"BASE"- Building Action for Sustainable Environments

BASE is a coalition of 17 organizations nationwide representing people of color and disenfranchized communities affected by the nuclear chain, as well as U.S. chemical and biowarfare facilities. Shundahai Network is honored to be a member of this effort. Email contacts are located at the end of each group description."

Center for Environmental And Economic Justice, Biloxi, MS

CEEJ is working to fight environmental racism and military pollution in the Biloxi, MS area. Biloxi and its surrounding waterways are heavily impacted by dioxins and other chemicals, such as Agent Orange, emanating from a Navy Base in the area. CEEJ is a diverse group of African-Americans and Latinos that is training and involving the community members in the government’s cleanup of this pollution, conducting health surveys and educating the greater Biloxi area. email: prayzes@aol.com

Columbia River Education - Economic Development, The Dalles, OR

Columbia River Education is working for environmental justice and alternative economic development among indigenous communities who have remained in their traditional lands along the Columbia River. This group gathers and provides people with information on nuclear materials production, storage, and disposal; how the nuclear cycle affects their health, food supply, and job safety; and promotes community involvement in decision-making about hazardous waste in and surrounding the river, which is severely impacting the communities’ health. email: wsjr@netcnct.net

Community Alliance on the Savannah River Site (CASRS), Savannah, GA

The Community Alliance on the Savannah River Site works with four counties in Georgia and five in South Carolina whose communities are generally African American and low- to moderate- income. The Savannah River Site is a former nuclear weapons production plant which has spread pollution and nuclear contaminants far downriver, impacting fish, local wildlife, and the communities surrounding this area. In addition, African American former employees of the Site have been disproportionately exposed to the radioactive chemicals involved in such work. Housed by the Center For Environmental Justice in Atlanta, the Community Alliance works to reduce the level of pollution around the Savannah River Site, to educate local communities about the Site, and to help raise their voice and empower them in the decision-making processes around it. email: cfej@bellsouth.net

Defense Depot Memphis TN - Concerned Citizen Committee, Memphis, TN

The Concerned Citizens Committee is fighting military pollution and racism in poor communities of color around the Memphis, TN area. The community surrounding the military Defense Depot, a former federal facility responsible for decades of chemical releases, has a very elevated rate of cancer – including breast and prostate cancer among teenagers and young adults. The Concerned Citizens Committee works to find solutions to the health problems caused by the Defense Depot; they also have a Youth Terminating Pollution wing that educates youth about environmental racism and strives to find answers to problems impacting young people in general. email: ddmtccc411@aol.com

Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, Durango, CO

Diné CARE is an all-Navajo (Diné) organization comprised of a federation of grassroots community activists in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Diné CARE’s goals center on the empowerment of Navajo communities to defend themselves from unwanted, environmentally destructive development – and the promotion of sustainable, small-scale, value-added industries; decentralized energy production; recycling; and environmental regeneration. Since its formation in 1988, Dine' CARE has worked on several environmental projects across the Navajo Nation, including battles against logging and uranium mining within sacred Navajo lands. email: kiyaani@frontier.net

Eastern Navajo Uranium Workers, Prewitt, NM

Eastern Navajo Uranium Workers is based in McKinley County, New Mexico, where over 100 open pit and underground uranium mines remain where Navajo people were once recruited to work. Today, the Navajo continue to suffer from the side effects both of mining uranium and the contamination from unreclaimed mines. There are severe health issues among the people caused by the uranium, not to mention the radioactive contamination of the drinking water, and a serious lack of knowledge in the community about these hazards. The ENUW is an all-Navajo environmental justice organization that works to raise public awareness, educate, and empower the local Navajo communities. email: tmartinez@thoreauchapter.org

Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee, Augusta, GA

Hyde and Aragon Parks are located in the low to middle income communities of color in a flood-prone area of Georgia, surrounded by a dozen industrial and chemical facilities who illegally dump cancer-causing byproducts in the area. The Hyde and Aragon Park Improvement Committee fights environmental racism by educating local communities as to the dangers of the chemical facilities in the area, and working for their change or elimination. email: hpapic@hotmail.com

Imani Group, Aiken, SC

The Imani Group works to develop holistic educational, social, economic and spiritual opportunities for empowerment and capacity-building within communities in the Savannah River area. Initially focused on organizing educational, cultural and social events for the community, the Imani Group is also working to educate and organize the community surrounding the Savannah River Site about environmental issues, and working to provide youth with education around environmental, social and cultural issues. email: imanigrp@bellsouth.net

Jesus People Against Pollution, Columbia, MS

Because of the inadequate data produced by Reichold Chemical Company, Environmental Protection Agency officials and other government units about Agent Orange and other toxins in their community, JPAP organizes, educates, and empowers the community to work together for enviromental justice. The group strives to obtain environmental health services and to generate self-help housing programs with sustainable economic development for persons living around the site, and also to dialogue and collaborate with groups at the regional , national, and international levels to develop solutions for existing problems in contaminated low-income communities. email: keysjpap@aol.com

Macedonia Baptist Church Environmental and Academic Tutorial Program, Blackville, SC

The mission of this program is two-fold: to educate, enlighten, and inform children about environmental health hazards in and near the community; and to help students meet South Carolina Curriculum Standards in Math, Science, Language Arts and Social Studies by improving their study, writing, and critical thinking skills in researching and analyzing information. email: gwenlittlejohn@yahoo.com

New Mexico Alliance, Chimayo, NM

New Mexico Alliance is a grassroots, statewide organization composed of community-based groups and individual activists who are involved in social, political and environmental justice issues. The Alliance is working to educate and organize local communities around the transportation and storage of nuclear waste that will be going through rural and indigenous communities on its way to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico. In Northern New Mexico, the Alliance is educating people about the long-term environmental, economic and health effects that Los Alamos (home of the first nuclear bomb testing) has had on local communities. email: reals123@cableone.net

Northwest Social and Environmental Justice Institute, Granger, WA

NCEC, a Latino farm-worker community organization, directs its efforts to educate, organize and mobilize the Latino community in building partnerships with academic institutions, community groups and friends in government agencies to confront and find solutions to the environmental threats that agricultural practices and nuclear contamination are posing to the health and safety of the people living in the rural, agricultural communities of the Eastern Washington. They have produced and programmed radio campaigns that informed and educated farm-workers on environmental injustice issues as well as amnesty and human rights. email: kncec1997@aol.com

Pine Bluff for Safe Disposal, Pine Bluff, AR

Pine Bluff is a low-income community of color in which there is an old chemical weapons arsenal and twenty-six different companies that severely pollute the environment. The group works to protect their community by conducting environmental and health testing of Pine Bluff and the surrounding area, identifying and addressing educational programs and activities to empower people of color in Pine Bluff and Arkansas. email: yates_e@hotmail.com

Proyecto Caribeño de Justicia y Paz - Caribbean Project for Justice and Peace, San Juan, PR

CPJP is a Puerto Rican peace group that focuses on education, documentation and dissemination of information about human rights, militarism, and peace. CPJP’s work on environmental issues focuses on the US military’s use of Puerto Rico as a military colony and its pollution of the land, water, and air in Vieques, PR as a result of extensive bombing practice. CPJP strives to develop the values of solidarity and cooperation that permit each person to act individually and collectively to transform the rigid structures that maintain injustice. email: pcjp@coqui.net

Shundahai Network, Salt Lake City, UT

Shundahai Network is a nonprofit organization dedicated to breaking the nuclear chain by building alliances with indigenous communities and environmental, peace and human rights movements. The group actively seeks to close down the Nevada Test Site to all nuclear weapons programs except for radioactive contamination containment and cleanup. Shundahai Network also opposes all nuclear waste dumping on indigenous peoples’ lands, especially Yucca Mountain and Skull Valley Reservation. They also work to educate the people about the dangers of radioactive waste transportation and promote a safe and sane energy policy based on conservation and renewable resources. To this end, Shundahai Network organizes and participates in nonviolent direct actions, demonstrations, workshops and conferences. email: shundahai@shundahai.org

S.H.A.W.L. Society (Saving our Health, Air, Water, and Land), Wellpinit, WA

SHAWL Society is an indigenous organization working on issues of environmental contamination such as uranium mining in Spokane lands. SHAWL Society works to keep toxic waste from ruining the environment; to protect the air, water, and land for the children; and to promote awareness and educate the community about environmental concerns and social injustices. email: shawlsociety@yahoo.com

Tribal Environmental Watch Alliance, Santa Fe, NM

TEWA is made up of indigenous Tewa speaking Pueblo Indian nations, and is a voice for indigenous and non-indigenous communities that deal daily with extreme poverty, lack of social services and environmental racism. Since local indigenous communities have been seriously impacted by the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and testing and radioactive material in the area – which has led to serious environmental and health hazards – TEWA was formed to address issues that local tribal governments could not. TEWA continues to work to address pollution-based illness in indigenous communities and to get more social service funding from the state and federal governments. email: tewacowboy@hotmail.com

Tewa Women United, Santa Fe, NM

Tewa Women United provides educational and empowerment training activities for residents of the six Tewa speaking Pueblos in northern New Mexico. With members aging from 18 to 65, the group's activities focus on environmental justice, the prevention of domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and teen suicide, peer support for Indian women, and the strengthening of the Tewa values (including in relation to the forces of acculturation). In essence, Tewa Women United is committed to improving the economic, physical, environmental and social aspects of indigenous communities, and to do so for women in particular. For five years the group has held annual gatherings to address the nuclear contamination of Pueblo lands arising from their proximity to Los Alamos National Laboratory. email: vickiedowney@hotmail.com