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Little Village Facts

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The Department of the Environment has a website and a phone number for reporting nasty emissions.

If you smell a foul odor, follow this link and they will send an inspector out (when everyone calls, make sure you get a reference number and after you get a reference number say you WILL be calling backrepeatedly to understand what's going on).

Comments regarding LVEJO
Available Scholarships
Rachel's News now housed with LVEJO (En Español)
Play Audio of 2007 Eco-Justice meeting (streaming audio)

More About Us...

LVEJO originally worked within the City of Chicago Community Areas #30 (South Lawndale) & #28 ( Lower West Side). These two community areas are commonly known as Little Village and Pilsen respectively. Together, they make up the largest Mexican American urban area in the U.S. outside of East Los Angeles. We have now expanded the geographic focus of some of our programs to the entire city and some suburbs. The roots of our organization began in 1994 when parents, grandparents, students, neighbors, and priests organized to move a proposed elementary school to a safer environmental location. In November, 1995 through a $20,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Justice Organization, the Gary School Environmental Justice Project (GSEJP) began. Thirty middle school students participated in a GSEJP leadership program for two years. During that time the school became the first in Chicago to certify the school engineer, staff, students and parents to implement a lead prevention and reduction program. Gary also became the first Chicago school to do a complete toxic and asthma trigger inventory, buying safer products and materials. GSEJP won safer roof replacements in all three of its buildings. Fifty parents and student members of the GSEJP club voted to establish a community based organization (CBO), LVEJO, in June, 1997.

Over the next year LVEJO worked with parent organizers going door to door to find out what concerns the community had. Based on the organizing LVEJO’s campaigns were created and have evolved into our work today.

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