Spring 2026
How Community Advocates Across Georgia Inspire, Facilitate Rollins Research
Story and photography by Rob Spahr
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When residents of West Savannah neighborhoods introduce themselves, many do so in a way that pays tribute to their family’s community ties. It may sound something like, “I am a fourth-generation resident of Ogeechton” or “I am third-generation Carver Village.”
This generational knowledge is powerful.
Bernetta Lanier, a fourth-generation resident of the Hudson Hill neighborhood and the city’s District 1 alderwoman, vividly remembers her father’s stories about the freshwater springs that commonly popped up in the area.
“They would get glass jugs and gather water. The water would be so fresh that they could drink directly from the springs and so cold that it would frost up the glass,” Lanier recalls.
A roadside monument marks the location of one of the largest of these springs, Jasper Spring, named after a sergeant who, according to legend, helped rescue several Patriot prisoners during the American Revolution while the British soldiers guarding them were distracted by the refreshing spring.
“While my father was still a boy, about 13 years old, Union Camp came in and drilled a well and for whatever reason, all of the springs in West Savannah have been dried up to this day,” Lanier says. “That was probably one of the first environmental assaults here that was community wide.”
The monument and shared oral history are all that remain of the spring. It sits next to the offramp for an interstate highway from which large trucks traverse through residential communities to the large adjacent industrial sites, some with large smoke stacks, and to the noisy shipyards along the busy Savannah River.
West Savannah residents have coexisted with environmental impacts from industry they say regularly affect their properties, their water, and the air they breathe for decades.
“When we were kids, and people talked about the industrial smell in our neighborhoods, we would make up sayings like, ‘but it smells like money to us.’ We needed to justify being able to live under those conditions and we knew these industries provided income for many of our residents,” Lanier says. “But over time, the jobs went away. You don't find the local people working at the factories anymore, but we still reap the negative impact of these places. So, now it’s getting to the point where we're sick—literally and figuratively sick. And we have to do something.”
Uniting Behind Shared Concerns, and Science, for Change
Different groups worked separately over the years to address aspects of the environmental issues, with varying results. But this changed when Diane Washington-Bryant, a longtime resident of the city’s Hudson Hill community, saw a television interview with Dana Barr, PhD, professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health. Barr was being interviewed about an exposure study of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals, that a team of Rollins researchers conducted in northwest Georgia to determine the level of the potentially harmful toxicants that were making their way into local residents’ bodies.
Washington-Bryant shared the interview with Lanier and other community stakeholders, who then worked to bring together representatives from each of the West Savannah communities, city officials, and various community organizations for an environmental town hall on March 31. They also invited Barr and Stephanie Eick, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology at Rollins, to make a presentation about the dangers of toxicant exposure and possible ways scientific research could provide the community answers.
The concern and frustration among residents in the audience as Barr and Eick shared their perspective was visible, and the demands for action that followed were loud. The presentation marked an important first step in a collaborative journey with the scientists that Lanier says she hopes will result in meaningful remedies for the quality of life in West Savannah.
“We are Gullah Geechee people and there’s an old Gullah Geechee saying that is, ‘We speak for We.’ For too long, ‘we’ weren’t speaking for ‘we.’ We allowed others to speak for us and that effort kept us separated,” Lanier says. “It’s time to let our communities know that there’s power in numbers, that we hear them and their feelings are legitimate, their personal assessments are legitimate, and it matters. But now let’s back up this information with science.”
While the West Savannah residents are just beginning their collective efforts to improve the health and well-being of their communities through science, it is a journey that other communities know well.
Water Matters in Calhoun
More than 300 miles across Georgia, in the northwestern corner of the state, Kimberly Chapman’s father also passed down information to her about Gordon County’s waterways. It is why she does not drink tap water or swim in the local streams.
“I am the daughter of a carpet mill worker and I grew up here, so the smell of carpet and the industrial smells are normal [to me]. There is a certain odor carpet has that unless you’ve lived here, you wouldn’t recognize,” says Chapman, who has lived in Calhoun for most of her life. “I am not old enough to remember the creeks being different colors due to the industrial chemicals, like other people, but I do remember they used to look nasty and that my parents would never let us swim in them.”
Beyond that, Chapman says she was never too concerned about environmental issues in her community. That is, until she saw social media posts from fellow longtime Calhoun resident Hartwell Brooks about a lawsuit the Southern Environmental Law Center filed against the city on behalf of Coosa River Basin Initiative. The lawsuit alleged the city improperly disposed of PFAS from its wastewater plant into the Coosawattee River and local groundwater.
Having grown up in Calhoun, Brooks remembers learning about industrial pollution in science class and then coming home to see trucks dumping sludge onto nearby pastures.
“The smell was awful. … So as a kid, I was already asking what the heck was going on,” Brooks said. “But what really drove it home was when the lawsuit came out.”
He had since moved out of state, but his family was still in their home. Though they were now told that they should no longer eat vegetables from their garden, dig in the soil, or drink the water from their faucets without a special filter.
“We started asking some questions but didn’t get any answers. And it became apparent that the only people that were going to help our community were ourselves,” Brooks says. “So, from 700 miles away, I started posting social media posts and making little videos to start raising awareness.”
Chapman soon reached out to Brooks with the idea to start a formal Facebook group, which they named “Calhoun: Water Matters,” to serve as a safe space for concerned community members to ask questions and share information. The private group has since grown to more than 2,200 members.
In addition to sharing the latest PFAS- and industrial pollution-related news from across the state and nation, the Calhoun: Water Matters group has helped coordinate efforts like donations to provide their neighbors with temporary solutions, like limited supplies of water filters and single-use water tests.
“We wanted more testing done here so we could get some answers—so we can either feel safe or upset about our water,” Chapman says. “But we’re just a Facebook group, testing is expensive, and we’re in a carpet mill town where many people live paycheck-to-paycheck.”
Then in 2024, group members were contacted by Jesse Demonbreun-Chapman, executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative in Rome, Georgia, about an opportunity for Calhoun residents to take part in the Rollins exposure study.
“It was validation of the community effort, and really makes you feel like something is being done. It made me proud that we were involved in it so much, that our members were involved in it, because the study made the problem real on an academic institution level,” Brooks says.
“Community groups are great and many of our members have become somewhat experts in PFAS. But without the academic measures that scientific processes take, the issue is kind of subjective, and people can make up their own interpretations. … Now I think there is a good turning point in the area where more people are starting to ask questions about their health.”
Searching for Better Solutions
Since 1993, the Coosa River Basin Initiative has worked on high-profile projects to protect and restore a 5,500 square mile watershed that stretches across portions of southern Tennessee, northwest Georgia, and northeastern Alabama. The organization’s successes include bringing in more than $1 million to restore critical habitat and endangered species in the river basin, advocating for state legislation to fund cleaning up hazardous waste sites, and the PFAS-related legal action that inspired the Calhoun: Water Matters group into action.
“A lot of people across northwest Georgia care about the state of their water. While other people are looking to other agencies for answers, I am lucky enough to get to work on it,” Demonbreun-Chapman says. “Professionally, I get to find those answers and leverage my time to come up with solutions. And that is, just by itself, very rewarding to know that it’s actually my job to take something I am very concerned about and go make progress.”
Not all of the organization’s work involves headline-grabbing work on emerging contaminants. Sometimes it involves issues as common as dirt.
“One of the most common pollutants that people don’t think of as a pollutant is dirt. The way we manage our land use across the state and enforce Erosion and Sediment Control Act laws has an enormous impact, both on the health of our waterways and the lifespan of our drinking water facilities,” Demonbreun-Chapman says. “So, we’re constantly trying to find better solutions for how we manage the way land development occurs and how enforcement action is taken to make sure that our developers are doing things the way they’re supposed to.”
And sometimes, the most important task is simply being a good partner.
When Atlanta News First needed help finding a small group of Rome residents who might be interested having their blood tested for PFAS following the lawsuit settlement with Calhoun, Demonbreun-Chapman helped recruit the participants for the investigation. And when Rollins researchers wanted to conduct a larger scientific exposure study of nearly 200 adults in Rome and Calhoun, Demonbreun-Chapman again helped spread the word to potential participants. The preliminary findings from this study have already resulted in national news coverage and additional requests from residents for more studies.
“This was a neat time when we could see the fruit of the work—both in the public engagement and the additional resources and partnership studies that were coming to the area—because of the contamination pathway that we exposed in Calhoun,” Demonbreun-Chapman says. “When we see a community wrap around each other, decide to seriously organize themselves and get very involved civically, that’s always exciting.”
And the scientific data produced by the study was mutually beneficial.
“The science is absolutely vital to us being able to communicate accurately what the threat is without us sounding like we’re yelling and saying the sky is falling,” Demonbreun-Chapman says. “It is really easy for conservation groups to be labeled that way when we're talking about something that is, in our eyes, an existential threat to drinking water but is also something that the public has never heard of before. And so if you're not able to back that up with data—if somebody hasn't written papers that essentially back up exactly how these things are moving in your community—then it's really difficult to convince the public.”
However, the greatest benefit was perhaps for the study participants.
“It was exciting from a data standpoint to be a part of a scientific process like that, it was like being part of a science experiment,” Kimberly Chapman said. “But now I have a piece of paper in my home that says this is in my blood and that’s scary. I wish everybody could get their blood tested so that it would hit home for them too that this is an important issue. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s not fake. These are actual chemicals in our blood.”
Strength in Numbers, Resources, and Diversity of Thought
While the Savannah and Calhoun environmental health advocacy efforts are both still in the relatively early stages and led by volunteers, a recent out-of-office message from Rachael Thompson, executive director of Glynn Environmental Coalition, illustrated the workload for professionals, even at well-established organizations, who dedicate their careers to working to protect the health and well-being of others.
The message politely informed recipients that she might be slow to respond that week because “numerous scheduled community events and multiple grant deadlines” required her to direct her attention away from her email inbox. As the sole full-time employee of the organization, she reassured the recipients that she was doing her best “to meet the needs of the community first.”
In Glynn County, the environmental health needs of the community are plentiful.
Situated on Georgia’s southeastern coast, the county has a long history of industrial pollution. It is home to 17 identified hazardous waste sites and four Superfund sites that are on or proposed for the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) National Priorities List.
“Some days I’m wearing my fundraiser hat, some days I’m wearing my marketing and social media hat, some days I’m wearing my grant writer hat or my community engagement hat. And there’s probably a number of other hats mixed in there. But the variety of this job is what keeps me going, so I’m definitely a jack of all trades,” Thompson says.
She was not supposed to be the organization’s only employee. But when the EPA cancelled a large grant in April 2024 that would have bolstered the community's ability to monitor air quality issues, the Glynn Environmental Coalition—which was formed in 1990 by residents concerned about pollution in their community—was forced to reduce its workforce.
The EPA’s explanation for cancelling the grant was a “shift in agency priorities,” Thompson said. Less than a year later, air quality issues in a northern portion of Glynn County were so bad that it sent multiple people to the hospital and forced the evacuation of a local school. And when concerned residents and school officials wanted more information on the possible cause, they turned to Thompson for answers she did not have.
“It’s a stark reminder of how important those resources would have been to this community. If that grant hadn’t been terminated, we absolutely would have had the supplies, equipment, and trained citizen scientists to go out there and capture what was in the air,” Thompson said. “Being approved for that grant was like five or six years in the making, so when it was terminated it felt like we were going 10 steps back.”
Yet forward she persists.
In addition to pivoting to investigate and apply for alternate options to fund air monitoring equipment for the county, Thompson also continues simultaneously working on an array of complex initiatives on behalf of the community’s health.
The projects have ranged from fighting against an elementary school being built dangerously close to a hazardous waste site and working with the Healthy Coastal Neighborhoods coalition to launch resources for local seafood safety, to working with Rollins researchers to engage residents for a study assessing their industrial chemical exposure and being involved in a comprehensive, community-led letter-writing campaign advocating for the National Institutes of Health to approve a proposal from researchers at Rollins, University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Morehouse School of Medicine to establish a Superfund Research Center in Glynn County.
For any of these initiatives to be successful, Thompson and the Glynn Environmental Coalition must work closely and continuously with residents, other environmental and community groups, and scientists.
“There are almost zero programs or initiatives that we do all alone. There is strength in numbers and strength in resources, but there's also strength in that diversity of thought. And it is through our collaboration and coordinated effort that we know who to call and where pressure needs to be placed,” Thompson said. “The pollution problems here should have never been like this. But being able to witness when the community stands up for itself in the face of a potentially long-term harm, it’s inspiring and restorative in a way.”
Josiah “Jazz” Watts helps to address environmental health issues in Glynn County from multiple perspectives, including as a Sapelo Island descendant whose family has been in the area for seven generations, which he says is extremely valuable.
“One has to understand the systemically racial/racist and detrimental toxic legacy of pollution that has existed here in our communities in order to know how best to support and serve the mental, spiritual, and physical health of the generations of families that reside here; especially those that live in these areas that have been contaminated well over 100 years since the first industrial plants were built and produced the poisonous toxins that are still here,” Watts says.
The backing of a well-established organization and benefits of generational knowledge are particularly helpful with the persistent barriers to progress faced by advocates. Watts says these barriers still include a lack of public acknowledgement of the history and legacy of harm that has been done to generations of families, weak regulatory measures regarding remediation and cleanup of these sites, a lack of access to needed resources, such as funding, to address detrimental long-term health, economic, and environmental impacts.
The vision of what success looks like is still clear for Watts, however.
“Success looks like local, state and federal governments that direct well-funded initiatives that serve frontline communities. Success would include well-funded community-led and centered advocacy; along with supported technical expertise that the actual impacted communities could direct and lead with the support of advocacy groups,” Watts says. “It looks like having a Superfund Center that would help residents construct restorative plans to protect our communities, our livelihoods, our culture, and our lives. It looks like intentional policies that protect the people and confront exclusionary and discriminatory practices that systematically and historically poisoned our communities.”
For Rollins researchers working to provide communities across Georgia with scientific answers to their concerns, the efforts of community organizations and advocates is a critical part of the process.
“Local organizations are indispensable to environmental health work,” says Noah Scovronick, PhD, associate professor of environmental health at Rollins. “Social and economic history is deeply connected to present day environmental challenges, and researchers cannot understand that context without local partnerships. That context should guide both scientific assessment and the solutions designed to protect community health.”
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