Growing up in two distinct Eugene neighborhoods informed activist’s view on justice and more

Joel Iboa remembers barreling down the gravel trails on Skinner Butte with the Whiteaker neighborhood kids and then walking through the front door of his childhood home at the bottom of the hill.

His backyard was the Willamette River, where he’d take winding rides to the BMX track near Autzen Stadium, often scraping his knees. He played pickup basketball under the Washington-Jefferson Bridge.

But when one of his aunts and uncles came to pick him up after school for an afternoon in west Eugene, play looked a lot different than it did in the Whiteaker. 

From one of his uncle’s apartments in Trainsong, the view was stacks of raw wood in a Zip-O-Logs mill lot. He played with his cousins in front of the complex next to the train tracks. 

And the summers were hot there, he recalled. It was the pavement and industrial infrastructure, holding heat more intensely than the tree canopied-covered communities of Eugene. 

“I grew up with this duality of worlds,” said Iboa. 

Iboa, 35, is the Oregon Just Transition Alliance executive director and a Homes for Good commissioner. Most recently, he is the chief petitioner for the Eugene Clean Energy Fund — an initiative that, through a fee on local profits of large retailers, generates a fund for projects that protect people on the forefront of climate extremes, like rising temperatures in heat-trapped communities.

“Climate justice is environmental justice,” said Iboa, explaining the nuance between the principles that seek to protect people from hazards around them. “Climate justice asks us not only to do what’s best for the land, but also do what’s best for the people, especially the folks who live and are from them.” 

As a first-generation American and lifelong Eugene resident, his experience underpins his work on housing, justice and economic equality. He spoke with Lookout Eugene-Springfield over a frothy cup at Farmers Union Coffee Roasters on Thursday, May 28, about five blocks east of Interstate 105.

“A lot of my formation too, is this side of [the old] REI, this side of the I-105,” he said. 

Iboa spent most of his life — about 25 years — in a townhome built by what is now known as DevNW. After spending his early childhood in an apartment across from the former Whiteaker Elementary School, his family moved to the townhome near the interstate, where they were regularly exposed to diesel exhaust and other vehicle emissions. 

“My little brother who was born and brought to that house, has asthma, and I can’t help but think being so close,” Iboa said. 

“Our house was like a block away from I-105,” he said. “It [the interstate] was supposed to go through the city, but ended right on Seventh because of a lot of pushback from folks in the Whiteaker and Jefferson neighborhoods. Something about the Whiteaker being a place long known for its activism … all that kind of influenced me while also having a deeply, deeply childhood experience of a lot of culture from my parents and my cousins and aunts and uncles.” 

From Zacatecas to Eugene 

The first members of Iboa’s family came to the United States through the federal Bracero Program, which sought to address labor shortages during World War II. Under contract with the U.S. government, people like Iboa’s grandfather and his brothers picked pears and dug potatoes in Texas, California and Oregon.

While the program offered economic opportunity, workers often endured poor living conditions, including outbreaks of infectious diseases in camps, exposure to pesticides such as DDT, and being ill-prepared for cold temperatures, according to historians.

This workers’ rights component continues to inform how I approach climate justice today. Joel iboa

His family worked contracts lasting nine to 18 months before returning home to Zacatecas in north-central Mexico.

When Iboa’s oldest uncle was 15, he came to work in Medford. Other family members followed, including Iboa’s father and mother, who eventually settled in Eugene. They worked a variety of jobs, including planting trees on steep hillsides. 

“For Earth Day, sometimes, the school planted trees, and he would laugh, and I remember being like, ‘Why are you laughing,’ and he would be like, ‘I used to plant 900 trees in a day,'” said Iboa, noting the average was 1,200 with a record planting day of 2,500. 

Humor often found its way into stories that were otherwise difficult. Iboa’s father and one of his brothers once worked at the same timber mill, where his brother lost an arm in a machinery accident after his shirt became caught in the equipment. He was 19.

“Why a lot of these things happen is because the companies want to try and maximize their profits and minimize the cost of what it takes to make these things run, so they take shortcuts, and the consequences of that are sometimes people are sacrificed,” Iboa said. “This workers’ rights component continues to inform how I approach climate justice today.” 

‘Volun-told’ 

Even when young, Iboa was asking existential questions about what he calls a
“system of extraction.” History lessons about the Civil Rights Movement caught his attention. 

He became increasingly involved in student leadership at Sheldon High School and as captain of his water polo and swim team, eventually serving as a student representative to the 4J school board.

“I was 17, trying not to fall asleep,” he said of attending the meetings. “But as time went on, I started trying to pay more attention to what was happening.” 

He sat alongside former mayor Jim Torrey at the raised dais during meetings. When discussions turned to consequential issues, Torrey would nudge him to take note. It was a small gesture that would become a recurring theme in his life.

“I get volun-told,” he said. “It’s kind of been a guiding force in my life is getting volun-told to do things.” 

Torrey later wrote a letter of recommendation for Iboa’s admission to the University of Oregon. There, Iboa continued his involvement in advocacy as co-director of Movimiento Estudiantil Chican@ de Aztlán, or MEChA, and through the Coalition Against Environmental Racism. 

After graduating in 2014, Iboa began his career as an environmental justice and community outreach manager with Beyond Toxics, and then became a coalition manager for immigrants rights’ group Causa Oregon. 

Along the way, Iboa also took on a series of public service appointments. He served on the City of Eugene’s Human Rights Commission for several years and then spent a year on the police commission as the Human Rights Commission’s representative. He also served on what is now the Governor’s Environmental Justice Council and was a founding chair.

Most recently, he joined the Homes for Good Board of Commissioners, where he continues to serve.

‘Having a place to lay your head’ 

Over the course of his career, Iboa has watched disaster after disaster — and the inequities within them.

Some of us were waiting it out in yachts, and some of us were like Jack from the ‘Titanic,’ just holding on to a little piece of driftwood. Joel iboa

He points to two defining events of the past several years: the COVID-19 pandemic and a series of climate-related disasters in western Oregon.

“The pandemic forced a lot of us to be inside our homes in a way that we haven’t been before. And so the thing that I kept hearing when the pandemic started was, like, ‘We’re all in this together, right? We’re going to ride this storm out together.’ The truth of it, some of us were waiting it out in yachts, and some of us were like Jack from the ‘Titanic,’ just holding on to a little piece of driftwood and eventually falling off and dying,” Iboa said. 

“And so between that and then coupled with the Labor Day wildfires in 2020, the heat waves in the summer of ’21, the winter storm in ’23, all those things resulted in a ton of deaths,” he said. 

Even people who were fortunate enough to shelter from the weather often lived in aging houses in need of repair, he said, as almost half of homes in Oregon were built before 1980. The structure of a home can determine how well it protects its residents from extreme heat and poor air quality — whether that be from a polluter like J.H. Baxter or wildfire smoke. 

“Having a place to lay your head at night is potentially becoming the difference between living or dying, and in places like Trainsong,” he said. 

Communities in Trainsong and Bethel in west Eugene have higher concentrations of people of color, people with disabilities and low-income residents, according to an equity and opportunity assessment conducted by the Lane Livability Consortium, a partnership that includes Eugene, Springfield and the University of Oregon.

These are people who often face compounding barriers, Iboa said, “life experiences that just make it so that you may not survive a 105-degree day.” 

As director of the Oregon Clean Energy Opportunity campaign, Iboa helped secure a package of policies focused on energy affordability and housing quality. The measures included reduced utility rates for low-income households, funding for essential home repairs and investments to move Oregon toward 100% clean energy.

Clean energy ballot measure 

Iboa is now turning his advocacy efforts closer to home as the chief petitioner of the Eugene Clean Energy Fund. If the campaign gathers enough signatures by Aug. 6, then a measure will appear on the November ballot.

In registering the initiative, supporters filed a 10-page petition proposing changes to Eugene city code. The measure would create a 2% surcharge on the local retail profits of corporations earning more than $1 billion annually nationwide and more than $500,000 in Eugene, with exemptions for groceries.

The coalition estimates it would generate about $15 million annually. They modeled the measure on the 2018 Portland Clean Energy Fund, which raised money for programs that help people most vulnerable to climate change. For example, the fund paid for portable air-conditioning units for low-income residents ahead of summer heat waves last year. 

But Eugene’s needs are different from Portland’s, and even within Eugene, Iboa sees neighborhoods with distinct challenges. 

Oregon Just Transition Alliance “made a commitment over the last presidential election to support regions with the solutions that are unique to them,” he said.  

“There’s a saying my dad used to tell me growing up which is like ‘para toros del jaral, caballos de ahi mismo.’ So, the saying basically goes, ‘you want to catch cows from, say, Eugene, you have to get horses from Eugene, right?’ So you want to solve a problem, the solution is close to the problem,” Iboa said. 

“Even though I am the executive director of Oregon Just Transition Alliance, I was also born and raised in Eugene, so you know you got to catch this bull (Eugene Clean Energy Fund) where you got your horse.” 

This story was updated to clarify Iboa’s roles on city commissions and councils.