Heinz Environmental Justice Cannot Be Honored by Erasing the Community that Built the Record

Open Letter

To Dr. Sacoby Wilson and the Heinz Family Foundation

This open letter is issued on behalf of the Brandywine/TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition, known as BTB Coalition, and the residents whose lived experience, documentation, organizing, legal advocacy, and public-health concerns helped establish Brandywine as a defining environmental-justice case in Maryland.

We write regarding the public narrative surrounding Dr. Sacoby Wilson’s environmental-justice work, including representations connected to the Heinz Awards, the development and use of Maryland environmental-justice screening tools, and broader claims concerning cumulative-impact research and community-engaged environmental justice.

Let us be clear: this letter does not dispute Dr. Wilson’s academic expertise, research contributions, or right to receive recognition for work he actually performed.

It addresses something equally fundamental:

Environmental justice cannot be celebrated through a public narrative that minimizes, omits, or institutionalizes the work of the frontline community whose struggle generated the evidence, urgency, access, and policy demand upon which that work was built.

Brandywine Was Not Merely Studied

Brandywine was not simply a location selected for academic research.

Brandywine residents organized for decades against the cumulative concentration of power plants, mining operations, industrial facilities, diesel truck traffic, waste activities, infrastructure failures, flooding, air pollution, and related public-health burdens.

The BTB Coalition did not enter this work as a passive research subject. We gathered evidence, challenged permits, organized residents, engaged agencies, initiated civil-rights advocacy, participated in technical processes, and demanded a method capable of documenting cumulative burden.

The Maryland environmental-justice screening framework did not emerge in a vacuum.

Its development must be situated within the community’s Title VI struggle and its demand for a data-driven way to demonstrate what residents had been reporting for years: Brandywine was carrying a disproportionate concentration of environmental and public-health burdens.

The record reflects that the Maryland screening-tool concepts were presented and refined during a period when Brandywine’s Title VI advocacy, cumulative-impact evidence, community mapping, and demands for stronger environmental review were already active. Brandywine-specific mapping was used, community members were asked to engage in validation, and questions were raised about the weighting of air pollution, power-plant proximity, industrial concentration, and other indicators.

The community was therefore more than a mapped population.

Brandywine was the proof point.

Academic Contribution Does Not Cancel Community Origin

Academic researchers may design methodologies, construct databases, develop algorithms, publish papers, produce maps, and present findings.

But those activities do not erase the source of the underlying public problem, the community-generated evidence, the civil-rights advocacy, or the residents whose participation made the work possible.

The distinction matters.

The academic contribution may involve building a tool.

The community contribution includes creating the factual, political, legal, and moral foundation that made the tool necessary.

The public record should recognize both.

Instead, the history increasingly appears to have been compressed into a cleaner institutional story—one in which universities, agencies, foundations, and recognized experts become the central actors, while the directly affected community is reduced to a case study, data source, engagement site, or beneficiary.

That is not equitable attribution.

It is institutional displacement.

The Title VI History Cannot Be Removed

BTB Coalition’s environmental-justice advocacy was directly connected to Title VI concerns involving discriminatory impacts, cumulative burdens, meaningful public participation, and the failure of regulatory systems to protect an overburdened majority-Black community.

The January 28, 2019, PHMSA–Maryland Public Service Commission Informal Resolution Agreement was not an abstract administrative development. The community understood that process to require environmental-justice screening, meaningful engagement, front-end public-participation safeguards, and review of whether proposed projects would add burdens to communities already carrying disproportionate harm.

MARYLAND FACES CIVIL RIGHTS COMPLAINTAFTER APPROVING 3rd FOSSEL FUEL/GAS PLANT IN BLACK COMMUNITY

As the President, of the Brandywine | TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition we are elated to announce that The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), Pipeline and Hazard Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), External Civil Rights Compliance Office (ECROC) is resolving our complaint based on there internal 'Informal Resolution' process. An agreement was entered into and executed on January 30, 2019 between the Maryland Public

Service Commission ("PSC" or "Commission"), Maryland Department of the Environment ("MDE"), Maryland Department of Natural Resources ("DNR") (together, the "Agencies"), an behalf of the Brandywine TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition ("BTB Coalition"), regarding the Title VI complaint ("Standing Complaint") filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ("U.S. EPA") and the U.S. Department of Transportation ("U.S. DOT") on June 14, 2016.

The informal resolution agreement represents the countless hours of work the Kamita Gray, and Al Weaver put in alone as community representatives throughout the ADR process and then Kamita Gray with the informal resolution process with agencies in working for the greater good of our communities.

In consultation with long standing key members of the ECCB whom fully supported my decision. www.btbcoalition.org/titlevi.html 

That civil-rights context is indispensable.

A screening tool rooted in a Title VI fight cannot later be publicly characterized as a stand-alone academic or governmental innovation detached from the community advocacy that demanded it.

Nor can the tool’s civil-rights purpose be separated from later decisions concerning what the tool measures and whom it recognizes.

Current concerns are particularly serious because Maryland’s operative EJ scoring methodology reportedly excludes race and ethnicity, language proficiency, and age from the EJ Score, even though those factors are directly relevant to civil-rights vulnerability, meaningful access, and environmental inequity.

Dr. Wilson acknowledged in a September 8, 2025, communication that removing race and language affected Brandywine’s score and was connected to compliance with the federal administration’s anti-DEI and environmental-justice directives.

That is not merely a technical modification.

It raises a fundamental question:

How can a framework born from a racial and environmental-justice struggle remain faithful to that struggle after race and language are removed from the operative score?

Recognition Creates a Higher Duty

The Heinz Awards were established to recognize extraordinary achievement, leadership, and contribution in areas including the environment.

Recognition of that magnitude carries a corresponding responsibility to ensure that the public narrative is complete.

An award should not only celebrate the visible institutional leader. It should also avoid reinforcing the historic pattern through which universities, foundations, agencies, and professional intermediaries receive recognition while frontline communities disappear from the story of their own work.

The question is therefore not whether Dr. Wilson contributed.

The question is whether the narrative presented to the Heinz Family Foundation, its reviewers, its jurors, and the public adequately disclosed:

1. BTB Coalition’s decades of environmental-justice organizing in Brandywine;

2. the community’s role in generating the cumulative-impact record;

3. the Title VI advocacy that created the demand for a Maryland environmental-justice screening framework;

4. Brandywine’s role in tool demonstration, validation, and public justification;

5. the contributions of residents and community practitioners whose experience and access supported the research;

6. the continuing disputes over attribution, methodology, governance, and dilution of the tool’s civil-rights purpose; and

7. whether award-related descriptions implied sole or primary authorship of work that was community-originated, jointly developed, institutionally supported, or dependent upon frontline participation.

The public deserves an answer.

This Is Not a Demand to Rewrite History Around One Individual

BTB Coalition is not asking that the record be rewritten to substitute one individual hero for another.

That is precisely the model we reject.

Environmental justice is frequently built through an ecosystem of residents, organizers, scientists, attorneys, public-health practitioners, students, institutions, and government actors. Accurate attribution must reflect that ecosystem.

However, collaborative work does not mean anonymous community labor.

Partnership does not mean that the institution owns the history.

Research access does not transfer ownership of the community’s experience.

Funding does not purchase authorship of the struggle.

And recognition does not give any person or institution the right to present a community-originated body of work as though the community were merely the place where the work occurred.

Our Concerns Extend Beyond One Award

This matter reflects a broader pattern.

Community-generated concepts, language, evidence, accountability models, and civil-rights demands are too often shared with academic, nonprofit, governmental, and philanthropic intermediaries. Those ideas later reappear as institutional reports, grant initiatives, screening systems, scorecards, policy frameworks, presentations, or award narratives.

The original community is then invited back as a stakeholder—after its work has already been renamed, funded, professionalized, and credited elsewhere.

That is not community engagement.

That is extraction.

The concern is reinforced by later institutional products involving MDEnviroScreen, MDEJSCREEN, environmental-justice scorecards, and “People’s Report” framing. Records already identified by BTB Coalition support a legitimate inquiry into who authored, funded, reviewed, approved, and benefited from these products and whether community-originated frameworks were properly acknowledged.

Requested Corrective Actions

BTB Coalition respectfully requests that Dr. Wilson and the Heinz Family Foundation take the following actions:

1. Conduct a Formal Attribution Review

Review all nomination materials, biographies, supporting documentation, videos, public statements, award descriptions, interviews, and related submissions concerning Dr. Wilson’s work in Maryland and Brandywine.

The review should determine whether the narrative accurately distinguished among:

• academic authorship;

• technical development;

• community-originated advocacy;

• community-generated evidence;

• Title VI legal and policy demands;

• collaborative research;

• institutional funding and sponsorship; and

• frontline validation and implementation.

2. Publish a Supplemental Attribution Statement

The Heinz Family Foundation should issue a public supplement recognizing the role of BTB Coalition and the Brandywine community in creating the civil-rights, cumulative-impact, and community-engagement foundation associated with this body of work.

At minimum, the statement should make clear that Brandywine residents were not merely research subjects or community partners, but principal actors in establishing the environmental-justice record and demanding the accountability framework.

3. Correct Any Overbroad Authorship or Creation Claims

Dr. Wilson should identify and correct any public statements that could reasonably be interpreted as claiming sole creation, sole authorship, or exclusive institutional ownership of the Maryland environmental-justice screening framework or related Brandywine-based work where the full record supports a more collaborative and community-originated history.

4. Disclose the Supporting Record

The relevant institutions should identify the records supporting claims regarding the creation, design, validation, funding, ownership, and implementation of:

• the Maryland EJ screening framework;

• MDEJSCREEN and MDEnviroScreen;

• Brandywine-specific mapping and validation;

• related environmental-justice scorecards;

• The People’s Report; and

• any Heinz Award representations tied to these bodies of work.

BTB Coalition has already requested underlying authorship, design, funding, approval, methodology, and communication records rather than asking any decision-maker to rely solely upon personal recollection.

5. Establish an Award Attribution Standard

The Heinz Family Foundation should adopt a formal standard for awards involving community-engaged research and frontline environmental-justice work.

That standard should require nominees and nominators to disclose:

• the originating community;

• principal community organizations and leaders;

• the source of lived-experience evidence;

• community intellectual contributions;

• consent and attribution practices;

• disputes over ownership or authorship;

• funding and institutional support; and

• how recognition or award resources will benefit the communities connected to the honored work.

6. Meet Directly With BTB Coalition

We request a direct meeting with authorized representatives of the Heinz Family Foundation and Dr. Wilson to review the chronology, supporting records, attribution concerns, and proposed corrective language.

This meeting should not be routed through an intermediary.

The directly affected community should be allowed to speak for itself.

What Resolution Looks Like

Resolution does not require diminishing Dr. Wilson.

It requires expanding the record until it is truthful.

A corrected narrative could recognize that Dr. Wilson provided academic, scientific, mapping, public-health, or technical contributions while also acknowledging that the work was shaped by and dependent upon decades of Brandywine community organizing, BTB Coalition’s Title VI advocacy, resident-generated evidence, and the community’s demand for cumulative-impact accountability.

That would not weaken the award.

It would give the award greater integrity.

The Principle Is Simple

The tool came from a civil-rights fight.

The evidence came from community harm.

The urgency came from residents living with the consequences.

The validation came through Brandywine.

The academic work must be recognized accurately.

So must the community work.

We remain prepared to submit an organized attribution record, including the relevant chronology, correspondence, presentations, screening-tool materials, Title VI documentation, public-participation history, and other supporting exhibits.

We hope Dr. Wilson and the Heinz Family Foundation will address this matter voluntarily, transparently, and with the seriousness that environmental justice requires.

Silence, however, cannot be treated as resolution.

Nor will BTB Coalition consent to being erased from a history that its residents helped create.

Respectfully,

Kamita Gray

President, Brandywine/TB Southern Region Neighborhood Coalition

BTB Coalition Administrative ChairExecutive Community Citizen’s Board and Neighborhood Leadership Council

On behalf of the Brandywine community and the residents whose lived experience, evidence, advocacy, and persistence built the public record