Founded in 2016, ELI’s Blight Revitalization Initiative for Green, Healthy Towns (BRIGHT) helps environmental justice communities craft their own area-wide plans or corridor projects. The BRIGHT team works with communities on the ground and also publishes the BRIGHT Guide. BRIGHT seeks to empower just, equitable, and community-driven sustainable development by providing tools and resources to support the community in accomplishing its goals.
The BRIGHT Guide is the flagship publication and a living guide for readers to assist in their creation and execution of a corridor project. EPA defines a corridor project as a community-driven area-wide plan for communities dealing with legacy pollution and other environmental justice issues.
The purpose of the BRIGHT Guide is to encourage communities to develop and execute corridor projects in their neighborhoods to produce positive health, ecological, and economic outcomes. Many American communities have suffered from blight, divestment, brownfields, and extreme weather; area-wide planning works to solve or ameliorate the risks of all of the various challenges that these communities face. By emphasizing race-conscious, anti-gentrification practices, the Guide reframes brownfield revitalization as a source of equitable and sustainable development.
The BRIGHT Guide is composed of 8 chapters. The first chapter introduces BRIGHT and outlines the purpose of the Guide. The following 5 chapters walk through the major steps of area-wide planning. Chapter 7 comprises relevant case studies for communities to learn from and Chapter 8 is a catch-all of resources, references, and tools to support communities in the development of their own corridor projects.
The 5 chapters outlining the major steps of area-wide planning are listed below:
As a live document, BRIGHT actively pursues best practices in area-wide planning and encourages the broader community of lawyers, practitioners, academics, and concerned citizens to share new information and resources as they become available. Please send us relevant information at bright@eli.org
Founder, Executive Director
Scott is the founder of BRIGHT, the Blight Revitalization Initiative for Green, Healthy Towns, and has been the Director of BRIGHT as a Visiting Attorney at ELI for over 5 years. Scott is an environmental justice attorney at the University of California Irvine's Environmental Law Clinic and has served for many years as the Co-chair of the Environmental Justice Committee of the American Bar Association's Civil Rights and Social Justice Section. Scott has degrees from Northwestern University's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences as well the Pepperdine University's Caruso School of Law and Straus Foundation.
Managing Director, Lead Editor
Alda Yuan is an attorney, writer, and cartographer. She has worked as a lawyer on water access, air quality, and toxic dumping in environmental justice communities as well as in the federal government on ethics in AI and equitable access to research data. She is a graduate of Yale Law School and Hunter College. She has worked with ELI and on BRIGHT since its founding in 2016. She wrote a DIY guide to institutional change for racial equity entitled With a Lever and runs the Integral States Project, which depicts the US states and territories as fantasy maps.
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Co-Author, Co-Editor
Selah Goodson Bell joined the Environmental Law Institute as a Research Associate in July 2020. His current work involves curriculum development for the Climate Judiciary Project, logistics and research support for the Training Course on Climate Adaptation in the Republic of Kazakhstan, and research support for the re-implementation of ELI’s BRIGHT program. He also co-founded a student-led group called the Yale Environmental Education Collaborative, conducting place-based environmental lessons in local New Haven schools. Selah is from Atlanta, Georgia yet grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. He graduated with a BA in Environmental Studies from Yale University.
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Co-Author, Co-Editor
Noble Smith a 3L at Howard University School of Law. After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in 2017, he worked for East Liberty Development Inc. as part of the land recycling department. ELDI is a 501(c)3 community development corporation focused on providing affordable housing in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh as well as managing blight and abandonment in the East End of Pittsburgh. He’s interested in creating pathways for EJ communities to develop climate resilience strategies that are equity-based.
Co-Author, Co-Editor
Charlie Grosenick is a world traveling environmentalist. Hailing from the D.C. area, he moved to San Diego for law school and currently works as an attorney at Brown & Winters – an environmental law firm specializing in environmental remediation. Charlie volunteers as a legal advisor for the Global Island Partnership, an international non-profit focused on building resilient and sustainable island communities. Besides the BRIGHT Guide, Charlie has written articles on environmental topics such as implementing a plastic bag fee and promoting recycled fiber toilet paper in developing markets. In his free time, Charlie enjoys surfing, scuba diving, and basketball.
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