The Community Environmental Resource Program (CERP) is a monitoring and educational effort created to help residents, businesses and officials understand and deal with environmental issues in the cities of St. Louis and East St. Louis. With support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the clearinghouse has been developed under the direction of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council. Citizens, government officials and non-profits from both sides of the Mississippi River are actively involved in this project.

Purpose. CERP will help you learn about environmental problems in your neighborhood, how conditions are changing over time, and what you can do be done about them. The system also helps city officials, businesspeople, and anyone else interested in the local environment improve communication and trust and address environmental problems more effectively.

Process. CERP builds on the environmental listening tours that have been conducted in recent years on both sides of the river. Those tours identified four topics that are especially important to citizens: vacant/derelict buildings, brownfields, lead poisoning, and illegal/hazardous waste. The process of designing CERP involved:

Product. CERP provides the following products:

1. A brochure that describes local environmental problems and what is being done about them.
2. A newsletter that informs the public about local environmental issues and what they can do about them.
3. Maps that present environmental concerns in a way that can be easily understood.
4. An Internet-based system that allows anyone to obtain environmental information on a particular topic or for a specific geographic area.