The publication below is an original opinion piece by Angelo Logan from the Liberty Hill Foundation, published by SoCal Grantmakers. The thoughts and opinions expressed in this article belong to SoCal Grantmaker’s guest contributor.
Photo by Jordan Renville
Standing near the Inglewood Oil Field, it is easy to understand why communities have spent decades fighting to end neighborhood oil drilling. The impacts are not abstract. They are lived every day by residents whose homes, schools, parks, and places of worship sit near industrial activity that should never have been placed so close to families in the first place. For generations, communities have carried the health, environmental, and economic burdens of extraction while others benefited from it. That reality cannot be understated.
Communities need strong, healthy, protective policies that are successfully implemented, enforced, and resourced to ensure that promises made on paper become real, visible differences in communities that are transformative.
The conversation at SoCal Grantmakers’ recent Environmental Funders Group convening, From Extraction to Opportunity: Advancing a Just Transition for Land, Health, and Community, invited us to look beyond the harm and toward the future that communities are already imagining. We talked through critical questions, imagining what would happen if land long defined by extraction became a community asset and what it would mean to transform a drilling site that has caused harm into something that supports health, stability, and opportunity. We also discussed whether philanthropy is ready to fund both the urgent fight to stop the bad and the long-term work to build the good.
A photo from SCG’s Environmental Funders Group’s June Meeting. Picture courtesy of Liberty Hill Foundation. Photography by Jordan Renville.
We Cannot Build the Good Without Stopping the Bad
Environmental justice communities have always understood that survival comes first. For decades, residents living near oil drilling sites have had to organize to be heard, believed, and protected. They have documented harms, challenged land-use decisions, testified before public bodies, built coalitions, and pushed institutions to recognize what frontline communities have known all along: proximity to pollution is not accidental. It is the result of policy, zoning, investment, and political choices.
Ending neighborhood oil drilling is not just a climate and public health goal, but also a racial and land justice goal as well. It is a basic question of whether every community deserves clean air, safe neighborhoods, and the opportunity to thrive.
Just weeks after the SCG convening, the Los Angeles City Council advanced an ordinance to prohibit new oil and gas extraction and phase out existing drilling citywide. That vote did not happen in isolation. It reflects more than a decade of organizing by frontline residents and environmental justice coalitions, including STAND-L.A., who have pushed Los Angeles to confront the climate crisis as well as the health and safety impacts of neighborhood oil drilling.
But even this milestone underscores the central point: the work is not over. The policy still must move through the remaining steps, and communities will need sustained support to ensure it is passed, implemented, enforced, and translated into real protections. At the same time, residents and organizers are already asking the next essential question: once extraction ends, who will shape the future of these sites?
This is not the time for philanthropy to step back because the issue appears to be moving in the right direction. Now is the time to lean in. When communities are closest to a breakthrough, the need for support often intensifies.
Keeping the momentum going will require sustained investment. Opponents will organize, and timelines stretch. Implementation details become contested, and agencies will need to be held accountable. Communities need the resources to stay engaged through the long and often unglamorous work that turns policy into reality.
The Funding Gap Is Now
Philanthropy often understands how to fund a campaign when there is a clear threat, a defined opposition, or an urgent vote. But environmental justice work is less of a campaign and more of a long-term movement. Some of the most consequential work happens in the space between a policy idea and lived community change.
Communities need support to continue fighting for strong policy and meaningful implementation. They also need support to plan for what comes after extraction: community visioning, land stewardship, remediation, governance, financing tools, public engagement, and long-term implementation.
What arises are questions that are at the heart of environmental justice:
- Who decides what happens to land after extraction ends?
- How can we build trust and protect public health through comprehensive and well-resourced remediation?
- What public benefits should be prioritized?
- How can residents shape future land use before market forces define it for them?
- What resources are needed to move from community vision to implementation?
- Who gets to define what “opportunity” means?
If philanthropy only funds the fight against harm and ignores the work of transformation, we risk leaving communities with the burden of implementation but not the power or resources to shape the future they fought to make possible.
From Surviving to Thriving
A just transition is more than the absence of extraction; it is also self-determination through community power. Removing what has harmed communities is essential, but so is creating what helps them thrive.
That means thinking about land differently. It means asking whether former extraction sites can become places of healing, public benefit, climate resilience, affordable housing, green space, clean energy, economic opportunity, or community ownership. It means recognizing that residents who have endured the costs of extraction must be central to deciding what comes next.
This is the difference between surviving and thriving.
Survival is fighting for protection from harm. Thriving is having the power, resources, and opportunity to shape a healthier future. Frontline communities have already done the work of imagining that future. They have organized simultaneously against pollution and for life-affirming alternatives. They have built the relationships, knowledge, and leadership necessary to guide the transition ahead.
A 50-Year Question for Los Angeles
The question now is whether philanthropy will match that vision with the kind of sustained investment this moment requires. At Liberty Hill, we have been asking what kind of Los Angeles we want to help build over the next 50 years. That question feels especially urgent in places like Baldwin Hills, where the future is not theoretical. It is now being shaped by policy, organizing, land-use planning, financing decisions, and public will.
Fifty years from now, what will communities see when they look at land once defined by oil extraction? Will they see another example of displacement, speculation, and missed opportunity, or will they see land transformed for health, belonging, community ownership, and shared prosperity?
The answer will depend on more than vision. Communities already have vision. They have been imagining healthier neighborhoods, safer environments, and more equitable futures for years. The answer will depend on whether institutions with resources are willing to invest in that vision for the long haul.
What Funders Can Do Now
For funders, this moment calls for alignment, urgency, and patience. Here, we offer some considerations for funders as they approach this work:
- Fund the organizations closest to the communities most impacted. They are both identifying the problem and building the solutions. This includes the STAND L.A. coalition, which includes Communities for Environmental Justice, Holman United Methodist Church, Redeemer Community Partnership, Black Women for Wellness, Esperanza Community Housing, Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education (SCOPE), and PSR-LA.
- Fund the fight that is still in front of us. Policy passage, enforcement, and accountability all require resources.
- Support planning and implementation, not only advocacy. Community-led land transition requires technical capacity, legal support, public engagement, governance models, financing strategies, and time.
- Collaborate across issue areas. This work is rightly focused on our environment, but it is also about public health, housing, economic development, racial justice, land use, and democracy.
- Stay engaged after the policy moment passes. The transition from extraction to opportunity will require sustained investment long after the headlines fade.
A photo from SCG’s Environmental Funders Group’s June Meeting. Picture courtesy of Liberty Hill Foundation. Photography by Jordan Renville.
From Proximity to Possibility
The power of a site visit, like the one during the recent SCG Environmental Funders Group convening, is that it moves us closer to the land, the history, and the people who carry the burden of misguided policy decisions. It also moves us closer to the possibilities that become visible when communities lead. Standing near the Inglewood Oil Field, we were reminded that environmental justice has always required both resistance and imagination.
For generations, communities near oil drilling sites have been asked to absorb the costs of pollution. Today, they are demanding protection, accountability, repair, and the chance to shape what comes next. The future of Los Angeles is already being imagined by the communities that have fought hardest to protect it. The opportunity before philanthropy is to invest in making that future real.
SCG’s Environmental Funders Group is open to all SCG members. To learn more and get involved, visit the group’s landing page or reach out to Katy Pelissier, SCG’s Director of Programs & Conferences, at katy@socalgrantmakers.org.
