Alex Relph working with Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry. (Courtesy: Mike Oxendine)
On Valentine’s Day, Mike Oxendine, founder and director of Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry, received a letter stating that the $600,000 grant his organization was awarded just months earlier had been terminated.
Oxendine had received the funding from the Arbor Day Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to planting trees. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service terminated its $75 million support of the foundation on the same day: the award “no longer effectuates agency priorities regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities,” the letter stated.
Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry was founded to restore trees and vegetation lost after the 2020 Almeda Fire. The Almeda Fire burned approximately 3,000 acres, destroying over 2,800 homes and businesses in the towns of Ashland, Talent, and Phoenix, areas with a large Latino community.
“The focus has always been on the most underserved and disadvantaged, the most vulnerable populations, which were the most impacted by the fire,” said Oxendine.
Kristi Heatherstone, 67, is one of the Ashland residents who lost her house in the fire. Initially, she wanted to leave the area, but then she realized that the traumatic experience brought the residents together. “I lost everything, but I gained community, and that’s priceless,” said Heatherstone. “Add on trees, it just makes the quality of life so much better.”
Before the funding was terminated, Oxendine said his organization spent about $100,000 to deliver tree-planting services for ten recipients. Heatherstone was among them.
“Having gone from lots of trees to none, having trees makes me feel like I have a place, a home,” said Heatherstone. “What Mike is doing is offering something to people that probably would never be able to afford it. And it changes the environment here: it makes it cooler because, without any trees, there’s no shade, which makes it even drier and more vulnerable to fire.”
The devastation caused by the Almeda Fire. (Courtesy: Mike Oxendine)
Oxendine’s organization planted trees for communities that didn’t have trees or who live in manufactured mobile homes in Southern Oregon—where, he noted, temperatures can exceed 100°F (37.7°C) for extended periods in the summer.
“Not to be overly dramatic, but people could die as a result of this,” Oxendine said. “In extreme heat events, if you have shade from trees, you can drop the temperature up to 16 degrees. And that can be the difference between life and death for people.”
The organization had scheduled 42 projects that have now stopped.
“The hundreds of people that need tree canopy to help them recover, and be healthier, and have better health outcomes for generations to come aren’t going to get those services because of this lack of funding,” said Oxendine. “That’s been the hardest part.”
The situation of Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry is far from uncommon. Organizations that received grants from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for environmental justice initiatives also find themselves stuck in limbo.
In the last week of March, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released an internal list of about 400 EPA grants targeted for termination. The grants covered $1.7 billion in investments dedicated to safeguarding clean air and water, supporting clean energy investments, and building resilience to climate disasters.
Many of them had arisen from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, as a result of the Biden administration’s executive order to make the climate crisis a central issue in the United States’ domestic and foreign policy. Grantees also used the Justice40 Initiative and the Climate & Economic Justice Screening tool developed by the Biden administration to identify communities with environmental, social, and economic burdens and tailor their grants. Through the Justice40 Initiative, these communities were slated to receive 40% of the federal funding allocated to climate and energy investments.
On the day of his inauguration, President Donald Trump rescinded Biden’s executive order, terminating the Justice40 Initiative. Two days later, the screening tool was no longer available on the White House portal.
Dominika Parry, founding president of the nonprofit 2C Mississippi, said the organization had a $500,000 grant that was terminated a few weeks ago and a multimillion dollar grant to build a resiliency hub to tackle extreme heat that has just been terminated.
But even before the terminations, funds were frozen on the Automated Standard Application for Payments (ASAP) system used to withdraw grant money, so organizations couldn’t reimburse themselves if they invested personal funding in buying material and developing their projects.
“These grants, since the inauguration, have been frozen. Then they were unfrozen for about a couple of weeks,” Parry said, explaining that the portal prevents recipients from withdrawing all the money at once. For weeks, she found the funds frozen every time she checked the portal.
Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a group composed of over 600 former EPA workers, said the termination letters violated court orders. On March 18, a federal judge temporarily blocked the cancellation of grants since the EPA failed to provide evidence for termination, but the EPA has continued sending termination letters.
Grant money comes with a series of conditions that the government is now making increasingly challenging for recipients to meet. Generally, when organizations obtain an EPA grant, they receive a contract outlining the terms they must meet to maintain it and requiring them to show their progress.
“If you don’t move with the project, you are in what’s called non-compliance,” Parry said, expressing concern that the freeze in funding has made compliance increasingly difficult—and that the new administration and the EPA might use the lack of progress as an argument to terminate grants.
Based on the original terms and conditions, a grant can be terminated if there is evidence of fraud or a lack of compliance with the terms of the award. But on April 3, the EPA amended these terms. Now the agency can terminate new grants “if an award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”
The widespread fear of grant termination has reduced some organizations to silence, but not all.
Sarah Diefendorf, director of the Capacity Collaborative at the Earth Island Institute, is part of a group of 13 organizations and six municipalities that have started a lawsuit against the Trump administration and different government agencies arguing that the suspension of the funds is unlawful.
Diefendorf said they were able to take part in the lawsuit because they have a financial sponsor, the Earth Island Institute, which can support them.
“We agreed that we would do it because we can stand up longer than other nonprofits may be able to,” Diefendorf said.
The Capacity Collaborative was awarded two grants that are now on the leaked list of grants targeted for termination: a roughly $3 million grant dedicated to promoting intergenerational knowledge within the Wai’anae community in Hawaii and creating an environmental committee for Indigenous Hawaiians and a $2.5 million grant to tackle health and environmental issues in West Anniston, Alabama, in a predominantly Black and low-income community affected by industrial pollution.
Diefendorf said that the EPA officers dedicated to environmental justice in Region 9, which includes Hawaii, are not allowed to speak with their grantees, so she hasn’t been able to reach them. But she has been able to make contact about the other award. “We’re lucky: we have two grants, one in a region where they can talk to us,” said Diefendorf, referring to the EPA officers in Region 4, which covers Alabama. “We’ve been able to get feedback on how we’re supposed to comply because the first quarter is done, and we need to do our first quarter report.”
The EPA declined an interview request but wrote in an email, “As with any change in Administration, the agency is reviewing each grant program to ensure it is an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars and to understand how those programs align with Administration priorities.”
As the Capacity Collaborative’s lawsuit proceeds, the recent decision of a court in Rhode Island has imparted some hope to the organization. On April 15, a federal judge ordered the release of funding, writing that the organizations involved in the lawsuit had demonstrated the indefinite freeze of funding was arbitrary.
The judge applied the order nationwide: all the funds awarded through grants from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law had to be unfrozen. For almost two weeks, the government didn’t comply with the order, leaving environmental nonprofits to worry that court rulings may no longer be sufficient, and the case may escalate to the Supreme Court.
Then, on April 28, some organizations discovered that they could again withdraw funding from the ASAP portal. “We’re not really sure why since no one talks to us, but it’s great news,” said Diefendorf.
Organizations continue to grapple with uncertainty, as the situation rapidly evolves. The EPA has recently acknowledged its plan to cancel 781 environmental justice grants, instead of the initial 400 on the previously leaked list, and send official termination notices over the next two weeks.
For its part, Oregon Urban Rural and Community Forestry, whose grant from the USDA was terminated, was able to secure some funding from the Oregon Department of Forestry to complete some of the ongoing projects, but not enough to carry out all of them.
“We provide services to anybody that needs them that meets some very specific criteria with socioeconomic status,” Oxendine said. “It just sucks to get wrapped into a political ideology when our work is not about that. Our work is about helping people and helping the most vulnerable and disadvantaged people among us.”
About the author(s)
Alice Finno is an Italian reporter based in New York City, covering climate and social justice issues. She is an M.S. candidate at Columbia Journalism School.