Star Staff Profile: Wendi Hammond
When Wendi Hammond started with Legal Aid of NorthWest Texas last year, she joined a team committed to an area of law that was long of interest to her: environmental justice. Prior to joining Legal Aid, Wendi spent more than 20 years focusing on statewide environmental and community advocacy both while in private law practice and serving as a nonprofit executive director of an organization that addressed air quality issues in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Today, as a member of the Community Revitalization Project (CRP), Wendi continues to focus on environmental justice (EJ) issues in LANWT’s 114-county service area.
“I enjoy working with a dedicated team that empowers our client communities to help themselves,” says Wendi. “Too many low-income community members bear the greatest burden of pollution and health costs from environmentally harmful businesses, while rarely realizing benefits from these same businesses, such as employment opportunities or infrastructure improvements in their neighborhoods.”
CRP provides legal services, advocacy, and community education to individuals, nonprofits, and community groups in the areas of affordable housing, including removing barriers to developing and maintaining affordable housing for individuals and educating communities regarding fair housing issues; community development and advocacy to help ensure the right to meaningful input on matters affecting the community; and environmental justice, including educating and protecting communities from environmental hazards.
“CRP focuses on educating and empowering communities to help themselves by providing the necessary knowledge and tools for them to meaningfully participate in the numerous opportunities available to address various issues including EJ,” says Wendi. “While several of our most recent cases involved a specific local issue, the CRP team also strives to identify cases capable of addressing a systemic problem affecting our entire service area.”
Among the recent successes of the CRP were working with clients to enforce federal, state, and local environmental protections and, through community lawyering, working with a neighborhood coalition that opposed the construction of an industrial facility across the street from an elementary school in an area already surrounded by industrial plants. Armed with facts from CRP, the coalition turned the city's initially proposed approval into a complete denial during the span of only 60 days.
Summing up her long-term goal, Wendi hopes that one day her EJ work won’t be necessary. “We are in the business of putting ourselves out of business,” she says. But until that time, Wendi and the rest of her CRP colleagues will be busy tackling EJ challenges affecting client communities in North and West Texas.