Center for Community Engagement

California’s Central Valley communities are faced with the highest pollution burdens andhealth vulnerabilities. Specifically, San Joaquin County residents live in food deserts and are impacted by multiple health disparities, despite the county’s significant contribution to California’s economy through agriculture. To address the intersectionality of these issues, Rise Stockton Coalition developed the 2019 Sustainable Neighborhood Plan (SNP), a framework forsustainable development in Central and South Stockton to translate community concerns into projects and policy proposals. While their community engagement efforts identified community priorities and outlined potential projects to be adopted by the City of Stockton and coalition partners, there has been no evaluation of the document’s impact on sustainable development. Toaddress this gap, this community-engaged research project, in partnership with Rise Stockton, aims to evaluate the 2019 SNP’s influence on the coalition’s program development and strategieswithin the context of the COVID-19 pandemic through informational interviews with coalitionpartners. A semi-systematic literature review will also be conducted in order to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the strengths and weaknesses of the framework. Datagathered will be instrumental in further updating the 2019 SNP, including to reconfirm community needs and cultivate efficient project outlines to address those priorities.