Community Environmental Health Manager

The Community Environmental Health Manager at the Center for Environmental Health in California, MO, is responsible for providing strategic support and technical assistance to staff and community partners in addressing environmental exposures to toxic chemicals. This role involves managing casework, collaborating with community leaders, conducting outreach, and creating technical documents related to legal cases. The position emphasizes advocacy for frontline communities affected by environmental health issues.
Location: California

ORGANIZATIONAL PROFILE :
The Center for Environmental Health (CEH) protects people from toxic chemicals by working with communities, consumers, workers, government, and the private sector to demand and support business practices that are safe for public health and the environment. CEH believes that air, water, food, and the products we use every day should be free of dangerous and untested chemicals. We hold companies to account through public interest litigation, work together with institutions to implement environmentally preferable purchasing, and reform entire regulatory systems through policy.

This is an organization of committed advocates who work together to protect the health of all people, including those who face disproportionate health effects of toxic chemicals caused by systemic racism and social injustice.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES :
The Community Environmental Health Manager (CEHM) provides strategic capacity building and technical assistance support to CEH’s staff and current and future community partners in CEH’s work to end environmental exposures to toxic chemicals. The CEHM manages environmental exposure cases and liaises between program staff, the organization’s legal counsel, and residents and leaders from frontline communities. The CEHM manages community health advocacy projects over the life of a legal case or policy advocacy campaign, providing various types of technical assistance, maintaining open lines of communication with leaders regarding litigation developments, advocating on residents’ behalf to CEH staff and attorneys, and recommending solutions to environmental health concerns to address barriers and move projects forward to achieve the CEH mission and vision.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

Community Exposure Partnership and Casework
• Provide scientific leadership and support for community-based air and water contamination cases, and environmentally preferable products and standards development initiatives.
• Collaborate with community leaders and advocacy organizations from initiation of a legal case through its conclusion.
• Build and maintain partnerships with local and national environmental justice and environmental health organizations during legal cases and after their conclusion.
• Conduct community outreach and provide capacity building resources to community leaders and organizations during legal cases.
• Create technical documents related to legal cases, including but not limited to toxic chemical profiles (incorporating relevant information such as health effects and routes of exposure), air, soil, and/or water sampling protocols and summaries, lab result summaries, etc.
• Schedule, participate in, and co-lead or lead meetings with affected community members, community-based organizations, CEH’s legal counsel, and/or regulatory agencies (e.g., EPA, Air Quality Management Districts, Department of Toxic Substances Control, CARB, Water Board) as needed.
• Represent CEH at resident-led or community-based organization-led meetings, regulatory agency hearings, working group meetings, and other meetings on toxic exposure issues in California.
• Communicate and advocate for community wants and needs to CEH staff, CEH’s legal counsel, and partner organizations.
• Serve as a primary contact for environmental justice community inquiries related to potential toxic environmental exposures, managing follow-up research, and connecting residents/community groups with additional legal and technical resources (when CEH cannot support further).
• Work with CEH’s Science Lead to execute internal capacity building (e.g., knowledge-sharing of new tools, training) to support new case research for community exposure cases.
• Identify new advocacy issues and opportunities based on emerging scientific research and/or contaminants of concern, particularly around toxic chemicals, plastics, and petrochemicals, to protect consumers from endocrine disrupting chemicals.

Community Exposure Strategy
• Conduct investigative (online, scholarly, and field) research (e.g., review and analysis of EPA and company-reported data, academic studies, physical air monitoring, soil, and water sampling); utilize…