When the time came for Randy Vaal to speak in front of friends, neighbors, and strangers about what had brought him to the table, only one word came to him: atonement.

We were seated in a big circle, all 35 of us in a room at the Sisters of St. Benedict Monastery in rural Ferdinand, Indiana. Around the tables were a number of Sisters and their community stakeholders, representatives from Indiana University, and Randy’s fellow members of Southern Indiana Citizens for Quality of Life (SWICQL, affectionately pronounced as “swickel”). This was our first large meeting to begin developing our proposal for the EPA Community Change Grant, a transformative opportunity to invest in environmental justice organizing made possible by the Biden-Harris administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.