California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment

A screening tool used to help identify communities disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution and with population characteristics that make them more sensitive to pollution.

California Air Resources Board

This map shows disadvantaged communities and low-income communities as defined for California Climate Investments. To see if a particular location is within a disadvantaged community or low-income community, either navigate to the desired location on the map, search for the location by address, or enter a 10 digit census tract number in the search bar. Layers can be adjusted using the layer tool. Census tracts that are both disadvantaged and low-income blend to a color not represented in the legend if overlapping.

California Air Resources Board

This spreadsheet can be used to identify if a census tract is as a Disadvantaged Community or Low-Income Community, if Tribal lands are present within the census tract, and buffer community claims may be available.

California Air Resources Board

Use this lookup tool to identify the median income threshold by county and county average household size.

California Department of Housing and Community Development

Identify income limits for low-income communities and households. Low-income communities and households are defined as the census tracts and households, respectively, that are either at or below 80 percent of the statewide median income, or at or below the threshold designated as low-income by HCD.

California Air Resources Board

Benefit Criteria Tables are used by administering agencies and applicants to identify the priority populations that will benefit from the project, and determine how the project will meaningfully address an important community or household need and provide a benefit.

California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment

A screening tool used to help identify communities disproportionately burdened by multiple sources of pollution and with population characteristics that make them more sensitive to pollution.

California Air Resources Board

If direct community engagement is not possible, administering agencies, applicants, and/or funding recipient can refer to the list of common needs and select a need that has documented broad support from local community-based organizations and/or residents. While this list includes some common needs of priority populations, as identified by community advocates, it is not intended to reflect a definitive list of all potential needs of disadvantaged and low-income communities and low-income households, and items included in the list may not be applicable for a specific community.

California Strategic Growth Council

Tested policy models for equitable outcomes in under-resourced communities. Provides case studies, lessons, and scalable templates to support program administrators and funders in designing programs to achieve equitable and transformative outcomes in communities in California and beyond.

California Strategic Growth Council

If your organization isn’t ready yet to apply for a planning or implementation grant, find resources here to help you prepare for success. Through the Community Assistance for Climate Equity (CACE) suite of programs, SGC provides technical assistance and capacity building to help under-resourced communities access critical funding resources, implement high-impact projects, and enact community-led initiatives.

Governor’s Office of Planning and Research

This checklist is intended to assist State agencies to ensure that plans and investments identify and protect the State’s most vulnerable populations. This checklist can be used alongside any decision-making process to improve equitable outcomes.

Explore resources that can be used to provide technical assistance in a way that advances equity and builds community capacity to secure funding and implement projects that can help reverse past disinvestment.

California Air Resources Board

Community Connections is a tool to help organizations and agencies find partners interested in California Climate Investments. Partnerships ensure that project proposals reflect the perspectives needed to build resilient communities and implement meaningful investment.

Council on Environmental Quality

This tool is an interactive map and uses datasets that are indicators of burdens in eight categories: climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development. The tool uses this information to identify communities that are experiencing these burdens. These are the communities that are disadvantaged because they are overburdened and underserved. Federal agencies will use the tool to help identify disadvantaged communities that will benefit from programs included in the Justice40 Initiative.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

EPA's environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic socioeconomic indicators. EJScreen users choose a geographic area; the tool then provides demographic socioeconomic and environmental information for that area. All of the EJScreen indicators are publicly-available data. EJScreen simply provides a way to display this information and includes a method for combining environmental and demographic indicators into EJ indexes.

California Strategic Growth Council

The Hub is designed to enable practitioners, policymakers, and communities at any point in their racial equity journey to increase access and understanding to relevant resources and best practices.

California Air Resources Board

Example guidance from the Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP), where applicants must directly engage community residents, in all phases of the STEP proposal’s development and implementation to ensure projects provide direct, meaningful, and assured benefits to STEP Community residents. While quantity of outreach and engagement is important, STEP Applicants should also prioritize the quality of their outreach and engagement, including targeted outreach and engagement to hard-to-reach residents.

California Air Resources Board

Example guidance from Sustainable Transportation Equity Project (STEP), where applicants are encouraged to consider how to identify and avoid substantial economic, environmental, and public health burdens in disadvantaged and low-income communities that may occur due to STEP-funded projects and that may lead to the physical or economic displacement of low-income households and small businesses.