Neighborhoods Project

With information from our surveys and community input, we will work to identify one environmental “assault” in each Marin County city or town that may be having an impact on elevating cancer rates. With a collective of interested residents, we look forward to strategizing how best to address the issue with the goal to correct it and maintain healthier communities.

One Example:

We have identified three areas of exploration that will be the basis for further environmental testing; personal environment, household environment and community environment.

We hope to assemble residents, SFTC staff, County leadership, a toxicologist, hydrogeologist, and a volunteer team of researchers to identify any potential risk factors and work to eliminate them.

Heather Gardens, Larkspur

We had a meeting with members of the Larkpsur community to address cancer in Heather Gardens back in 2005. We gathered a fair amount of information about the land use surrounding Heather Gardens and are working to create a unique layered map that will include geological, topigraphical, hydralogical, electrical power distribution, cell phone towers and location of all utilities.

We will also make sure that all homes have responded to the 2003 survey. From this data we will capture as much information as possible regarding potential environmental risk that could have implications on the health and well being of this neighborhood.

Our hope is that this becomes a model for how we examine each of our neighborhoods, engaging the residents in the process and evaluating what environmental risk factors may have an impact and determine together how to enact change.

Door-to-Door Survey

Our first effort in looking at potential causes in our neighborhoods is to respond back to community concerns identified on the door-to-door survey.

The first one we are addressing is drinking water. We have started working with the Marin Municipal Water District to understand how and why they are doing the extensive testing on our water systems and to assemble a group of independent expertise to ask questions and gain understanding about any other work that may or may not need to be done to cross this concern off our list.