Interview conducted by Megan Chopra and Lia Nathan.
Oana Leahu-Aluas is the Sustainability Program Analyst in the Urban Sustainability Administration at the Department of Energy and Environment (DOEE). According to their website, DOEE “is the leading authority on energy and environmental issues affecting the District of Columbia.” The interview, which focuses on the various projects that the Urban Sustainability Administration has undertaken and how COVID-19 has affected their timeline, as well as the relationship between social justice and environmentalism.
How has COVID affected your work and the progress being made on projects?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: I started at DOEE almost a year ago, so while I was not personally here for the normal operations before COVID-19 and then COVID-19 hitting, from the discussions I’ve had with my colleagues and also from putting together the annual progress report this year which required a lot of discussions about how much progress has been made on the actions, there were definitely a lot of initiatives and actions that were delayed or put on hold as you can imagine. Certainly, [at] the ones that were related to people being in office or at school, like waste diversion efforts at offices, or school gardens, there weren’t as many people to help maintain them.
Similarly, with things like building out makerspaces, there was just so much uncertainty that it’s not like those were front of mind for folks. [Despite the rollbacks], there were a lot of initiatives rolled out during COVID-19 to support the most affected industries, and I think perhaps some creativity emerged with some of the initiatives that were rolled out during COVID-19. There was one called Fit D.C. which provided online health and wellness resources and found a way to encourage people to exercise and be active even within that COVID-19 world. Ultimately, COVID-19 while had an impact on the ability to move forward with some sustainability actions, there are new, [beneficial] initiatives that emerged as well.
On the DOEE website, it says 86% of the actions (143 actions) are underway and 20 actions are completed. When do you expect all of these actions to be completed?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: The short answer is 2032, because the very first sustainability plan came out in 2013 and the whole motto of the sustainability plan is to make D.C. the healthiest, greenest, most livable city for all residents within one generation, which was meant to take 20 years. That being said, some of the actions in the plan are short term actions, some are long term actions, some are ongoing actions, so whether we can ever call the ongoing actions complete is probably up for debate.
DOEE works a lot on social justice and racial equality in tandem with environmental projects. Why do you think racial equity is important to consider in developing D.C.?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: You can’t talk about D.C. history and past without talking about race, therefore, you also can’t talk about D.C.’s future and development decisions without talking about race. I don’t know if you all are familiar with the book Chocolate City by Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrovebut the subtitle of it is “a history of race and democracy in the nation’s capital”
I’m sure there are other great books out there as well on similar topics, but Chocolate City is such a comprehensive view of the beginnings, before the district existed to modern day and it describes what role race played throughout that history including policies made by government, or perhaps policies not made by government, allowing discriminatory practices in the public and private sectors, so you can’t separate the two. If you’re looking at development into the future, you have to take into account racial equity.
The other key document I would point you to is if you haven’t seen it, is the Department of Energy and Environment has released an equity framework and that takes the bigger questions about how critical racial equity is in general and applies it directly to our work. As an entity that that is a policymaker and an entity that runs programs, we have to take into account the history and context so that we don’t repeat the decisions that resulted in the inequities we have today and we purposely make decisions that alleviate the inequities we have today.
At DOEE, staff racial equity training is prioritized. How does this training affect the general, marginalized populations?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: In conjunction with that equity framework I mentioned within our agency, and also within the DC government, there has been racial equity training rolled out, including required training and there are several reasons why that is important. One is that again, we, as part of an institution and system, need to understand the context that we’re working with and the consequences of certain decisions— those that were made in the past and also those that we make today.
The trainings are a way to provide the context and then also put together the linkages between the context and our day-to-day work because if you’re going to have institutional change, you need to have the people within those institutions make those changes. As one of my coworkers said, we’re not just robots doing their work, we are people, so we make up the institutions and we make up the systems so the people within those systems and institutions can understand the context they’re working with within and particularly the racial context of the district.
DOEE also has something called the Equity Impact Assessment Tool. Can you speak on that and how you’re using it? How is it addressing the racial inequities in relation to sustainability?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: There have been a couple iterations of the tool, it got updated recently and so we call it REIA: The Racial Equity Impact Assessment. REIA’s are done at various levels but for DOEE, have an Equity Committee and they’ve been working on developing tools and resources such as the REIA. Once they developed initial versions of the REIA, each team within the agency had to complete a REIA for either an existing program or a program that was under development.
What that process looked like is we met in those small teams and we worked through specific questions like ‘which populations are most affected by your program,’ ‘what are the potential positive and negative impacts,’ and ‘what strategies could we put in place to mitigate harm and expand benefits particularly the two most overburdened or underserved communities.’ Walking through those questions as a group resulted in thoughts on strategies again to minimize burden and maximize benefits.
That was how we used the REIA tool internally, and once all the teams went through that process the Equity Committee compiled everybody’s input and feedback and they’re now reviewing it all. The Equity Committee is not only going to get a wealth of information from all the discussions, but they’re also going to provide feedback back to the teams with input on the comments provided through the REIA as team members were also able to provide comments and feedback on the REIA process for improving it in the future.
How does environmental work, such as increasing sustainability infrastructure in D.C., like your Solar Works D.C. initiative, help citizens?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: Solar Works is a really good example of bringing all the components of sustainability together. Whether you describe sustainability as environment, equity, and economy or as people, planet, and profits, or other ways of describing it— D.C. generally really uses this framework of equity, environment, and economy. So, Solar Works D.C. touches on all of those because it’s a paid workforce development program that’s meant to channel people to jobs in the solar industry.
It’s run out of the D.C, infrastructure Academy in Ward 8, so it’s certainly intended to capture under- and unemployed residents. It’s a workforce development program that helps create that pipeline to the green economy coupled with the fact that when they’re training people to install solar and clean energy for low-income residents. There’s also the equity piece of focusing on the populations most in need most with the highest unemployment, and then the environment piece is that while this training the workforce development is happening we are increasing the amount of clean energy and reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and the folks getting solar panels installed on their homes are getting a reduction in their utility bills so it’s also saving them money which goes back to the economy piece.
In what ways do you think environmental work is crucial, or can be crucial, when it comes to all these different departments?
Oana Leahu-Aluas: I think it’s about the coordination between various teams and agencies. Environmental work and, more broadly, sustainability are such a big topic, along with equity, and economy, it can’t be done in a vacuum by one agency alone. In the sustainability plan, the co-leads of the plan are DOEE and the D.C. Office of Planning. In addition, there’s 25+ agencies listed on the plan as either a lead or support on every action because even the two of us [DOEE and Dep. of Planning] would never be able to touch on all the work that needs to be done to reach our sustainability goals. There are departments like the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Department of Public Works, the Department of Small and Local Business Development; there’s just so many agencies that are ideally all working in one direction to meet these sustainability goals.
One of the most valuable things about having a sustainability plan is that it articulates the high-level goals that these agencies are working towards. When other agencies are figuring out their programs and priorities, they use the sustainability plan to make sure they’re aligned with others. Likewise, when community members see the D.C. government doing certain programs and projects, if they’re not in alignment with the sustainability plan, they can point to the sustainability plan and be like, ‘why would you do this if it’s in conflict with your sustainability goals.’ That’s why it’s such a large group effort and requires having a sustainability champion in each of these departments, because if it was just one person and DOEE, they wouldn’t really be able to get pretty much done without the collaboration of the other departments.
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