Allen Buansi - On his environmental justice work (clip)

Kathryn Wall: And you’ve done some work right here in Chapel Hill around the RENA community and the landfill here. Could you speak a little bit about that?

Allen Buansi: Sure. Absolutely. So, just going back to law school, back, I guess, during 2013. The summer of 2013. This was my first summer after my first year of law school at Carolina. And one of the reasons why I had gone to Carolina was because of the UNC Center for Civil Rights. I mean, I knew I wanted to be a Civil Rights lawyer. And so from what I had seen about the work and the lawyers like Mark Dorosin and Elizabeth Haddix at the time. I mean, they were putting civil rights law kind of into action. Like they were applying the things they learned in law school to unfair circumstances, situations, all around this state. And so, one of those involves a community right here at home, which is the Rogers Eubanks Neighborhood Association. And so, I had learned, I guess, in the beginning of that summer that this neighborhood had been dealing with the just terrible impacts of a landfill that was outside of it, right next to them. This landfill had been opened up, I believe in 1972, without that community’s consent. And then, I think at the time there was a promise that the landfill will close within 10 years. It didn’t. It went on and on. And so, this community had been fighting for a long time, for decades, to get that landfill closed. Because folks there, children there, families there, I mean, they had been suffering from impacts, [including] contaminated water, contaminated air. And so, they had enlisted the help of folks at the UNC School of Public Health. My wife is actually a graduate of that school of public health. But, they enlisted the help of faculty and researchers there. They enlisted the help of lawyers at the UNC Center for Civil Rights. And at the time, when I got involved, basically there had been a task force that had been appointed by the county, the Town of Carrboro, and the Town of Chapel Hill. And so one of my responsibilities at that time was to one, take notes at those task force meetings. The task force basically had the goal of coming up with a plan for closing the landfill and for coming up with a way to get water and sewer to people in the community who hadn’t been hooked up to water and sewer. And so going to those meetings taking notes, I was eventually tasked with the responsibility of essentially drafting up a timeline that the towns could kind of work on to get Rogers Road those supports. And so I researched about this thing called Extraterritorial Jurisdiction. It’s basically a concept in which a town can offer services to communities that lie kind of just outside the corporate boundaries. And so, Rogers Road kind of fell into that category with both the Town of Carrboro and the Town of Chapel Hill. And so I basically drafted up a timeline in which the town could extend, ETJ, or Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, to the Roger Road community to enable them to get water hookups and things like that. Along with the landfill closing, I believe the landfill actually closed that year, as well. And, I remember meeting and getting to learn from, I mean, great people like Minister Robert Campbell, David Caldwell. And the two of them, I appreciate them very much. You know what I said about teachers and my mom, and my childhood, what Minister Campbell and David Caldwell had meant to me as a young man has been immeasurable. I mean they really educated me about, kind of the long history of the treatment of RENA, but they also inspired me because these men, they’re not young men, but they have been in this fight pretty much all their lives. And, it’s taxing, it’s hard, but also, they really kind of modeled for me that this work is a lifelong commitment. It’s not something that’s an opt in opt out. You know, you’re in and you’re in it. And so I appreciate them modeling that for me. And so, that work with the center and working with the RENA community, I mean that I wasn’t uncertain about working with civil rights, but working with them it cemented things. It really fortified for me what I’m meant to do. Which is to help and to be a part of communities like that.