Michelle Pierce
How long have you lived in San Francisco?
I am 44. I have lived in San Francisco my whole life in the southeast corridor. I was born on Potrero Hill and when I was almost five, we moved out here to Bayview, which is where we still live now. I am third generation San Francisco. My father moved from the Midwest. He started his own business. My mother was born and raised here. She was born in the Fillmore. My mother works for the health department. She’s what got me into this field. She worked for the health department as the Environmental Justice Coordinator for years and years. When she was doing the environmental justice work for the city, she moved into that from this nonprofit that she and some of the old timers from the neighborhood started—the Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, which they founded in 1994. As she would go to her meetings with government agencies, their technical people would try to outspeak or out-science the people who were showing up. I was majoring in chemical and biochemical engineering and her academic training was in the legal field. She and the advocates would give me whatever documentation they brought, or she would read her notes back to me and ask me to interpret what they were saying and what my impressions of possible impacts to communities might be. More and more, other groups around the Bay Area used me in that way. I spent a lot of my undergraduate time at City College translating technical documents for social justice and environmental justice groups so they could go back to whoever they were negotiating with and say, “stop trying to play us or make us look silly and actually come to the table and talk to us.” That’s how I got into this work. It’s been almost 20 years.
Link to Podcast
possible media to link to
https://publicknowledge.sfmoma.org/civic-data-solidarity/a-conversation-with-community-advocate-michelle-pierce/
https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/events/bottom-research-environmental-justice-panel-discussion-oakland-and-sf-bay-area-community
https://sfbayview.com/2019/01/community-exposure-research-in-bayview-hunters-point/
https://sfbayview.com/tag/michelle-pierce/
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- Environmental Justice Henry Brannan
