EJ Hero: Nicole Gonzalez
The Brightline Podcast: Season 3, Episode 4
Our final episode features Nicole Gonzalez, a UC Berkeley senior in Environmental Science and a former Brightline Defense Policy Fellow. Nicole takes us through her journey with GIS mapping and policy advocacy, sharing how these skills have shaped her approach to environmental justice. Now, she’s putting it all into action for her senior thesis, which focuses on air quality, public health, and community-led air monitoring programs. Don’t miss this inspiring conversation on the power of data and grassroots advocacy!
Transcript:
Nicole: I'll always come back to just being in this office, like remembering like okay, this is what I'm doing it for right? Like I'm doing it to help people, people right outside these doors.
Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice, or EJ, issues in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My names' Aubrey, and I've spent this season introducing you to some of California's EJ heroes. These are people who are out there, working on environmental justice issues in their communities each and everyday. And in this final episode of season three, you'll get to meet one student who's been making her way towards an EJ career for longer than she might have realized.
Nicole: I'm Nicole Gonzalez, and I'm from Southern California
Aubrey: Today, Nicole is an environmental science major at the University of California, Berkeley. But not too long ago, she was just a kid whose dad worked for their local water district. And well, he brought his [00:01:00] work home with him.
we would always get pamphlets and, um, shower timers and just, like, stuff to, like, time our water use. And so, growing up, I was always like, all right, well, five minute showers it is. Like, I'm doing this for the drought in California.
Aubrey: Water conservation was a big part of Nicole's childhood.
We would go camping with his co-workers and their kids and they would host events with face painting and activities for the kids. And there was this like water droplet. I don't remember his name, but it was the mascot. And I just remember thinking like i'm doing it for the water guy. Like this is just like my dad's job and this is his boss. That's our that's my superhero right there.
Aubrey: But Nicole's dad was motivated by more than just water conservation.
He grew up in Long Beach, California, and he would just like tell me a lot of stories about how people and kids suffered from asthma that was most likely just living so close to the refineries and freeways and I think that's like one of the reasons why he's so passionate about the world around him and the environment.
Aubrey: She remembers her dad going back to grad school while she was a kid. He studied GIS, or Geographic Information Systems. Which is basically the use of data and software like ESRI's ArcGIS to create maps.
We're so fortunate enough to go to the ESRI conference every summer. And I got to see my dad in these workshops and presenting his maps and presenting his work to people.And I would attend the kid workshops on how to use GIS. ANd I made my very first map. And I remember seeing all these people like from all parts of the world attend the conference in San Diego. I asked my dad, I was like, are these all your coworkers? Like who, how do you know all these people? And he's like, no, like all of these people use this tool in their work and it can go from anything, not just water. It can be, I mean, air quality, it could be built environment. and I never knew that I wanted to do GIS, but I think from there, it kind of opened my eyes to like the different possibilities of things I could do and maybe take after my dad.
Aubrey: When she got to high school, Nicole got the chance to take AP Environmental Science and she loved it.
So in my freshman year of college, I thought I'm going to try a bunch of different things, no matter what it is. I'm sure it'll fall under this umbrella of environmental science. And it'll help me explore my passions and my goals.
Aubrey: She was excited to take what she learned in high school to a whole new level. But it was also pretty intimidating.
you know, as an environmental science major, you actually have to take some pretty heavy STEM courses, which I was very, very nervous about. I wasn't the best at like math and bio and chem in high school, so I was really nervous and I needed to find community in that. So I definitely found some friends in classes and formed community there
Aubrey: And outside of class, she joined almost every club she could with the word environment in the name. She found people who cared about the same things she did, and wanted to do something about it.
I thought, okay, let's take this one step further and not just, you know, work in Berkeley to make change in the organizations there, why not look for an internship or look for a fellowship, um, something that I can spend my summer doing to really just build my [00:05:00] knowledge and expand on this.
Aubrey: Nicole reached out to Brightline, and ended up working as the Policy Fellow that summer. She spent her time looking at clean energy policy, writing memos, and getting introduced to Brightline's air quality and advocacy work with community partners like La Voz Latina. You might remember La Voz from our other episode this season with communities leaders Rosa Alvarado and Miriam Aspajo.
Miriam has asthma and, uh, I think someone in her home is a smoker as well. So she faces, yeah, she faces problems when it comes to air quality and air pollution in her home. So access to an air filtration device is very, very important.
Aubrey: One day that summer, Miriam showed up at a council meeting to give a comment about a public health program in San Francisco.
there is a free air filter program that was in the community that was giving out free air filters, but there was a lot of barriers to accessing those free air filters that included two zoom calls, uh, an asthma training and a doctor's note. And those types of barriers are big for people who maybe don't have a computer to have a zoom call. Maybe you don't have access to wifi. Uh, maybe you don't have access to getting that doctor's note.
Aubrey: But when Miriam got to the meeting, nobody was there to help translate her comment from Spanish. So Brightline's team called Nicole, who speaks it fluently.
So it was my first time meeting Miriam and I said, okay, I'm gonna we're gonna figure this out in less than 10 minutes. I'm gonna read your public comment and I'm gonna translate it. Um, and that showed me first how much I like working with people and talking to people, um, specifically Spanish speaking people. And then it also opened my eyes to Why wasn't there a [00:07:00] translator there? And why wasn't there anyone there to help, um, someone give someone in the community, give their public comment and have their voice heard.
Aubrey: Back on campus that fall, Nicole couldn't stop thinking about what she'd seen and learned at Brightline. And soon enough, it was time to start planning her senior thesis. She started off with an ambitious first research question.
My first question was evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions by San Francisco. But it's such a big question because it's hard to identify like the cause and effect, right? Did this one policy measure make air quality on this day? Who knows, right? It's hard to quantify that.
Aubrey: She met with Eddie, Brightline Executive Director, who had some ideas.
My first conversation with Eddie about the thesis, he was very honest and told me that my first direction that I wanted to go in might not be feasible.
Um, you know, it was going to be too difficult of a question to answer in a year or less than that. Uh, so that was definitely the main struggle, landing on a good question.
Aubrey: But after some workshopping, she narrowed things down.
how does poor [00:10:00] air quality in San Francisco's disadvantaged neighborhoods impact public health and how can community driven air quality monitoring programs address these impacts through an environmental justice framework?
Aubrey: There is a lot packed into that one question. In fact, Nicole has three different sub research questions within her main question. And it may not surprise you to hear that she's leaning on an old familiar tool to answer them: maps. Using some of Brightline's air quality data collected over the past few years, Nicole's creating maps that will help reveal correlations between particulate matter and disproportionate health impacts in San Francisco. She's also thinking about the audience and purpose of her work.
So making maps and making visualizations that are linguistically and culturally appropriate for people in the community. And then from there, my second sub question is looking at, uh, community empowerment and engagement and talking to people in the community, community leaders like medium and [00:11:00] seeing what again, what types of barriers they face in that advocacy, maybe the public comment process or maybe just barriers in, like I said, attaining a free air filtration device. Um, so just kind of talking to them and seeing maybe how my data visualizations can help them
Aubrey: From campus clubs to working with Brightline and Miriam, Nicole has found so many ways to connect her studies with her community. It's also been a new point of connection with her dad.
Every time I go home or every time I call him, it's always something about my thesis or just something about school. Uh, because he knows what I'm going through. He also did a thesis in his master's program. He also looked at disadvantaged communities and different racial and ethnic groups and socioeconomic groups.
but he was telling me the other day, he was just telling me how much work goes into it. Like it's not going to be perfect on the first run of it. And it's going to take a lot of editing and a lot of time
Aubrey: And the mapping skills her dad raised her with hold some important lessons too.
What’s super cool is in a lot of my GIS classes, for the labs or the assignments, we're all pretty much doing the same assignment, right? We're doing the same lab. Everyone in my class I look over and we're looking at the same data set, but everyone's final map looks differently.
It looks so different. Like, we can go through the same steps and everything, but everyone's Yeah. map is going to be a different color, or um, maybe their legend or their north arrow is going to be in a different position, and it's just so cool to see we're all working towards the same problem, right?
We're all solving the same prompt, or solving the same [00:13:00] problem, but it's going to look different for everyone. Everyone's map is going to look different, the same way everyone's journey looks different, and I think
Aubrey: Just like those maps, Nicole sees a lot of potential directions for her post-graduation life.
There are, so many other ways to go in environmental work, but I think starting off my environmental work journey at a non profit, uh, The values in the non profit and the values here are just seen so, are just so powerful and you can really see the people that are working here are working to help other people, right?
Like it's, it's seen in the local partnerships and on the ground partnerships. It's just so, it feels like you're really making a difference and I think that was just, that is just a great way to start off in any way. Type of field like I don't know. I just think like it really felt personal to me um and helping communities and talking to [00:14:00] people. I'll always come back to just being in this office, like remembering like okay, this is what i'm doing it for right? Like i'm doing it to help people, people right outside these doors.
Aubrey: This season was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway. Original music by Maya Glicksman Thank you to Eddie Ahn, Carolina Correa, Merha Mehzun and Jacob Linde and for their support, and to Nicole for sharing her story. For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog. Don't forget to give us a follow and leave a review if you enjoyed the show, and thank you so much for joining us for the third season of the Brightline Podcast. Take care.