Children of Flint’s Water Crisis is creating change as young environmental and health activists

Their childhood memories are vivid: warnings against drinking or cooking with tap water, long lines for crates of water, washing from buckets filled with heated bottled water.

But the children of the Flint water crisis — which was set in motion on April 25, 2014, when the city began pulling water from the Flint River — have turned their trauma into advocacy.

They know Flint is still struggling: its population has declined by about 20,000 in the past decade, making abandoned homes often targeted by arsonists. More than two-thirds of children live in poverty, and many struggle at school.

But young activists say they want to help make a difference, change the way outsiders see their city — and defy expectations.

“One of the biggest problems growing up in Flint is that people had already decided and predetermined who we were,” said 22-year-old Cruz Duhart, a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.

“They had ideas about our IQ, about behavioral things, but they never really stopped to talk to us and how we felt about it and the kind of trauma we were going through.”

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Sima Gutierrez collects water samples from residents’ homes and brings them to the Flint Community Water Lab, where more than 60 high school and college interns have provided free testing to thousands of residents since 2020.

As a member of the Flint Public Health Youth Academy, she helps plan awareness campaigns on topics such as gun violence and how racism impacts public health.

“I wanted to be around people who didn’t want to gloss over the whole fact that people still have problems … to share my life (with) someone else who’s going through what I’m going through,” Sima, 16, said.

Ten years ago, she complained of stomach pains when she drank water, but her mother believed it helped Sima’s body flush out the medications she was taking for an autoimmune disease that caused her hair to fall out in patches and her skin to become blotchy.

Sima and three of her sisters were found to have elevated lead levels and were diagnosed with ADHD; Sima also has learning difficulties, her mother said.

Residents were assured the water was safe when many complained of rashes and discolored, foul-smelling and foul-smelling water after the city disconnected Detroit-supplied water to save money.

But a year and a half later, a water expert discovered high lead levels in the tap water, caused by the city’s inability to add anti-corrosion chemicals that state environmental officials said were unnecessary. A doctor also found that levels in children’s blood had doubled.

The powerful neurotoxin can damage children’s brains and nervous systems, affecting learning, behavior, hearing and speech. There is no safe exposure level for children, and problems can manifest years later.

Data collected over a decade now shows that Flint children are more likely to have ADHD, behavioral and mental health problems and have more difficulty learning than the children assessed before the water crisis, said Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who has tracked rising lead levels in Flint reported. blood of children. She said issues such as nutrition, poverty, unemployment and systemic inequality could also be factors.

But Flint children are resilient, she said, and have made important contributions to the city’s recovery. For example, the Flint Youth Justice League, an advisory board to its Pediatric Public Health Initiative, has provided guidance on programs to reduce poverty and connect residents to public services.

“Our young people are amazing,” says Hanna-Attisha. “They disagree with the status quo and demand that we do better for them and for generations to come.”

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Asia Donald remembers feeling helpless and bewildered as her sister developed a rash and her mother boiled pot after pot of bottled water for bathing.

But a few years later, she was mentoring children from Newark, New Jersey, as they experienced their own water crisis. During Zoom meetings, Flint’s children explained parts per billion, how to test water for lead and how to deal with anxiety.

“They felt exactly the same way I did when I … went through it,” said Asia, 20, one of 18 interns at the Flint Public Health Youth Academy.

They receive a monthly stipend to run the academy: writing grants, creating budgets, analyzing data, leading meetings and creating public awareness campaigns. They have a bi-weekly talk show on YouTube where they discuss everything from mental health to COVID.

Dr. Kent Key, a public health researcher at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine in Flint, started the academy after studying health disparities in African American communities as part of his dissertation.

“I felt like everyone had written off the Flint youth,” he said. “I didn’t want (the water crisis) to be a sentence of doom and gloom … I wanted it to be a catapult to launch the next generation of public health professionals.”

One of the academy’s regular partners is Young, Gifted & Green.

Flint resident Dionna Brown, national director of the organization’s environmental justice youth program, plans a two-week environmental justice summer camp in Flint every year. Teens learn about policy, climate justice, sustainability and housing disparities.

Brown became interested in advocacy while taking a class on environmental inequality at Howard University. Now she plans to become an environmental lawyer.

“I tell people all the time, I’m a child of the Flint water crisis,” said Brown, who was 14 when it started. “I love my city. And we’re letting the world know that you can’t just poison a city and we’ll forget about it.”

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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for reporting on water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment.

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