental literacy, community expertise integration in academic practice and is the co-founder of Science and Community Action Network. He serves to raise community voices in the fight against environmental racism and to overcome the systemic exclusion of frontline communities from the decision-making process. His lived experience, growing up fenceline to a petrochemical facility continues to drive his work at the intersection of climate, environmental justice, and public health. He is a founding member of the California Environmental Justice Coalition, Co-Founder of La Union Hace La Fuerza, a farmworker justice organization and member of national CJ & EJ networks including but not limited to the EJ Leadership Forum, Building Equity and Alignment (BEA) and the National Leadership Advisory Board Member of the Moving Forward Network, MidWestEJNetwork.

Beto’s contributions to the movement include organizing, legislation that prioritizes environmental justice and community-led research amongst many other community-engaged initiatives that directly inform state policy. He has co-authored multiple academic publications on community-based participatory research, air pollution, data accessibility, and community engagement, including and the deployment of the largest community-based air-monitoring network in CA and the world at the time, which served as a model for state legislation in CA, to ensure community representation in decision making spaces. Has also led EJ Task Force utilizing crowdsourcing EJ Environmental Reporting App to gather and track data around oil & gas, toxic taps, CAFO’s, etc. I collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders, including local, state and federal agencies, grassroots frontline led environmental justice groups, environmental law and science organizations, to prioritize environmental justice communities.
In California, between 2013 and 2019 I led a Community Environmental Justice Enforcement Task Force, a collaborative between regulatory agencies and the community. It transformed the California Environmental Protection, this task force continues and has been expanded to multiple disadvantaged communities. The task force ultimately sought to transform the process of environmental reporting and enforcement from being reactive to proactive. These partnerships are based on regular dialogue and collaborative problem solving, rather than occasional one-way flows of information between different agencies.

In August 2021 Beto was invited to serve on the Federal Clean Air Act Advisory Committee, to represent a grassroots frontline perspective. He also serves in advisory board roles of professional associations and academic institutions, such as the American Public Health Association’s Center for Climate, Health and Equity, Children’s Environmental Health Sciences Translational Research at USC, Community Engagement Core of the Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center at USC, Health Effects Institute Environmental Justice Advisory Group and USC MPH Public Health Advisory Board Member for the Trojan Scholars for Advancement in Public Health, and in the Environmental Justice Advisory Group at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (the largest air district in the country).