Celebrating a Decade
of Front and Centered

For over ten years, we have successfully improved well-being for ALL Washingtonians by passing groundbreaking environmental laws, redirecting millions of dollars and other key resources to frontline communities, and advancing community-directed strategies to limit pollution and correct environmental health disparities.

Ten Years of Advancing Climate and Environmental Justice

Since our inception, the Front and Centered coalition has grown to become the largest and most powerful coalition of frontline communities—communities of color, Indigenous peoples, migrants and refugees, and people with lower incomes—who are advancing climate and environmental justice in Washington State, and by doing so, ensuring a Just Transition to a better future for all.

We are deeply grateful to the visionaries who brought our coalition into existence, all of those who have contributed along the way, and the ancestors whose shoulders we stand on today. As part of our tenth anniversary celebration, we want to share with you some of our journey through success stories, member and community voices, photos and videos, data, and more.

We hope you will find inspiration from our coalition’s solidarity and growing impact, especially during these times of social, political, and economic upheaval. We encourage you to join our email list and follow us on our social media channels—and ask your friends and colleagues to do so as well—to stay engaged and build power together as we look toward building the future we need!

Our Coalition

Membership in the Front and Centered coalition means that member organizations believe in Front and Centered’s founding principles and values. Our Front and Centered Coalition members influence our advocacy, inspire our action, and connect us to the frontlines of change in Washington State’s communities of color and people with lower incomes. Together, we are building power and expertise rooted in solidarity, and advancing a just transition at the intersection of equity and environmental and climate justice.

The Front and Centered team is staff to the coalition—they provide the coalition with access to:

Funding opportunities and resources

Technical assistance

Influence on policy and impact strategies

Statewide convenings

Policy and legislative briefings

Leadership development and educational resources

Our Work, Our Impact

We work to improve well-being for ALL by passing groundbreaking environmental laws, redirecting millions of dollars and other key resources to frontline communities, and advancing community-directed strategies to limit pollution and correct environmental health disparities. By targeting areas and populations that face the greatest harm, we can make sure everyone benefits from a cleaner, healthier environment.

Initiative 1631

For us, by us. Front and Centered harnessed our collective power as a statewide coalition to collaboratively develop an initiative that would have been a key piece of legislation in righting decades of historic pollution inequity, Initiative 1631: The Protect Washington State Act (I-1631). Aspects of I-1631 included an escalating pollution fee that would have funded a variety of pollution cleanup projects, strategic ecological restoration, as well as reducing the burden of energy costs for low-income communities.

As our coalition and steering committee developed I-1631, we exercised our legislative advocacy muscles through this process; our campaign was powered by many partner and member organizations who together gathered the 250,000 signatures needed to get on the ballot. Many of our coalition members also joined in strategic planning efforts that strengthened community bonds and gave everyone valuable practice in legislative advocacy.

This initiative did not pass, in part due to a huge wave of industry pushback that influenced voters away from I-1631. But we know that when polluting industries fight against us it means we are headed in the right direction. By addressing the carbon-dependent systems that allow dirty business to continue polluting our environment and shortening our lives, there have been and will continue to be concerted efforts to stop our work. Nevertheless, we dig deep and plant the seeds of change in our own backyards, all through Washington.

The value of I-1631 still lives on, as the outlined funding mechanism that our hardworking coalition developed was carried over to the Climate Commitment Act (CCA). The CCA mandates that 35% of cap-and-trade revenue must be designated towards direct and meaningful benefits for frontline communities.

Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act

We demand a Healthy Environment For All. But what is a “healthy environment”? Who is “all”? The Healthy Environment For All Act (HEAL) Act is the Front and Centered coalition's landmark state legislative policy that is beginning to answer those questions. Once passed in 2021, the HEAL Act codified the definition of phrases such as “environmental justice” and “overburdened communities” into state law, and that was just the beginning.

Having explicit definitions and goals for environmental justice encourages a shared understanding of the issues at hand and what needs to be accomplished. For example, involved state agencies did a self-evaluation of their progress towards discrete HEAL Act baselines. Community organizations completed the same evaluation, and the results showed that there is a serious discrepancy between how these two parties view the state’s efforts. Now that we are able to define and lay out the problems at hand, we can start addressing them!

Another exciting example is WA DOH’s Environmental Justice Assessment in which they used the Environmental Health Disparities Map to better identify and expand the number of Washington State communities who would qualify for public drinking water system funding subsidies, including Tribes. This means that the DOH has since been focusing their infrastructure support on the needs of communities, rather than the financial capacity of the utility providing those important public health services.

Community Education

Education is not restricted to schools and universities. Expertise doesn’t only come from one top-down legitimized source of power. At the core of community education is the realization that political action and community resilience rely on integrating Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and low-income narratives into learning opportunities. In our community education efforts, the reality and lived experiences of our frontline communities are incorporated to create an inclusive, bottom-up, co-learning environment.

At Front and Centered, community education is conceived as a collaborative exercise to infuse the Just Transition framework into community-driven and pace-based efforts to implement environmental and climate justice strategies to enhance community resilience. We collaborated with ClimeTime and other dynamic community partners to foster meaningful climate science education in Washington schools, co-creating opportunities like the Community Education in Action workshops, the Climate Justice League project, and intergenerational storytelling events. Our digital booklet shared ideas on how to implement a photovoice project focusing on environmental justice and environmental health disparities to inspire the ideas of the Youth Wisdom Council.

Our Just Transition Loteria game, available in both Spanish and English, covers both environmental and climate justice concepts with the aim of promoting intergenerational community conversations around the Just Transition, including “false solutions”. In our On the Frontlines podcast, we provide a platform that gives exclusive insider access to the knowledge
and lived experiences of our members while on the frontlines, including those who crashed the COP27 conference to hold accountable our governments peddling false solutions in the discussion of policies and impacts related to global climate change.

Even though this is a relatively new and emerging work at Front and Centered, we have already made significant impacts in support of our front communities. By investing in multigenerational learning practices, we disrupt dominant and colonizing narratives while simultaneously building new paths for liberation.

Exposing False Solutions

At Front and Centered we keep our eyes on the prize and oppose false solutions – even when it might seem counterintuitive at first glance. When the Climate Commitment Act (CCA) was signed into effect by Governor Jay Inslee in 2021, there was potential for environmental and climate justice funding to support frontline communities and their efforts to improve environmental quality and further climate adaptation practices.

Our team looked through the lofty promises and wrestled with the root problem: would the CCA’s cap-and-trade scheme actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions in an equitable manner for frontline communities? Long story short, no. Washington’s cap-and-trade scheme, with its purchasable “allowances” and exceptions for high-emitters does not dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and as a result, communities closest to these emitters would still experience harmful air quality. So even though the optics of opposing parts of climate legislation drew criticism, we sprung into action.

We pushed back against this market-based policy by offering our own equitable and effective recommendations. Firstly, stopping the “pay to pollute” cap-and-trade scheme and instead developing facilities-specific emissions standards is a tried and tested climate policy that we still strongly advocate for. Secondly, we have been, and will continue to advocate for a diversity of policies and programs that address the wide range of relevant concerns around emissions such as toxicity of emissions and ecological degradation near industrial plants. Lastly, we assert how imperative that the designated funds for frontline communities, which was defined as 35% of all related revenue from the CCA, actually goes to said communities. We are committed to addressing false solutions that do not serve frontline communities, no matter how they are offered.

Transportation Justice

In our state, nearly half of our greenhouse gas emissions come from cars and trucks. Washington State has the highest asthma rates in the nation. We are experiencing a 20-year high in pedestrian and bicycle deaths and an overall increase in traffic fatalities per vehicle miles traveled. Washington State is also the fourth highest spender on road expansion. When Front and Centered asked its membership what their transportation priorities were, the calling couldn’t be more clear. Better Public Transit. Cleaner Air. Safer Streets.

Communities of color from our coalition have led the fight to advocating for a just transition in transportation by creating advocacy tools, providing legislative testimony, and educating our state-wide community. The Yakima Asian Pacific Islander Coalition along with other Front and Centered members, Disability Rights, and 350 Washington worked to develop a Transportation Bill of Rights that puts people at the center of our decisions.

In response to our community’s calls for transportation justice, Front and Centered created advocacy tools like the WA Environmental Health Disparities Map, the WA Transit Access Map, and the Accelerating a Just Transition in WA State report to highlight inequities in access, safety, and health outcomes. Our advocacy efforts are working. In the 2022 legislative session, the Washington State legislature passed Move Ahead WA, effectively winning $16 billion to be invested in Washington’s transportation infrastructure over 16 years. The passing of Move Ahead WA was a historic and transformative shift towards a multi-modal future, quintupling the amount ever invested in transit and active transportation, and successfully outranking funding toward new highway expansion. Our fight continues with our Gardening for Transportation Justice: A Blueprint Toward Community-centered Carbon Reduction report we released earlier this year, highlighting the impacts of our Transportation Justice Leadership grant program completed in collaboration with 19 member organizations, and in partnership with Washington State Department of Transportation.

Tackling Cumulative Impacts

When it comes to environmental health, we see the whole picture; not only what environmental threats you are exposed to, but how vulnerable are you to said threats? Acknowledging the fact that this complex interaction is one of the most accurate ways to identify comprehensive environmental risk, we led a collaborative, multi-sector project that resulted in producing the Environmental Health Disparities (EHD) Map. The EHD Map is Washington State’s first ever open-access mapping tool that provides a science-based visual representation of how 19 discrete indicators intersect and make communities more or less vulnerable to environmental health risks.

Once we could visualize the risk of cumulative impacts of pollution on vulnerable communities, we realized there was a serious lack of state policy that addressed this comprehensive pollution risk in an equitable manner. As a result, we produced and advocated for the Cumulative Risk Burden Pollution Act and the modified version, House Bill 1303, to address this shortcoming. While these policies did not make it to the legislative session, we carry on knowing that complicated, multi-factor problems will not be solved by a single policy. So we are developing a variety of programs that address individual factors of pollution risk.

For example, we have been supporting the Seattle community-based organization, Duwamish River Community Coalition (DRCC), in their lawsuit against Ash Grove Cement Company’s legal attempt to increase the amount of tires they are allowed to burn as fuel. DRCC’s major concern is that air pollution will further worsen for the fenceline communities of Georgetown and South Park, who already experience the most severe air quality issues in the Greater Seattle Area.

We will continue to develop a myriad of policy, legal, and social infrastructure solutions in the face of environmental injustices. Cumulative solutions to cumulative problems!

Strategic Communications

Over the years, our coalition has developed effective and creative communications strategies that center the expertise of our coordination team and frontline community members. We aim to educate and activate broad audiences while positively influencing the public narrative via earned media, social media, email, events, briefings, video, podcasts, research and reports, and other digital and in-person strategies.

Our experts and advocacy has been featured in multiple media outlets, including The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, Grist, The Urbanist, Prism, Real Change, and High Country News.

Our Distinctive Approach

Front and Centered represents and is in relationship with frontline communities to provide access to and influencing political power and funding resources to build the movement. For over ten years, no one else in the state of Washington consistently has brought together a broad, multiracial coalition to advance climate and environmental justice.

In 2014, a group of leaders of color came together to collaborate and create Climate Justice Principles that define key equity guidelines for climate policy to benefit their communities. Sixty groups working in communities of color across Washington State signed these principles and called themselves the Communities of Color for Climate Justice.

The needs were clear, the response and structure were unique. BIPOC-led organizations already had agency and expertise, but many did not have the capacity to raise funds, analyze and advocate for state policy, or gain access to political power.

In 2015, we created a statewide support team to serve as a coalition broker and to bring the coalition’s power to bear as we advocated for policies, innovated programs, researched issues, and expanded and stewarded resources for frontline communities. This approach has served the coalition well over a decade of change, extending our movement for climate and environmental justice across the state, expanding our team from one-and-a-half consultants in 2015 to sixteen staff and four core consultants in 2025, and increasing the resources we redirect toward the frontline communities five-fold.

Voices of Front and Centered Community Leaders

Decade Highlights

In our first ten years, we advocated for and helped to pass vital state policies and shape budget outcomes, and we then worked to ensure that funding is directed to frontline communities, including over $650 million in the 2023–2025 budget cycle. Along the way, we built capacity within our frontline coalition, learning and educating together—bringing member wisdom to wider audiences and building a bench of leaders of color to forge the path forward.

2014–2017

A group of leaders of color came together to collaborate and create Climate Justice Principles that define key equity principles for climate policy to benefit their communities. Sixty groups working in communities of color across Washington State signed these principles and called themselves the Communities of Color for Climate Justice.

Communities of Color for Climate Justice then formally became Front and Centered to organize, align, and build power, reshapin the climate and environmental advocacy landscape and getting the attention of funders and elected leaders, including Governor Jay Inslee who visited an impacted community on his climate tour to the South Park and Georgetown neighborhoods in Seattle and met with leaders from communities of color to discuss climate change.

Our coalition ramped up advocacy with state legislators and agencies while building out a policy framework for statewide climate measures to help stop false solutions and advocate for investments in climate justice. We shaped the governor's Clean Air Rule and got the state’s Department of Ecology to use environmental justice (EJ) criteria in the awarding of toxic cleanup grants. Our coalition also stepped up voter engagement and education that helped defeat Initiative 732, a carbon tax that would have funded corporate tax breaks.

We held the first West Coast EJ leaders convening to align and prevent legislative missteps. We created the EJ mapping group, shaped state solar strategies, and succeeded in ensuring an EJ approach to the disbursement of $112 million in pollution mitigation funds. We also held listening sessions on pollution, health, climate, water, and solar energy to inform multiple projects.

2018–2021

Our coalition helped lead the drafting and advocacy for the “Yes on Initiative 1631” campaign. I-1631 was a groundbreaking climate investment ballot measure that would have centered the power of communities of color, but it was unfortunately defeated in 2018 by Big Oil, which spent a record-breaking amount of money against it. Nevertheless we managed to conduct outreach to over 100,000 low-propensity voters of color in highly polluted areas.

In 2019 we hosted our second Environmental Justice Summit with over 225 leaders of color from across Washington State. Summit attendees draft a detailed climate plan for a Just Transition and invest in communities to make change.

That same year we co-launched the Environmental Health Disparities Map—which was later adopted across government agencies, proposed the Healthy Environment for All (HEAL) Act, and realized the establishment of a statewide Environmental Justice Task Force. We also shaped and helped pass the Clean Energy Transformation Act, a law that requires an equitable transition off fossil fueled power.

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020, Front and Centered sprang into action, redirecting over $500,000 in emergency funds to frontline communities.

Later, the Front and Centered team launched two reports: Accelerating a Just Transition in Washington State, and the Statewide Community Environmental Report. The New Economy Washington Fellowship was established, funding five community Just Transition projects.

In 2021, Front and Centered created and led the passage of the Health Environment for All (HEAL) Act, a landmark environmental justice law that centers communities most affected by pollution as Washington State pursues a Just Transition away from an extractive economy.

2022–2025

After our frontline coalition said NO to new highways in 2021, we helped reshape the transportation landscape with a more equity-focused investment package, including $5 billion in public transportation, initiating a state study on frequent and accessible transit, and launching the Washington Transit Access Map.

Also in 2022, we held our first Just Transition Learning Series event at Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad in Everson, and we later hosted our coalition member summit on the Seattle waterfront—our first in-person summit since 2019.

For Earth Deserves More Than a Day in 2023, Front and Centered partnered with Rainier Avenue Radio and Social Justice Film Festival a second time to present a week-long program of events. The 2023 program highlighted our coalition members’ commitment to climate justice, with folks joining us throughout an exciting week of both in-person and virtual events showcasing the local and global efforts of our frontline communities to defend and honor Mother Earth.

At the beginning of 2024, we moved our offices to Seattle’s historic Labour Temple, in large part because of the opportunity the building gave us to convene and build solidarity with our frontline coalition.

We launched the CURB Pollution Act at the end of 2023, and we brought it to the 2024 and 2025 legislative sessions to try and get the bill passed and address pollution burdens in frontline communities. While the bill never got the opportunity for a vote by the full legislature, it made an impressive showing both years thanks to the strong support and backing of our coalition, partner organizations, and our supporters across Washington State. Now, as we look ahead to 2026, CURB is no longer just about any single bill, but our name for our broader, overall efforts to correct environmental injustices in Washington State.

The Future?

2025 has been an exceptional year. Climate and environmental nonprofits have been facing increasing scrutiny, and organizations that depend heavily on federal or state funding are facing additional struggles.

At Front and Centered, we remain committed to our mission, and we will be doing as we have always done—centering the critical analyses and lived expertise of frontline communities for the benefit of all Washingtonians, and for a healthy environment for all.

What this means is that we will continue to engage in policy advocacy, from addressing issues of clean air, transportation, and energy access to advancing solutions for resulting disparities in health and opportunity. We will continue to support communities across the state in their capacity building efforts, from leadership programming to community regranting and technical assistance. We will continue working for justice even when it feels against all odds.

The fear and anxiety many are feeling are real, so we want to highlight some of the work we’ve been doing internally to ensure the continuance and safety of our organization and our coalition:

convening our coalition members on a semi-regular basis to share knowledge, strategize, and be in community with each other;
gathering together a legal committee we can call upon should such resources ever be required;
planning for new ways to engage with our donors;
strengthening bonds and sharing resources and information with partner organizations; and
sharing as much information and resources as we can with our coalition and staff.

While we always knew the work we do has a significant impact, the events of 2025 have only proved that even more. Work like ours is under scrutiny precisely because it has been proven to create change for the better. As we celebrate and reflect on our first decade, we want to assure you that we are here to stay. Our mission continues, and with your support, so will the impact of our coalition.

Thank You for Your Time and Support

In October 2025, we held our ten-year anniversary celebration at the Seattle Art Museum’s beautiful Olympic Sculpture Garden overlooking Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains. We were also joined by coalition members from across the state for our annual summit at the Labour Temple, where we moved our team in 2024.

Both events were grounded in the past, present, and future of our fight for environmental and climate justice, reminding us what’s possible during this challenging moment. We offer our gratitude to our originators, staff, members, supporters, and partners—past and present—and stand committed to continue working together towards a healthy environment for all!

To find out more about what makes Front and Centered unique and powerful, visit our website, join our mailing list, and engage with us on social media.

We welcome your feedback, questions, or suggestions around our special anniversary website! Send your thoughts to our communications team at [email protected]. Thank you!

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Celebrating a Decade
of Front and Centered

Ten Years of Advancing Climate and Environmental Justice