The board is not neutral: Introducing NCBA’s CHESS board 

Chess is a game of strategy. Every move is purposeful. Every piece has a role.

Some glide across the board with range and flexibility. Others move slowly, deliberately, one square at a time. But the outcome is never determined by any single piece—it’s determined by how well each one understands its role in relation to the whole.

That kind of purposeful, strategic movement is exactly what the North Carolina Black Alliance’s Community Health and Environmental Storytelling toward Solutions Dashboard—the CHESS Board—brings to health equity and environmental justice.

The CHESS Board emerges at a critical moment. Access to public data that once helped communities understand their realities and hold decision-makers accountable is being removed. When data about what’s happening in our communities disappears, so does our ability to advocate for change.

In chess, you don’t start with abundance. You start with a position. You take stock of what’s in front of you—who’s on your board, what spaces are open, what pressures are already in play. And then you begin. Not with a rush, but with intention.

Taking stock of the realities facing Black communities across North Carolina, NCBA’s Access to Healthcare and Environmental Justice teams compiled data from open sources—uninsured populations, infant mortality, healthcare facility access—and overlaid it with environmental justice data: air pollution, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), landfill locations.

What becomes clear is what many communities have long known: the board is not neutral.

The greatest concentration of Black communities often overlaps with the highest cumulative impacts—multiple exposures to multiple chemical and non-chemical stressors affecting health, well-being, and quality of life. What has too often been experienced in isolation is now visible in connection.

What sets the CHESS Board apart is its intentionality about who is centered in the data. Many tools map environmental and health burdens—but stop short of telling you who lives there. The CHESS Board layers race demographics directly into the analysis, using dot density indicators and shaded overlays to make visible what aggregated data often obscures: where Black communities are concentrated, and what they are disproportionately living alongside. You can see the density of CAFOs over counties with high Black populations. You can see regions of the state where Black residents carry the highest rates of being uninsured. The burden is not anonymous. The people aren’t either.

That visibility matters. Strategy requires awareness that is both anticipatory and responsive. You have to see what’s happening now while also understanding what it sets in motion. We hear it in deep conversations with community partners—about children impacted by contaminated soil in a park that was once a landfill, about the toll of living in a town with more hogs than people.

The CHESS Board gives community members the ability to layer data, explore patterns, and uncover relationships that are invisible when viewed separately. It doesn’t tell you what to think. It gives you the full board so you can ask better questions and strategize your next move.

This is more than a map. It’s a tool for education, storytelling, advocacy, and engagement—built for community members, organizations, policymakers, and educators advancing environmental health. It grounds lived experience in data. And the data won’t disappear.

But like chess, the tool doesn’t make the move. People do.

This iteration of the CHESS Board is just the beginning. The issues impacting Black communities are intersectional, and our work ahead focuses on adding layers that reflect that. In the interim, we’ll be connecting with community members and partners for training on how to use it.

Because this work isn’t just about reacting to what’s in front of us. It’s about understanding how the board was set in the first place—and working toward a future where health and environment are not determined by zip code or race, but by intentional, equitable investment.

Once you can see the board clearly, you can begin to move differently.

That is the strategy.