Cheyenne is the Advocacy Director at Verde Verde brings new environmental investments to Portland’s neighborhoods, involves community members in the planning and building of these investments, and ensures that low-income people and people of color directly benefit from these investments.

This interview was conducted on October 24, 2024 – It has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

River Network (RN): To get started, can you give me a brief introduction to who you are and your role at Verde?

Cheyenne Holliday (CH): My name is Cheyenne Holliday. I’m the Advocacy Manager at Verde. The advocacy team does water education, community engagement and policy development at the local and state level. We host various leadership institutes and engagement opportunities to work with community members across the state to identify our policy priorities. And we do a lot of policy development with various stakeholders, and lobby at the Capitol [on issues] related to energy, transportation, air, quality, climate and water.

RN: Where does Verde focus its policy advocacy?

CH: We do city, county and state work. We also do a little bit of federal water and energy policy. Verde started in northeast Portland, in the Cully neighborhood, and did a lot of advocacy and policy for those first couple of years. We’re deeply rooted in the local policy, but as we have grown especially for water, energy and transportation, we have moved to state policy. We’re still always working on local policies, mostly related to energy and air quality, and then everything else at the state level.

RN: How does Oregon fund flood and specifically green stormwater infrastructure?

CH: I am not an expert on green stormwater infrastructure funding, but it is mostly funded through state programs. Specifically, the Clean Water State Revolving fund. Funding stormwater infrastructure has never been a priority for the state, even though Oregon gets a lot of rain. We have a lot of flooding issues, but it’s never been seen as a priority concern, especially when it comes to policy.

RN: What was the impetus behind Oregon’s Water Equity Fund and separately the Trees Act?  What were the primary drivers for these policies?   

CH: I was very involved in the Water Equity Fund. Back in 2019 to early 2020, Oregon’s former Governor Kate Brown was trying to figure out water infrastructure and water planning in general. She started doing engagement on Oregon’s 100-year Water Vision, something that the Governor’s office was developing. Unfortunately, a lot of communities were left out of the conversation. These engagements were held in the middle of the day for hours at a time, only in English. To respond to this need, a group of organizations and leaders came together to create the Oregon Water Futures collaborative. It includes the Oregon Environmental Council Coalition of Communities of Color, Willamette Partnership, University of Oregon, and eventually Verde. Verde did not have staff or capacity to fully join the collaborative at the time. In 2020 I was supporting the group as a graduate intern.

Oregon Water Futures engaged rural, low income, indigenous and BIPOC communities on the 100-year Water Vision. We hosted virtual community gatherings, held one-on-one conversations, engaged with over 100 community members across the state, and engaged with folks in every county  in 6 languages. We also talked about water in our communities; how do we work? how do we play? how do we pray with water? how do we view water in our home? what about water affordability? what are the concerns? what are areas of interest for community members? We took those stories, put them into a report, and shared it with legislators and other communities.

We were able to help create the biggest investment in Oregon history for water justice. 1.5 million dollars for water justice projects across the state that went to the Oregon Water Resources department to create a fund. Unfortunately, due to inaction, the agency actually returned the money 2 years later to the general state budget. They never spent the dollars. The fund was never implemented. We thought we had won, but we hadn’t, and we had to redo all that advocacy over the last 2 years. In 2023, we worked with legislators to get $500,000 of that original $1.5 million to pilot what is now the Oregon Water Equity Fund. Instead of going to a state agency, this is the first time that water infrastructure and water justice dollars have gone to a university. In 2024, we were able to get another $1 million added to the Fund. Now it is up to $1.5 million, and those first $500,000 have been spent on water related projects.

The other side of that is the Trees Act which was passed in 2023. Its purpose was to support green infrastructure where the Water Equity Fund was specifically for water. The Trees Act came out of separate organizations and community members with a focus that started with energy, and then was expanded to green infrastructure and community planning and resilience. The overlap between water infrastructure and green infrastructure is relatively new to Oregon and Verde has been the main organization working in that overlap thus far. The last 20, 30, 40, 50 years of Oregon we’ve been in this bubble of believing there’s no issue with water. That is not the case. We have a lot of nitrate issues. We have a lot of water infrastructure issues that haven’t been addressed. Water Justice work is very new to Oregon. We only started talking about it in 2020/2021.

RN: What have been the biggest hurdles or challenges related to green stormwater infrastructure funding in Oregon?

CH: A lot of our challenges have been in capacity and related to the urgency of needs in the communities we work with. Even when people care about green infrastructure or water justice, we have bigger issues at hand. Oregon has had insane increases of energy utility bills, extreme wildfires, rising food costs… all of these other issues. Only a few organizations are focusing on water and green infrastructure. Not very many of them are community-based or center BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) low income, or rural communities. The Trees Act was one of the first times we’ve been able to center equity and community in green infrastructure projects.

RN: Was there opposition to the adoption of the Water Equity Fund or the Trees Act? If so, how was it diffused/overcome?  

CH: I will say for Water Equity Fund, the second round in 2023, there was no pushback. We couldn’t believe $1.5 million was sent back due to agency inaction, but there was no pushback. It was more about trying to figure out how to fit this funding in when water is not the priority. We were able to sneak it in literally at the last second of the last day of the legislative session, but it was hard to talk about because there were all these other major priorities and the housing crisis. 

The Trees Act, ended up getting put into a larger resilience package. We had a lot of support and I wouldn’t say there was any opposition, but we had to answer the questions of “What is this? Why is it this way? Why is this centering equity or community in this way?” It was not housing specific, so it wasn’t a huge priority, but we were able to pull it to be more related to housing under the resilience package. That’s how we have to pivot our conversations around infrastructure and water in Oregon. Even other policies related to land use and energy have to connect to housing to get it talked about.  

RN: What organizations have you partnered and built effective coalitions with? How did you build trust, designate roles and responsibilities, and successfully come together? 

CH: Oregon Water Futures was created for the original project. In 2020, we thought we would do this community engagement project, submit it and be done. None of us were doing legislative work. Verde only did legislative work at the end of the project. In 2021 and today Verde is the only organization in Oregon Water Futures that has a dedicated water justice position on staff. But in the process of community engagement, we connected with a lot of community members and organizations. We realized we have a network. We believe in long-term relationship building and long-term trust and we didn’t want to abandon these relationships. We ended up developing the Oregon Water Futures Network which has organizations all from across the State. These organizations don’t necessarily do water work, or water justice, and I don’t think most of them would even identify themselves as caring about infrastructure. But they care about their community. They know this work impacts their community. We’ve built this network over time. We meet monthly, sometimes quarterly, and we try to meet in person once a year. A lot of the relationship building is not centered around water. We start with sharing a meal when we meet with new organizations, talking about ourselves, getting to know each other and the community members. Over time we start to talk about water and its impacts. We also got to know a lot of these people during Cov id. Because of Covid, we ended up putting the water work on pause and focusing more on food and emergency response. Oregon also had some insane wildfires that year. The question became “how are we supporting the community members and the organizations in other ways?” We knew we could get to the water part at a better time, but relationship building required investing in each other’s needs.

RN: What lessons did you learn from this experience? 

CH: Work moves at the speed of justice. Sometimes things move fast, sometimes things move slow. Sometimes we’re pulled into the legislative policy decision-making space, and we have to put the brakes on because certain stakeholders are not present. We have to slow things down or put things on pause to cater to the needs or wants of the community. These last 2 years of building the Water Equity Fund and the Trees Act really helped us identify some central guiding priorities, principles, and approaches. These included being flexible with time, co-creating with other partners and community members, talking about issues at the community level and using the community’s words and languages to meet them where they’re at, and understanding that, even though water is important, it’s not always the priority. We learned that a lot of people and legislators care about water, but we may have to talk about it differently, or push in different places.

We developed this Oregon Water Justice Framework through all our work. 

RN: Can you describe what implementation has looked like so far? Are you continuing to work with affected communities and/or state agencies to make sure regulation is being well implemented?   

CH: We did not realize the scope or how much time implementation would take. We’ve been in a lot of advisory committees that are hard to be in; they can take a full day over the course of weeks or months, are extremely technical, and it’s really hard to get your word in, especially if you come from a community-based organization. You often get a lot of push back from industry, utilities and engineers, and the agencies. With the first Water Equity Fund we thought we were doing implementation, but we weren’t. We had to reflect and ask ourselves, “what does it mean to be engaged and have a say in agency?” We passed HB 3292 which is water infrastructure community engagement best practices. We’ve had to learn how each agency likes to do their implementation and what it means to be a part of that process. It’s been a huge learning curve. Only a few organizations are a part of that process and most of the time it’s only Verde. We’re actively trying to build the capacity of other organizations to join that process.

For the Trees Act, Verde participated in and sat on the Advisory Committee for the Community Green Infrastructure Grant portion of the policy. We focused on the implementation of the program with various other stakeholders. It was interesting that water infrastructure and water justice principles were not specifically highlighted in conversations about the fund. We are hopeful that environmental justice communities across the state will benefit from this fund and receive dollars for green infrastructure projects, as the agency highlighted “green infrastructure projects, native seed banks and native plant nurseries, and green infrastructure master plans” as the priority for the fund and they engaged with various community based organizations across the state to develop it. The grant closed for applications on December 2nd, 2024 and the agency will select projects and release funds in early 2025.

RN: What policy issues are a current priority for the Verde and how are you advancing your goals?   

CH: We have 3 water policy priorities at the moment. Number one is more funding for the Water Equity Fund… we are hoping to add millions of dollars to the fund. We’re also exploring what it would mean to create a permanent fund to make sure it’s safe for the next 5 or 10 years.

The second policy priority is related to domestic wells. We have helped pass the well abandonment, relief, and repair fund at the state level. This fund runs out of money very quickly every year, and it’s very limited in scope in that it can only support well abandonment repairs related to wildfires or drought. And it’s a reimbursement-based program… community members have to come up with that money upfront and submit a reimbursement request to the agency. We’re hoping to invest more dollars into that fund, potentially push it beyond reimbursement, and give it a little bit more flexibility in what it can fund, especially related to contamination issues.

Our 3rd policy priority is related to renters’ rights and domestic wells. There are no regulations to ensure that renters have access to water quality information when they rent homes that have domestic wells. This policy, for homes and dwellings that are rental properties, will ensure that the well water is tested on a regular basis, and that renters receive that water quality testing information while they’re renting and before they move in.

RN: What are you most proud of?   

CH: The Water Policy Action Framework and the hundreds of engagements that shaped it. That is what I’m most proud of. That is the impetus of the Water Equity Fund itself. The Governor and legislators have referenced it in various decision making spaces. It has been used as a springboard for policy across the state. I feel so grateful to be a part of those engagements, and to build those relationships with individual community members, to provide stipends and share meals with that many folks. I’m grateful to have played a role in the stories that have come out of that report and all the other reports we’ve created, and the impact that it had on decision-making at the statewide level. I just feel grateful to be a part of it.