Roots beyond law: Growing change in Richmond

PCJ in the Bay Fellow Stories: Sierra Maciorowski

After the first year of law school, most law students spend their summer doing legal internships, writing legal briefs, reading cases, and organizing legal research. When I was deciding what to do for my first summer, I wanted something different—not just to work on legal issues, but to think more deeply about the relationship between law, policy, and research. 

As a Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area Fellow at Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) in Richmond, CA this summer, I had the chance to do exactly that, learning how to better support environmental justice communities on my path toward becoming a movement lawyer. 

Richmond has a long history of movements fighting for social, environmental, and economic justice—and injustices to fight against. The Chevron oil refinery, the Bay Area’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, was in Richmond even before the city incorporated in 1905. Since the 1940s, when Black shipyard workers were forced to live in supposedly temporary structures in unincorporated North Richmond instead of the city proper, segregation and redlining pushed Black and Brown residents into the areas most impacted by refinery pollution.

Today, Richmond has a progressive city council and mayor thanks in part to coordinated campaigns by the Richmond Progressive Alliance, a local umbrella organization for progressive activists. It has taxes on Chevron to invest in social programs, restrictions on cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and rent control.

It also has a pipeline underneath an elementary school. 

As I learned this summer, CBE, its members, and its allies have done incredible work to organize against environmental justice threats like these. Decades of organizing built up the progressive majority that the Richmond City Council has today. A recent legal settlement with Chevron netted the city $550 million to be paid over the next ten years. 

But the challenge comes in navigating what comes next. As refineries close across California, how can Richmond prepare for the day Chevron closes its doors? How can Richmond pursue a just transition away from a fossil fuel economy toward one that is sustainable and equitable? 

My work toward these ends focused on two primary projects. With my fellow intern and several community member volunteers, I researched soil contamination and remediation to support CBE members who had found heavy metals in their soil during a soil testing project known as the People’s Science Experiment. With members of the organizing, research, and legal teams, I created a proposal for how some of those $550 million in settlement funds could be spent: through a participatory budgeting process that would democratize the budget, redistributing funds from the Chevron refinery to the community members it has most harmed.   

While I was familiar with the basics of participatory budgeting, I spent my summer digging into the details. I scrolled through academic articles analyzing participatory budgeting in nearby Vallejo, comparing budgets, population sizes, and project examples. I dedicated other long research days to comparing participatory budgeting programs in other states, pulling out examples of equitable outreach from New York City and historical context from the origins of participatory budgeting in Brazil. 

By the end of my fellowship, I’d drafted nearly thirty pages of analysis intended to provide a robust starting point for discussions with allies, and an eventual plan for participatory budgeting in Richmond that would incorporate the best of what I found in other cities. I learned in practice what I already knew in theory: that environmental justice movement work does not begin and end in a courtroom, but rather requires legal advocacy, community organizing, and scientific methods working in tandem to create truly meaningful change. 

At CBE’s July member meeting, held in the Richmond office with its herbal apothecary and radical library, we painted a mural of Richmond: purple violets and orange butterflies, bright blue water and beautiful hills. It reminded me of our first day at CBE in June, when the team took the summer interns on a hike up Nicholl Knob to see Richmond’s incredible views: the beautiful blue waters of the bay; a clear sight to San Francisco and the Golden Gate; rows of homes and shops and freeways stretching east to Hilltop; and the brown, semi-camouflaged refinery tanks that blight the adjacent hills. These two images— dotted with industrial cysts, yet vibrant and colorful—remain superimposed in my mind as I return to the limestone towers of Stanford Law School: Richmond as it is today, after over a century of refinery and other industrial pollution, and Richmond as it should be. 

This summer, I contributed a few small brushstrokes to the long project of a just transition, plus a few uneven violets to the mural. But I will carry the lessons I learned from Richmond’s residents, organizers, and story with me for the rest of my life, from the need for consistency and sustainability in organizing to the importance of orienting ourselves toward a better future rather than only away from the past. As I gear up for my legal career, I know this summer grounded in community, history, and advocacy will forever shape my path. 

Sierra Maciorowski is a second-year JD student at Stanford Law School (SLS), where she aims to study the intersections of public health, environmental justice, law, and policy and prepare for a career in movement lawyering. In the summer of 2025, she was a Partnerships for Climate Justice in the Bay Area (PCJ in the Bay) Fellow with Communities for a Better Environment in Richmond, where she helped to research and prepare a proposal for participatory budgeting and support a community-led effort to test soil for pollutants.