At the first People's Hearing in North Carolina, many former members of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council served as witnesses. There, attendees and organizers alike dubbed the witnesses as the "People’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council," or PEJAC. Honoring the hard work of the organizers in North Carolina, the PEJAC has fully committed to working to continue to receive testimony from attendees during the nationwide People’s Hearings. In doing so, the PEJAC aims to keep the public record on what is happening to our communities and to elevate environmental justice solutions back onto the national stage.
The PEJAC will build on some of its members longstanding roles as national leaders - roles which crystallized in 2021 when they were appointed by the Biden Administration to advise federal agencies across the government about environmental justice. They harnessed this national platform at the time, releasing a 92-page report advancing federal commitments to assure fair flow of benefits to community-based environmental projects, improved methods of identifying communities struggling against injustice, and revising and updating the 1994 executive order on environmental justice.
Through 2024, the Council provided important reports on key climate, energy, and environmental justice issues, such as carbon management and disaster relief, along with its sharing of critical input for federal agencies such as FEMA, DOE, DOT, USDA and others. Thousands of people from across the Nation and its Territories shared public comments with the PEJAC to express their most pressing environmental problems and solutions, putting their experiences and knowledge on the public record.
Right when the council had succeeded in showing the significance of a national platform for environmental justice, the Trump Administration shut it down in 2025. But just months later, the People's Hearing in North Carolina created the spark for a new national platform for public accounting environmental justice that can inspire new coalitions, supercharge movements, and stoke policy change locally and nationally. After listening closely to the testimonies in Greensboro, the PEJAC drafted "The People's Motions for Environmental Justice" and has endorsed two summary reports from the hearing, the "National People's Policy Priorities for Environmental Justice" and "From Testimony to Action".
