Sampling

During the first few months of 2002, River Network surveyed numerous communities and groups around the nation that were grappling with water contamination and human health concerns. Our initial efforts were by telephone. We contacted community groups listed in the People of Color Environmental Directory described to be working on environmental contamination and human health issues. We made contact with the head of the environmental justice program from each Region of the US EPA and obtained a list of groups that had either applied for or been granted an EAP environmental justice grant during the past 3 years. We obtained additional contact leads from the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, the Environmental Health Network, NIEHS, ATSDR, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Indigenous Environmental Network. Lastly we polled the over 600 partner groups that are part of the River Network. We contacted these groups by telephone, mail and e-mail. We employed the concept of snowball sampling, asking each community that responded to our survey for contacts they knew of in other communities that were also dealing with human health concerns related to water-based contamination. Eventually, we made our survey available on the Internet and distributed the link to access the survey through a variety of environmental justice and watershed listserves.

As of June 1, 2002, a total 142 respondents completed a sufficient portion of the survey to be included in the analysis. This report is based on those responses.