In September 2022, Adam Reilly attended the E-Enterprise Leadership Council (EELC) meeting as the newly minted EPA Region 1 E-Enterprise Regional Coordinator, including a visit to Rosemont, an Environmental Justice (EJ) Strong community, and a chance to speak with leaders from the South Carolina EJ Strong Program and the Lowcountry Alliance for Model Communities. Community leaders detailed their restoration needs and experiences with federal funding, highlighting that numerous application and reporting requirements make funding nearly inaccessible, leading some to forgo seeking funds altogether. The candor of community responses impacted Reilly and set him to work to make a change.
Passed just ten months prior to Reilly’s experience in South Carolina, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) committed the government to delivering historic levels of investment in communities, with specific focus on disadvantaged communities, through the Justice40 initiative. Government agencies were scrambling to develop comprehensive strategies to staff up and effectively distribute IIJA funding across the nation. However, the EELC visit revealed that community groups found federal funding effectively inaccessible. The discussion that ensued with state and tribal EELC members following the visit to Rosemont underscored the fact that communities in need were already “walking away and leaving funds on the table,” and as the EELC identified improving grant recipients’ experience as a priority issue, Reilly realized he was uniquely positioned to do something in his corner of EPA as well.
Working for the Southeast New England Program (SNEP), a small but mighty geographic program in Region 1, Reilly’s insights from the visit to Rosemont directly informed his approach in creating the SNEP Opportunity to Advance Resilience (SOAR) Fund, an EPA-directed grant program aimed at improving climate resiliency in SNEP disadvantaged communities. In 2021, SNEP received an additional $15 million over five years in IIJA funds, and in 2022, Reilly was tasked with developing a program that would help SNEP meet its Justice40 commitments, aiming for at least 40 percent of this funding to reach disadvantaged communities. Now in its third year, the SOAR Fund is projected to invest at least $5 million in SNEP disadvantaged communities by 2027. One of the first projects funded by SOAR will reopen Crescent Park Beach in East Providence, Rhode Island, for the first time in over a century.
While it’s too soon to speak on the long-term impact of the program, Reilly is confident that its thoughtful design has made SNEP funding more accessible to disadvantaged communities throughout the region. The current challenge is to ensure that more communities are aware of this transformative program – the design of which was strengthened by the opportunities and experiences afforded through E-Enterprise.
To learn more, please visit the SOAR website or contact Adam Reilly of EPA.
