Bahieh Hartshorn: Creating Meaningful Connections Between Community and the Environment

In her own words, Bahieh Hartshorn knows that “we can’t talk about racial justice without talking about health and environmental justice.” Although this fact is now ever so clear to her, this wasn’t always something so readily apparent to Hartshorn. As the Community Organizer for St, Paul’s West Side Community Organization, much of her work happens at the intersections of health, racial justice, land use, and community-building– some of the main pillars of environmental justice work. Now she works as the Movement Politics Manager at TakeAction Minnesota where she works to invest, train, develop, and place leaders into decision making roles – whether elected, appointed, or hired.

I met Bahieh at Fresh Grounds coffee shop on Saint Paul’s West 7th Street, on exactly the type of cold and rainy April morning that makes you want to stay inside this warm and friendly shop. I inquired about her work and her motivations, and her thoughts on working for a more just environment. Hartshorn was open, honest, and interested in hearing about my questions and helping me answer them– a series of traits that make her such a good community organizer.

Our conversation lasted nearly forty minutes, and the topics we covered wound from gentrification, to identity in activism, to colonialism, to city politics. Through it all, Hartshorn showed her prowess in navigating political structures that were not built for young women of color like her. I was especially impressed by her ability to think about big ideas like structural racism and historical trauma and effectively combine that with local community-based change. That is part of what makes her a great advocate and change-maker.

Journey to Environmental Justice

Hartshorn was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and moved with her family to Luverne, Minnesota at just 2 years old. She attended college at Hamline University in St. Paul, where she graduated in 2016 with a double major in both legal studies and women’s studies. She planned to head to law school, but a job as a paralegal at an immigration law firm showed her that this was not the way she wanted to approach justice work. “I hated working within the system,” she told me, especially when that meant doing paperwork for an attorney who didn’t even respect his clients.

She quickly began looking for other ways to make a positive impact on the Twin Cities communities that were important to her, and found her way to TakeAction Minnesota, an organization working to promote a variety of justice-based platforms. Door knocking, phone-banking, and attending meetings there gave her an opportunity to work for change, outside of the political system. Around that same time, she attended marches and rallies in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder, and worked with the Black Lives Matter movement to further an issue she had long been passionate about– racial justice.

However, it was not until someone told her about the position at the West Side Community Organization (WSCO), that she first started thinking about being a community organizer. When she accepted the job there, Hartshorn noted that environmental justice “was not something that was in my forefront; I felt like I was too busy thinking about racial justice that I wasn’t thinking about how they intersect.” “I’ve experienced continuously through my life choices being made for me, my identity being erased.” Environmental injustice happens when “there are so many choices being made by people who don’t live in these areas.” She quickly discovered that pollution, land use, green space, and other environmental factors play an important role in the experiences of westsiders. In this part of town with relatively high levels of poverty and a large immigrant population, these environmental experiences are not separate from race and class.
She made the connection between racial and environmental justice, and also connected her own self-interest to the cause. “I’ve experienced continuously through my life choices being made for me, my identity being erased.” Environmental injustice happens when “there are so many choices being made by people who don’t live in these areas.” In her activism, Hartshorn understands the importance of grounding what she does in her own experiences and identities. She talks about her commitment to understand her own stake in the work, and to recognize the interlinking systems of oppression that influence her own lived experiences.

For Hartshorn, working for environmental justice on the West Side means building a system in which community members are able to “lead, and have a voice, and make change to the lived reality” of being in an industrial area. Through her work, she hopes to lift up the voices of people within the community, to heal previous traumas and to ensure better futures. Although environmental justice is not her only focus, the concept is intertwined with all of her other work.

Development and Wellbeing

Currently, much of Hartshorn’s work focuses on the creation of an equitable development scorecard, a document created by community members and WSCO to evaluate potential new developments in the neighborhood. This is a tangible way for the people of the West Side to show the city and developers what they want out of new investments, and to prove that decisions regarding land use have real impacts on the lives of nearby residents. There already exists a base economic development scorecard, assembled by a variety of organizations in the metro area, to better evaluate how future developments will impact residents. Proposals can be rated on a variety of variables that are deemed most important. On the West Side, WSCO is creating their own version– one centered around westsiders themselves. Bahieh tells me: “We want to make sure that we have this document that can live in the hands of community, that has different pillars that we say are essential in creating a healthy and vibrant community, and one of those pillars is environmental justice.”

For Hartshorn and others in the community, the conversation about development, land use, and environmental justice is not only about the city’s current policies on the West Side. Just as she told city officials in a recent meeting, she explained to me that “past practices and policies influence the ways that communities are set up, and the landscapes of that community… It matters that we talk about how we got here, [ ] that we talk about colonization, slavery, and imperialism.” As in many other places across the country and across the world, these are all factors that have shaped the physical, social, and political environments of the West Side. They have helped to create a place where residential neighborhoods are located right up against industry, where schoolchildren get sick because of the particles in the air near their schools, and where Our Lady of Guadalupe– the primary Latinx church in the area– abuts heavy industry. It is no coincidence that this is a particularly poor part of the city, with a high proportion of immigrants and people of color.

These forms of structural oppression, however, are made possible in the real-life laws and policies of cities like Saint Paul. So, for Hartshorn and WSCO, the development scorecard is an avenue to create positive change that is grounded in the local community. “It needs to be a holistic document that ensures that every community member’s voice is in it,” she tells me. It needs to include people’s lived experiences, and the systems of oppression that have shaped life in this community– and all of these things are connected to environmental justice. Through a series of community meetings, surveys, and individual conversations, WSCO has worked to incorporate all of this into their draft scorecard, published this spring.

One of the players in the creation of this equitable development scorecard is WSCO’s Health and Environmental Justice Committee, a group that Hartshorn helps to organize. Before her arrival, this group– formerly known as solely the Environmental Justice Committee– focused on projects around gardening and bees. She notes that while that type of environmentalism has its place, this should not be the organization’s main focus. People in this community “are dealing with the fact that they can’t even get food on their table, dealing with the fact that they have to breathe in [harmful] air particles,” and dealing with a host of other real-life problems that make pollinator gardens seem trivial. Adding a health focus to the committee helps people see the connections between the environment and their daily lives, and helps them to see that “actually environmental justice is [their] lived experience here and now.” Community leaders from the committee bring this lens to looking over drafts of the scorecard, so as to ensure that future development will protect the health and safety of residents.

All in all, Hartshorn has a positive outlook on the predicted ways that the city and developers will respond. As a district council (a unit of city government), WSCO has a certain amount of credibility with city planners, and a relationship with their city counselor. Recent meetings have shown city officials to be receptive to this type of score card. Some developers also seem to be on board. Instead of being surprised with a potentially angry community, the document can help them know ahead of time what they need to do to stay in good faith of west side residents.

Still, Hartshorn worries that backdoor deals between the city and developers could continue to jeopardize the wellbeing of westsiders. She points to an “arbitrary” scoring process for development that leads to high end condos encroaching on a neighborhood where people can’t afford that type of luxury living, and to an industrial corridor that cuts people off from the Mississippi River and pollutes their neighborhoods.

Thus, Hartshorn sees one of the roles of WSCO as helping to keep the city accountable on major projects. Her message to city decision-makers is that they have told the community that equitable development is something they want to take into account, so they need to do something– “if not, we are going to vote you out.” Although they get city funding, Hartshorn makes clear that WSCO is “first and foremost a community organization, before we are a district council… we are ensuring that the community is the one pushing the work, and that we are accountable to the community, not to the city.”

In the future

Looking ahead, Hartshorn knows that there is a lot of work yet to be done, but she is hopeful about the future. She tells me that the mark of a good organizer is that you can step back and move on to a new position, and the people you have been working with can step into the role because you have invested in their leadership. The people who actually live in the community, who know these experiences so well, can lead the organizing work. Someday, she does hope to move on. One day, “in the far future,” she tells me “I hope to run for office as a city councilor.”

Until then, Hartshorn has plenty on her plate. In addition to her work on the scorecard, meeting with residents, and helping to keep the district council running, she is working to create a community of indigenous women and women of color who are investing in their leadership and organizing around identity. Eventually, this is something that she hopes to expand beyond the community of the West Side.

As we close our conversation, she notes that a lot of environmental organizations focus on big, broad ideas like climate change, A lot of environmental organizations focus on big, broad ideas like climate change, “but the lived experiences and the direct organizing that needs to happen locally seems to be forgotten.”“but the lived experiences and the direct organizing that needs to happen locally seems to be forgotten.” That is exactly where Hartshorn’s power lies. Her ability to use the past to understand the present, to connect people and government, and to build relationships, make her job especially important. The work that she does is varied, timely, and– most importantly– grounded in her understanding of community as a force for change.