Massachusetts Environmental Justice Council Support

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) seeks to protect, preserve, and enhance the Commonwealth’s environmental resources while ensuring a clean energy future for the state’s residents. All of EEA’s programs, policies, and practices are rooted in the principles of environmental justice to ensure an equitable and just transition for all Massachusetts residents. The Environmental Justice Council was created in 2021 and is appointed by the Governor to advise and provide specific recommendations to the Undersecretary of Environmental Justice and Equity on policies that incorporate EJ principles. EEA contracted with ERG to provide administrative and meeting planning support for seven virtual and 13 hybrid Environmental Justice Council meetings, including support to make each meeting accessible to speakers of the five most common languages (after English) in the community.

Throughout this project, ERG has been working collaboratively with EEA to foster a productive meeting experience for all participants. The ERG team is responsible for managing all planning, implementation, and documentation logistics, leaving the Environmental Justice Council free to focus on designing and presenting the meeting content to advance the EJ principles at the heart of its mission. For all meetings, ERG begins by identifying a suitable meeting venue in an EJ community that is inclusive and, if possible, accessible via public transportation. Information from the state is used to determine the five most common languages after English in each EJ community. To ensure accessibility for all community members who speak these languages, EEA provides interpretation services and ERG develops and translates all meeting invitations, social media announcements, slides, the agenda, and the meeting summary.

To ensure that everything goes as smoothly as possible, ERG reviews the meeting run of show with the Undersecretary of Environmental Justice and Equity. For each meeting, ERG provides a webinar lead, who handles all meeting logistics, an onsite logistics lead, who arrives early to ensure (troubleshooting as necessary) that the site is ready and that all equipment works, and a notetaker. We also identify and schedule an onsite audiovisual team. After each meeting, ERG develops a summary with key takeaway points, a Rehabilitation Act Section 508-compliant recording of the English video, and regular recordings of the additional language rooms. As a best practice for continual improvement, we coordinate and lead a debrief meeting to discuss any ideas and lessons learned for refining meeting effectiveness so that we can build them into our approach for subsequent meetings.