In 2003, I volunteered with Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) to map and inventory the toxins found within 150 blocks of her predominantly Mexican-American community, Little Village in Chicago. I was enraged to discover that in Little Village more than 60,000 youth in a two-mile radius of the Fisk and Crawford Coal Power Plants are forced to breathe air that violates EPA standards. I was inspired to act, in order to shut down these coal power plants, build more parks, and clean up the toxics.

It is important to me because there are 95,000 people who live in Little Village, half of which are under the age of 25. The coal power plant in our community causes 41 premature deaths and 550 emergency room visits a year. For many years I and many community members thought the company was a cloud factory and never related the high asthma rates in our community to the air pollution. My mom's and sister's asthma are my motivation to stop this outdated way of creating electricity and push for renewable sources.

We must organize more people to stand up and fight. Our first step was launching the youth branch of LVEJO — Youth Activists Organizing as Today's Leaders, YAOTL. Based on the data we collected, YAOTL created OurMap of Environmental Justice, an interactive online map that documents the assets and toxins in my community of Little Village, a pre-dominantly Mexican-American neighborhood in Chicago. It includes 12 youth-created videos, descriptions of toxic sites, and gang territory delineations. The map, created completely by a youth group that I organized, takes GIS data about the industrial polluters in this low-income region and translates this information into an interactive map, embedded with personal stories, statistics, photographs and videos. OurMap of Environmental Justice is raising awareness locally and nationally about the extent of the environmental injustice and health problems that my community suffers each and every day, where we live, work and play. I was inspired to do this project after I went on a Community Assets and Toxics Tour led by a local non-profit group called Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). From LVEJO, I learned that the Harvard School of Public Health had determined that the health problems and asthma that so many of my family members and other residents, particularly young children were experiencing were directly linked to the two coal-burning power plants within blocks of my house. Yet, most residents had no idea of what is happening until we began using media to raise awareness. With this map, we educated our community about local environmental injustice and motivated them to become involved in campaigns.

OurMap of Environmental Justice is a youth-led grassroots effort that tells how we, as the future inheritors of the planet, are the ones with the most at stake. The multimedia map allows us to show and tell our stories in their own words and images, stories that are not being told in the mass media or press. Others can participate by using the Map as a model for communities across the nation of how youth can use their own digital cultures for advocacy, awareness and political engagement. Environmental justice and youth organizations can use it as an organizing and networking tool that works on both an intense geographic local level but also shows how low-income communities of color across the globe are experiencing similar injustices. By doing so, we can build a stronger and bigger movement to expose and end environmental racism. OurMap is based on the 21st century web 2.0 idea of open source and collective intelligence. It tells a larger story through the sum of its parts because it can be created and authored by many people. In this way, it can inspire other social justice movements to create their own Googlemaps for information sharing and coalition building.