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Spending constraints in state budgets have resulted in a need to evaluate the effects of alternative budgeting techniques. We study public school administrations, where improvements in budgetary processes could help align system goals with reduced levels of funding. A budgeting technique, called strategic budgeting (SB), emphasizing information symmetry and mutual monitoring, is investigated in a nonprofit setting by comparing it to a traditional budgeting (TB) method. The experiment finds that the effect of reduced spending previously discovered in a corporate setting are also evident in a not-for-profit setting. Results indicated an overall cost savings with SB of almost 25 percent. Public school administrators made spending decisions in a hypothetical three-year task and provided comments to justify their decisions. These comments along with anecdotal evidence from prior field research indicate that collaborative characteristics in a budget format may reduce unnecessary spending.

This chapter chronicles some of the early years of the author growing up in the racially segregated South Alabama and its influence on his thinking about race, environment, social equity, and government responsibility and his journey to becoming an environmental sociologist, scholar, and activist. Using an environmental justice paradigm, he uncovers the underlying assumptions that contribute to and produce unequal protection. The environmental justice paradigm provides a useful framework for examining and explaining the spatial relation between the health of marginalized populations and their built and natural environment, and government response to natural and man-made disasters in African American communities. Clearly, people of color communities have borne a disproportionate burden and have received differential treatment from government in its response to health threats such as childhood lead poisoning, toxic waste and contamination, industrial accidents, hurricanes, floods and related weather-related disasters, and a host of other man-made disasters. The chapter brings to the surface the ethical and political questions of “who gets what, why, and how much” and why some communities get left behind before and after disasters strike.