Empower You Edutainment Hosts Clean Air Day Program in Riverside

Aryana Noroozi

Charlotte Ben-Acquaah stood before a room of community members – youth, families, teachers – as she asked a question most Inland Empire residents can answer without looking up.

“Riverside, have you ever noticed how the horizon looks tired?” asked Ben-Acquaah, president of the NAACP Riverside County Youth Council. “How the mountains hide behind a curtain they never asked to wear?”

The spoken-word piece, titled “Our Breath Is Ours,” was one of the centerpieces of a Clean Air Day program held by Empower You Edutainment in collaboration with the youth council at the organization’s Upper Room on Magnolia Avenue in Riverside. The event, supported by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), brought together youth actors, singers and an environmental justice scholar to make one argument: clean air is not a weather report. It is a community issue.

“Community outreach isn’t only about what we tell you; it’s also about what we can learn from you,” a narrator said in a video introducing the program’s outreach work. “Because clean air isn’t only a significant issue; it’s a community issue.”

Acting for the Camera, with clean air in the script

Much of the evening belonged to students from Empower You Edutainment’s summer Acting for the Camera classes. The organization, founded in 2016, ran a June session for children roughly 6 to 11 and a July session for older students, about 11 to 17.

Director Sean McDade said the classes are open to students with or without acting experience. “It helps them build confidence, just feel good about themselves,” he said.

This year, McDade said, the four-week classes carried “…an underlying theme of clean air.” Students learned filmmaking and acting basics while interviewing one another, making art and writing scenes about the air they breathe.

In a video shot during the June class’s first week, one young student put the question bluntly: “We’re literally giving you air, and you’re deciding to pollute it.”

By the final week, the same students were presenting posters about removing “bad air” and buses that cut pollution. “You can notice how different the change from the first video to the second video,” McDade told the audience.

The July students went further, performing solo and collective monologues. In one, a student described a grandmother who no longer laughs, “mostly she just coughs.” Another pointed to the haze over the skyline: “The local news calls it air quality, like it’s just a normal weather report … It’s soot, smog, and stuff we aren’t supposed to be breathing.”

The June class’s final short films followed children through asthma attacks triggered by cooking smoke, a forfeited football game, and repeated indoor recess. “This is the third day this month we had indoor recess,” one character says. The films ended with solutions the students wrote themselves: planting trees, walking or biking to school, recycling and turning off lights.

Sharron Lewis, Empower You Edutainment’s executive director, praised McDade and the teaching team for keeping the work light. “F-U-N, fun,” she said. “As they were learning, you took away that stress, and they were able to bond and have fun together.”

‘Breathe in. That’s I.’

The Empower You Singers, Regina Cramer-Terry, Maudie Wilson, Latise Denson and Cecily Walls Johnson, threaded the program with songs that carry a message, including Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).”

Introducing “Man in the Mirror,” Lewis said people are quick to ask others what they will do. “But sometimes we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and say, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Ben-Acquaah’s poem asked the same thing. She described a region where “every inhale” is “a negotiation” and “every exhale a prayer.”

“Tell that to the kid whose breathing treatment is louder than their laughter,” she said. “Tell that to the elderly who stay inside because their chest tightens every time they try to breathe the air outside.”

But the poem turned from grief to agency. “We are students. We are parents. We are teachers. We are artists. We are scientists. We are neighbors,” she said, “and we are young people who refuse to inherit a problem without having a voice in the solution.”

She named everyday steps: walking, biking, carpooling, conserving energy, learning what is in the air and asking schools, businesses and leaders to do more. Then she asked the room to breathe with her.

“So Riverside, breathe in. That’s I. Breathe out. That’s we. Now look around this room. That’s us.”

‘It’s about a life’

Guest speaker Dr. Janice Hill, a sociologist who teaches at Riverside City College and UC Riverside, had flown in from Ghana the night before. She told the audience that clean air cannot be a once-a-year cause.

“It’s just not an Earth Day, one day. It’s 365 days out of the year,” Hill said.

She placed the blame for pollution less on individual habits than on corporations and the agencies meant to regulate them. “Profit should not come before humanity and human beings, but it has, and it doesn’t matter about a political party,” she said. “Who is to determine who gets to breathe clean air? We all pay taxes. We all work.”

Then Hill told her family’s story. She grew up in Oakland, surrounded by the airport, train lines and big rigs. As a child, she said, she loved watching the planes and getting truckers to honk. “But they were spewing pollution,” she said.

Her mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma on June 1 and died by July 16, at age 53. Hill said her mother never worked around heavy industrial chemicals. She believes the neighborhood’s pollution caused that cancer, as well as the stomach cancer that killed an older sister at 55 and the stage 4 pancreatic cancer another sister is now fighting.

Hill said her younger brother, who was 12 when their mother died, never recovered from the loss. He died of COVID-19 in 2020 at 36. It was that brother, she said, who pushed her to keep going after their mother’s death: “If you don’t fight, we have nobody.”

“It’s just not about clean air,” Hill said. “It’s about a life.”

She pointed to the work of Dr. Robert Bullard, widely known as the father of environmental justice, who once taught at UC Riverside. Hill summarized his argument that “your zip code is going to determine whether you live and have a healthy life or not.” Bullard calls the hardest-hit places “sacrifice zones.”

Polluting facilities, Hill said, are not placed in wealthy neighborhoods. “They purposely put them in neighborhoods, you know, of color, of Black and brown,” she said. “And I’ve watched my Black and brown neighbors die.”

A promise for every day

The program was part of Empower You Edutainment’s CARB-funded outreach, paid for through California Climate Investments. Partners listed in the program included the NAACP Riverside Youth Council, Riverside Unified School District, the UCR School of Medicine Center for Healthy Communities and UCR’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology.

Every student in the summer classes, Lewis said, would receive a certificate of participation. The evening also included a speech by youth advocate Taylen Cooper and more songs from the Empower You Singers before Lewis’ closing remarks.

Hill closed her talk by tying clean air to the health of democracy itself, with a nod to Ben-Acquaah’s message that “we all matter.”

“When equity is not there, there is no democracy,” Hill said. “And when we have air quality that takes people’s lives, there is no democracy.”