Towards Policy Advocacy — Activism, Advocacy and Political Empowerment: An Exploratory Study on Hispanic Environmental Justice Nonprofits

Environmental justice groups have incorporated as nonprofit organizations that tend to limit the ability to access the political and policy processes due to the restrictive IRS lobbying codes. Policy advocacy begins to address the roles and tactics that could be utilized by these nonprofits to influence public policy making and includes activities and tactics such as media campaigns, research, educational outreach, activism and political empowerment with the ultimate goal of influencing the initial stages of the policy process. This research uses a multiple streams approach to operationalize the advocacy variables and tactics used by these Hispanic environmental justice nonprofits and assesses the extent that these tactics have enabled them to mainstream into the policy making process as non-institutional actors. These nonprofits are most successful in identifying problems and have had some success in providing solutions. They have been least successful in gaining media attention and working with elected officials