West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project: Community Science Against Diesel Pollution

West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project (WOEIP) was founded in 2002 by residents Margaret Gordon and Brian Beveridge after noticing high asthma rates and truck soot in their neighborhood next to the Port of Oakland. WOEIP trained local residents to count trucks and monitor pollution for the landmark 2003 'Clearing the Air' report, which documented that West Oakland residents were exposed to roughly seven times more diesel exhaust per person than Alameda County as a whole. That community-based research helped lay the groundwork for California's Assembly Bill 617, and WOEIP co-led the 'Owning Our Air' community action plan, the first of its kind in the state. Between 2020 and 2022, WOEIP partnered with regulators and Aclima to deploy a network of seven real-time, hyperlocal air-monitoring sites across the neighborhood, feeding public data used to guide clean-air policy.