Angelou Ezeilo was on a company retreat in Sonoma County, California when she was rudely reminded that as a person of color, she is not welcome in all environmental spaces.
It was 2005 and Ezeilo was a young woman in her 30’s working for the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in Atlanta, a public land conservation NGO. She was on an annual company retreat in Napa Valley, Southern California’s historically white and affluent wine country. It was Ezeilo’s first time visiting Napa and she was excited to be surrounded by its famed beauty.
All was well until she and a colleague went out for a morning walk and was yelled at by a local to “go home”. The racist encounter shook her and brought back childhood memories of the discrimination her family faced while on vacation. Feeling deeply unsettled and ‘wrong’ in such a space, she reported the incident to her colleagues and flew home immediately.
After the retreat, the experience was made even more difficult when she tried to engage her mostly-white colleagues in a conversation about the incident. “Whenever things would get racially uncomfortable at the workplace, it would often be written off as an exaggerated aberration: ‘surely you misunderstood his/her intention…’ or ‘Let’s not lose sight of the issue at hand’”.
This is the kind of experience that Ezeilo highlights in her book Engage, Connect, Protect: Empowering Diverse Youth as Environmental Leaders, to frame the larger issues of inaccessibility and lack of diversity of environmental conservation work for people of color as she sees it and her approach to solving it.
Ezeilo’s book provides an account of her personal experiences while working in conservation and land management as a woman of color. She details the difficulties of her work while trying to expand environmental education and career spaces for young people of color. The book also details some of the challenges and lessons Ezeilo has learned while founding her nonprofit the Greening Youth Foundation (GYF).
GYF’s goal is to provide young people of color with sustainable careers in conservation, land management, and the outdoors. Ezeilo details the key experiences, difficulties, and the valuable lessons she learned while running youth-oriented programming for people of color that informed the development of GYF’s signature internship programs. She also provides practical information on how she was able to transform her nonprofit from a small classroom operation to a global multimillion dollar organization.
GYF was founded on her realization that people of color were victims of a large informational gap on their connections to urban environmental problems. While working for the TPL, her job required her to knock on the doors of residents living in areas desired for public land acquisition to convince homeowners to sell their properties for ‘bargain basement prices’.
Ezeilo noticed that most of the homes she was meant to visit were those of people of color from low income households. The lack of knowledge on the political and environmental value of their properties would leave residents vulnerable to exploitation. This was just one way in which Ezeilo noticed how large informational gaps among communities of color regarding their connection to environmental problems led to community vulnerability.
In order to transform the larger issue of informational gaps, Ezeilo created the first GYF programs in urban public schools in Atlanta. In the book, she talked about the first iterations of the program and the difficult experiences she had to work through in order to make sure that the curriculum suited students of color. She expands upon the necessity of creating culturally relevant teaching materials- making sure that the characters in her program activities centered children of color and featured scenarios that the children would actually experience in their own lives. GYD has since expanded from engaging young people to become environmental stewards to building sustainable career paths that will allow people of color to sustainably remain engaged in environmental fields of work.
The GYD’s internship programs were created to connect young people of color to jobs in environmental NGOs, governmental agencies, and outdoor retailership. One of the signature internship programs, Urban Youth Corps (UYC) offers opportunities for those without college degrees to pursue careers in the outdoors, including wildland firefighting, wind turbine and solar technicians, and tree-care management.
To become a wildland firefighter, one needs to obtain a red card, which is obtained through a training program. According to Ezeilo,“It can be difficult for young people of color to get the training they need because in many places the guardians of the system are older white men who have been utilizing a good old boys network for generations to control who gets certified and therefore who can get these jobs”. Many career paths are still closed off to young people of color, but organizations like GYD continue to work to open up these spaces.
Ezeilo also details the fluidity of her internship programs and how she’s been able to transform and adapt them to needs and new issues arising among the interns. For example, the UYC internship programs began teaching entrepreneurship skills in their training modules for interns who graduate but still cannot get employed. This way, interns are taught skills on how to carve out their own paths, start their own businesses and organizations, and be their own trailblazers. One success story she highlighted in the book was the founding of “3 Girls and a Paintbrush” an organization created by a few women who graduated from the GYF internships..
Even with its focus on solutions, the book highlights the deep divisions and existing exclusions that continue to exist in the environment and environmental spaces. In order to solve collective environmental problems, all the communities affected need to be included, bridge these divides, and collaborate on solutions.