Roseville, Minnesota is a city situated between Minneapolis and St. Paul. It may only have 36,000 residents, but it is officially recognized as a city, complete with municipal government. As of about 2016, nearly one-third of Roseville’s population was non-white.  Yet the city council was composed of four middle-aged white members. Dannah Waukazo Thompson wanted to change that.Thompson, a 28-year-old Native American activist and paralegal, entered the race to represent minorities and to fight for justice and equality in Roseville. She decided to run for Roseville City Council with no political background, mentoring, or funding. She took on the municipal political sphere by herself. Impressively, she came within 800 votes of winning a council seat from incumbent Bob Willmus.

Thompson recently moved to Roseville. She works as a paralegal at a debt collection firm, but she was a political science major in college and has always had an interest in the political world. Part of many local activist groups, Dannah devotes much of her time to the betterment of the community.

Dannah said that there were many push factors that led her to run for City Council. Dannah cited events such as Trump’s election and police shootings of young black men including Jamar Clark and Philando Castile as events that stirred up civic engagement in her community. This engagement took the form of protests, teach-ins and talk-back events, and increased dialogue with local politicians.

Amidst this, she said that she, “wanted to be somebody who would be able to bring a change to the system so that we could take a break and not have to fight for our lives all the time and could make systemic changes that could possibly save lives”.

Dannah faced an uphill battle from the start. While campaigning, some people—including the other council candidates—told her not to talk about the fact that she is Native American. Some even told her not to focus on the fact that she is a woman. But Dannah believed that her own experiences as a Native woman could bring progressive changes to the rapidly growing city.

By focusing on issues like affordable housing, higher minimum wage, and removing criminal background checks from rental application processes, she was able to bring attention to issues that disproportionately affect minority communities. For example, with affordable housing, Dannah researched possible city funding sources as well as racial bias in the housing process in order to create a multifaceted and feasible solution for Roseville.

“By talking about minority issues,” she explained, “I was able to bring attention to the problems affecting indigenous communities like Natives as well as other minority groups”. She brought together her professional knowledge and experience with her identity to engage minority communities and encourage white communities to think about these issues of inequality.

While Dannah’s race was just for a small city council, the political sphere she was entering was one still fraught with tension after the 2016 elections. Dannah has many white coworkers who voted for President Trump for business reasons. Those votes felt like a betrayal to her and her minority coworkers. This made Dannah think more about who needed to represent Roseville’s citizens in coming years. Supported by social justice groups in Roseville and civic engagement in Minneapolis, Dannah was driven to be a new kind of politician.

Aside from Trump’s election, Dannah was also greatly influenced by local politics, such as Jacob Frey’s victory in 2016 mayoral election in Minneapolis. Frey was elected mayor with the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor party endorsement, and many touted him as being the progressive candidate for the race. Recently, he has made affordable housing one of his main issues as well.

Yet Dannah noted that Frey was behind a lot of new fancy condos built around Minneapolis before he was elected—and on his website he listed ‘residential expansion’ as one of his main issues. With rent prices already skyrocketing in the Twin Cities, Frey’s luxury condos pushed up the cost of living in Minneapolis even more. This rent crisis exacerbated a Native American homelessness, culminating a homeless encampment located in downtown Minneapolis. More privileged communities saw Frey based on his campaign platform alone, unaware of his history in Minneapolis. Struggling minority groups couldn’t avoid that history, and now face the consequences.

This inspired Dannah to run as a candidate who followed through with promises to specifically help minority communities in Roseville. Dannah said that she was taught in her life to always think seven generations ahead. While Mayor Frey in Minneapolis may not have thought ahead when he built those luxury condos, Dannah ran to serve the City of Roseville now and in the future. She also ensured all of her campaign promises were all backed up with thoroughly researched and sustainable financial plans.

The City of Roseville did not make it easy on candidates. There was only one public speaking event for council candidates, held before the primaries by a third party to increase voter participation. The candidates did not know at the time if they would be on the ballot. The City of Roseville did not hold on any formal election events. That made it difficult to get word out about the candidates, and it gave an advantage to incumbents and candidates with more funding.

One thing is evident about Dannah; although she is just over 5 feet tall, she is not to be underestimated. She said that what her opponents may not realize is, she still got 6,200 votes. In Dannah’s words, “that’s not nothing”.

Dannah may have lost her political race, but she says that she remains hopeful. After the 2018 midterms, seeing a record number of women as well as Native American women win their elections has given her hope to keep fighting, and has bolstered her spirit so she isn’t actually too disappointed about losing.

Dannah Thompson is clearly here for the long fight; and to anyone considering following her footsteps into the political sphere, whether municipal, federal, or global, Dannah advises: “when in doubt just go for it because there’s never going to be too many people trying to save the world”.

Images:

https://dannahthompsonforcitycouncil.wordpress.com/

https://www.facebook.com/Dannah-Thompson-for-Roseville-City-Council-430548354038194/

Mitch Hescox wouldn’t call himself an environmentalist. “I’m a Christian,” he said. “I came to this because I’m a Christian.”

“This” is his work to engage the 40,000 evangelical Christian churches in the United States in environmental action as president and CEO of the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN). It might seem like an odd community to target – the most recent survey suggests only 28% of American evangelicals believe in climate change. But to Hescox, there’s no contradiction between being an Evangelical Christian and caring about climate change. Rather, he stresses that the two are intrinsically related. It just comes down to how you talk about it.

Many evangelicals are critical of environmentalism. They believe it puts the value of the environment above the needs of humans. In light of this skepticism, Hescox has helped pioneer the concept of Creation Care. Practicing Creation Care, according to the EEN’s definition, means caring for all of God’s creation by stopping and preventing all activities that are harmful to the environment and the humans who inhabit it.

Even Hescox wasn’t always on board. Before joining the EEN, he spent 18 years as the pastor of a local church – and the fourteen years before that working in the coal power industry. His job took him around the world and exposed him to the real human and environmental costs of the industry. He saw children choking on polluted air and realized that the people most impacted by pollution were the poor. All of this convinced Hescox that environmental problems were the cause of some of the largest justice issues in the world.

“If you talk about that [Christians] are supposed to care about what God owns and care for the least of these,” Hescox stresses, “there’s no way that any person of faith should not be committed to Creation Care.” In this context, Creation Care is fundamentally an act of loving God.

That leads the EEN to some unexpected positions. The EEN supports a carbon tax. They advocate for everyone to make reductions in plastic waste, however small, because “the journey of repentance begins with a single step.”  They’re gathering signatures and bodies to march in support of clean energy. And they do this knowing that many evangelicals believe the environment is traditionally a liberal cause.

But the EEN, a self-described conservative organization, urges people not to think of climate change as a liberal or a conservative issue. The EEN, like Hescox, eschews the environmentalism label, preferring to frame issues in ways foreign to many mainstream environmentalists.

“People have different things that motivate them,” he explained. “We studied what would reach most of our community, which is more conservative. We want to target the things that will get a response and open up people’s hearts and minds.”

He paused and then added, “I’ve said to a lot of progressives, let me and people like me reach into the conservative community with our values.  Let’s help people come to terms with working on climate change in a way that resonates with them.”

For the EEN, the winning formula has been a focus on the impact of environmental problems like climate change and pollution on human health close to home, framed through a familiar evangelical lens. Simply put, they want to make climate change a pro-life issue.

The crux of it is this: if you value life beginning in the womb, you can’t stop valuing it when the baby is born. Pollution, the EEN argues, harms all life, from the unborn in the womb to the elderly. To be truly pro-life, you should value a clean earth for all children and all future children.

It’s a powerful argument. The EEN has already gotten 45,000 Evangelicals to sign on to their current Pro-Life Clean Energy Campaign, which aims to get six states to commit to 100% renewable energy by 2030. The eventual goal is have half a million pro-life Christians lobbying their elected officials to support clean energy in the name of life.

This is all part of Hescox’s goal to reach beyond the kind of activism that has people just “opening up their wallets and giving money” and move towards one that changes people’s way of life. He’s convinced that the way to do this is to make an issue local and personal. “The more local you make an issue, the easier it is to open up people’s hearts to other kinds of news.”

“Clean energy jobs are soaring,” Hescox exclaimed. “Talk about that!”

Just as the EEN uses familiar pro-life messaging to engage evangelicals, they invoke conservative economic language highlighting personal responsibility and deregulation to make the clean energy pitch to local business owners and politicians. But instead of talking about deregulation in terms of getting rid of environmental protections, the EEN talks about “freeing communities and businesses from regulations that prevent [them] from joining together” to create and sell clean energy.

The EEN’s approach is paying dividends. The Creation Care movement is growing rapidly, and more and more people are getting on board. “Not only is the faith community seeing advantages, so are the business owners,” Hescox explained. His time working in the coal industry exposed him to the huge economic costs of centralized fossil fuel grids, and he became convinced of the economic power of local, sustainable energy. Beyond getting regular citizens involved, reaching the political and business community has been a central mission during his time at the EEN.

This messaging might sound strange to liberals, but it makes sense to conservatives. “Communicate in ways that people can hear and they’ll come on board,” Hescox emphasized. “I think that’s what we’re doing.”

And he’s right. The EEN works to get people on board by targeting people with messages they’ll relate to, even if it’s not the same message that will convince their neighbor. By using language and concepts familiar to conservative, evangelical communities, they’re able to reach a significant number of people who might initially be skeptical of climate action. The Creation Care movement might make people who aren’t religious uncomfortable. But the point of it isn’t to reach everyone – and Hescox thinks that’s okay. Other people can work on their own, and at the end of the day, it’ll all come together, whether or not you call yourself an environmentalist or practice Creation Care.

“My standard illustration,” Hescox reflects, “is that to raise the action on climate change, we’re not yet at a big tent moment where we raise one tent and everyone fits underneath it. We need a lot of smaller tents raised up by individual values. And if we raise enough tents using the values of different communities, we’ll have enough tents to make a big tent – except it won’t be one tent, it’ll be a lot of little tents touching at the edges.”

Community Supported Agriculture: it’s a concept that’s been catching on across the country for some time. Customers purchase an early spring subscription from their local farm or food hub in order to receive bags of fresh, local, and organic produce weekly throughout the growing season. Why has it gotten so popular? Farmers love CSA because upfront spring payments can provide financial stability and reliability for the rest of their season. Customers buy in partly due to the rise in “eat local” and “eat organic” movements, and partly because it can be cheaper or more convenient than other produce purchasing options. But there’s an organization in Maine with a new take on the trend – at Fresh Start Farms works to ensure that it’s not just that the community supports agriculture. The program works to help agriculture support the community.

Fresh Start Farms is a farmer training program designed to help refugee farmers from Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, and South Sudan transition to a new life in the US agricultural climate. Fresh Start’s New American farmers are each given a plot on a collective farm located in the rural outskirts of Lisbon, Maine. There, they learn how to operate a farm in the United States from both an agricultural and business perspective. The farmers are encouraged to grow some of their favorite crops from back home, tapping into the niche market of their fellow refugees, who are unable to find certain crops elsewhere. They sell their produce wholesale to restaurants and food pantries in the region, and directly to customers through farmers markets and the Fresh Start Farms CSA. In the off season, farmers take classes on topics like business strategy, crop planning, and marketing.

Anna Tracht, the CSA manager for Fresh Start Farms, divides their CSA customer base into two main groups: fellow refugees, and Portland urbanites. To fellow refugees, the program offers a unique opportunity to purchase culturally relevant produce at affordable prices that support their community. Fresh Start offers flexible payment plans and even a limited number of subsidized CSA memberships for members of the refugee community who can’t afford to pay the subscription.

In a recent survey, the office workers who purchase Fresh Start Farms CSAs nearly unanimously told Anna that they purchase because they “identify with the mission” of Fresh Start Farms. Living in the liberal city of Portland, these customers could afford to purchase local and organic produce elsewhere, but they choose Fresh Start Farms because of its social justice mission. Fresh Start’s partner organization, Cultivating Community, has done a great job of spreading the word about food justice in Portland, and customers can’t wait to use their grocery spending to “support refugee farmers.”

Fresh Start Farms is clearly doing some groundbreaking work promoting social justice and food security across multiple communities. But Anna admits there is one important customer base the program has failed to win over thus far. “We aren’t getting the same buy in from customers in Lisbon.” That is troublesome, since that is where Fresh Start Farms is based.

Why? It’s complicated. Anna explains, there’s a “really interesting dynamic of farming in a very very red rural town, but working with refugee farmers, and selling mostly to urban customers.”

While Fresh Start does sell produce to the local food pantry as part of their wholesale program, Anna has struggled to get even a few CSA customers in the Lisbon area. Some town members are hostile towards the farm and don’t identify with its mission. Without an organization like Cultivating Community starting local conversations about food justice, it’s harder to get the community behind a farm run by “outsiders.” For now, progress comes one person at a time. Anna’s first step has been improving relations with the owner of the neighboring farm. He “rides around [the farm] on his four-wheeler, with his dog on the back,” which is a pretty typical activity for someone living in rural Maine. But it is threatening for the refugee farmers, the majority of whom are Muslim. Culturally, they tend to avoid or even fear dogs. Since Fresh Start first moved into Lisbon, their neighbor has been “pretty unfriendly to the farmers.”

This year, though, he’s started warming up. Just a few days before Anna and I talked, he brought a peace offering of venison to the farm. Anna reflects on the significance of that act of generosity: “he’s really just gotten to know [the farmers], and eventually he realized they’re all working really hard every day like he is.” They have been showing him some of the food they’re proud to grow, and he is starting to share the food he’s proud of with them.

While Fresh Start Farms is already going above and beyond what most CSA programs do to promote social justice with their urban clientele and refugee farmers, Anna hopes that these small moments of compassion and understanding from their rural neighbors indicate the beginnings of real progress towards a CSA program that uses agriculture as a means to support all the communities it touches.

Apocalyptic reports about rising sea levels and shrinking job prospects roll in by the hour. They announce that just as lower-earning factory workers are the ones displaced by robotic workers, climate change will push aside less affluent communities that cannot afford to move or invest in infrastructure to protect themselves. Just as the poor and already marginalized have borne the brunt of past social problems, these same groups will be faced with more challenges in the future.

In the face of such daunting problems, some would call it quits. Yet Jon Shaffer, Executive Director of the Boston Network for International Development (BNID) and Ph.D. student in Sociology at Boston University, is optimistic. He thinks that everyone sitting in a place of privilege has an obligation to help make the world a better place. “We should be critical based on a study of how we think about global health and development,” Shaffer says. “But I think we can do that.”

Working as the Executive Director at BNID allows Shaffer to do just that. The Boston Network for International Development is a platform for discussion, a place for siloed projects and people in the development sphere to come together. While speaking with Shaffer, it was clear to me that he is an expert not only on global health, but also at engaging an audience to think more deeply about their beliefs. In his work at the BNID, Shaffer brings together practitioners, students of development, and academics to discuss topics in international development. Some people are liberal, some are market fundamentalists, and others are far left, Shaffer says, but BNID opens up the space so that everyone is on equal footing to debate.

Development is a big topic that requires these larger discussions. For some, it means raising a country’s GDP and increasing manufacturing capacity. For others, it’s the process that increases literacy and decreases infant mortality rates. For Shaffer, development is about redistributing resources from richer parts of the world to areas with fewer resources.

As he sees it, resources determine health outcomes and livelihood opportunities. Shaffer began thinking more deeply about global health as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University. A biomedical engineering major, Shaffer was “steeped in tech stuff,” yet his family values pushed him to think about his obligation to those with less. He became involved with GlobeMed, the national organization aimed at forming lasting partnerships between university groups and community health groups in underserved areas. “[GlobeMed] started to build this organization … that was about redistribution, about moving stuff –money primarily–to places that stuff had been taken out of,” Shaffer said.

From his perspective, those struggling with the AIDS epidemic in Lesotho or with rising sea levels in Tuvalu have much more in common than might appear at first glance. In Lesotho, the epidemic has been especially devastating because of the lack of resources for treatment and prevention. The small atoll nation of Tuvalu doesn’t have the money that wealthier coastal areas like Boston do to protect itself from rising sea levels. In his work and research, Shaffer focuses on how the poor have limited access to healthcare, and connects the causes of the problems faced by Basotho and Tuvaluans: the unequal distribution of resources.

In his analysis of these problems, Shaffer points to another commonality: events in the recent and not so recent past that led to this unequal distribution of resources. In order to understand the root cause of health crises, and other international development issues, Shaffer says, we need to learn a history lesson.

Consider the 2014 Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. While the immediate cause of the epidemic was the Ebolavirus, Shaffer sees the causes of the outbreak in a longer history. “You have to go back to colonial times,” he explains. Since colonists arrived in the country, they have been extracting Sierra Leone’s most valuable natural resources, especially diamonds. As resources flow out of the country, so do the profits. That leaves Sierra Leoneans without the health care systems or infrastructure that they need and deserve.

But the story doesn’t end here. Post-colonial states got caught up in the debate about the best way to provide social safety nets: through government spending or through the market? When these newly independent countries fell deep into debt in the 1970s and 1980s, institutions like the International Monetary Fund imposed conditions on loans that kept states from providing welfare services. In exchange for the loans, states had to deregulate, decrease barriers to trade, and reduce government spending. This meant that essential social services like education and health care were to be provided by private actors instead of being guided by the states.

While some economists celebrate the success of these loans, Shaffer sides with those who are more critical. In Sierra Leone, the lack of resources was devastating: when Ebola struck, a legacy of underfunding in the health sector meant that there were fewer than 150 doctors for 6 million people.

The weight of historical inequality continues to bear down on the parts of the world that have been subject to colonization and natural resource extraction, explains Shaffer. But how do we unravel the past to create a healthier and more just future, especially with the doomsday reports about climate change and global epidemics?

Foreign aid can help, Shaffer believes, despite the flaws in major development institutions. It’s clear that foreign aid is key to keeping programs that people depend upon in check. Many rely on it to meet their everyday needs, including those who receive drugs to treat the HIV virus or food to feed their children. But aid—whether it is through direct foreign investment, World Bank Group grants, or microloans from NGOs—must be carefully watched and analyzed, Shaffer says. We must use forums like BNID to discuss what’s going on and to find the most just outcomes.

According to Shaffer, everyone who is trying to help address these multifaceted problems has their heart in the right place. “Even if people are going at it in what I would consider boneheaded ways, there’s the idea that we all have some sacred shared humanness and that that ought to be protected,” Shaffer says.

Despite the challenges facing our world, Shaffer brings a message of hope. For him, helping others isn’t just a hobby or something to do to look good. It is a moral imperative based on a shared humanity. Those of us in rich countries need to become conversant both in terms of volume of aid and the important details about how it is structured and where it goes. We need to talk to our politicians, and think about how foreign aid, donations, and loans could be more effective at redistributing resources.

“We have to fight for moving money into programs we know make a big difference for folks that are otherwise marginalized,” Shaffer says. Only by doing this can we make the world a better place.

Moving forward with the Keystone XL pipeline, delaying the youth climate change lawsuit, approving the first offshore oil wells in the Arctic, and disbanding the EPA’s air pollution review panel—these are just a few of the actions the current administration has taken to roll back environmental protections. President Trump is not focused on prosecuting environmental crimes. Rather, he seems to have made it a priority to do the opposite. These actions are disheartening for environmentalists, and a threat to the health and well-being of people across the country.

The National Environmental Law Center (NELC) is a Boston-based non-profit litigation center that was founded in 1990. Its purpose is to ensure anti-pollution laws are enforced and to promote long-term solutions to the nation’s biggest environmental problems. NELC works with state and local citizen groups by educating them on the legal field to help protect public health and the environment. Our nation’s unique environmental laws allow citizens to pursue legal action against companies that violate the laws. The NELC serves as a major force in public interest litigation, especially in suits upholding our nation’s core environmental laws.

Josh Kratka is a senior attorney at NELC. He graduated from Harvard University in 1979. After college, he worked in union organizing, where he became passionate about standing up for the rights of others. When it came time to choose what he wanted to pursue as a career, he was deciding between becoming a history teacher and going to law school. He chose law school, saying “I saw a career as a lawyer as a more practical life choice.” Josh graduated from Northeastern University School of Law in 1984.

After law school, Josh wanted to build on his union experience by working in labor law. Legal positions in that field were hard to come by, so Josh worked a variety of different jobs. He served as a law clerk for the Superior Court of Massachusetts. He worked as a staff attorney for Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group. After a few years of advocating for environmental and consumer protection laws, Josh decided “the lobbying industry wasn’t for him personality-wise”. He took his love for the environment to NELC in 1994.

Instead of lobbing for new laws, attorneys at NELC monitor compliance with existing environmental laws. “We look at government records and report any violations that we find to the appropriate agencies,” says Josh. If the government doesn’t take legal action against the violating corporations, NELC will. When the NELC attorneys take action, they fight to win both fines for damages and court orders to block illegal practices. Their work holds polluters accountable for their environmental destruction.

One of the biggest cases Josh has worked on in his time at NELC is Environment Texas, Sierra Club v. ExxonMobil. The decision for this case was just handed down by the court in 2016. The plaintiffs that NELC represented argued that ExxonMobil committed 16,386 days of violation of the Clean Air Act at its refinery and chemical plant complex in Baytown, Texas. The court originally ruled in favor of Exxon at trial, and NELC appealed the verdict.

At the appeals court, the judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, whom NELC represented, and sent the case back down to the trial court. This time, the federal district court ordered Exxon to pay $20 million in damages, the largest civil penalty ever imposed in a citizen environmental suit. The ruling was a huge victory for NELC. Now, Exxon has appealed the most recent court decision, so NELC and Josh are back in court.

Over the past 28 years, NELC has focused on bringing violators of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act to justice. They have brought over 100 enforcement cases, winning millions of dollars in court-ordered penalties and pollution reduction measures.

Another focus of NELC attorneys is ensuring that environmental regulations are fully and fairly enforced by the appropriate governmental agencies. If an agency fails to properly regulate an industry, NELC will seek a judicial review of the agency regulations, essentially trying to win court orders that direct the agency to enforce the environmental law as Congress intended it to. NELC attorneys will also file “friend of the court” briefs in the federal and Supreme Court systems. This is another way to take legal action when environmental laws are being threatened, or the public right to participate in the implementation of those laws is being endangered.

Luke Metzger, the director of Environment Texas, said after the ruling against Exxon: “This ruling shows how crucial the citizen enforcement provision of the Clean Air Act really is…it means that private citizens victimized by the world’s biggest polluters can get justice in the American court system, even when government regulators look the other way.” Unfortunately, this is a result of the Trump administration’s rolling back of environmental protections, allowing the EPA to look away from pollution problems.

When speaking to Josh, it is clear that he is passionate about his job. Most of the companies that NELC files suit against are operating facilities in low-income neighborhoods. “People here don’t have as much political power or a voice to be able to tell the company to stop polluting,” Josh explains. “These are big companies that can afford to comply with environmental laws, and there is no reason why they should break the law and get away with it just because there isn’t as much government oversight as there needs to be.” When there is a failure of government enforcement of the laws, either by the Environmental Protection Agency or the states, NELC can step in to fill the gaps and help those who need it most. Passionate attorneys like Josh work to keep the federal government and corporations accountable for their decisions that damage the environment.

It is a hard enough job getting government officials to commit to reducing plastic waste. Add in persuading business owners concerned about their bottom line to limit their plastic use. For me, convincing these two groups to take action on plastic waste seems difficult and unpleasant. For Megan Byers at the Product Stewardship Institute (PSI), creating successful partnerships with them is the most rewarding part of her job.

Megan Byers is an Associate for Policy, Programs, and Outreach at PSI. While PSI is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, the non-profit works across multiple US states to minimize the negative impacts of consumer products and packaging. Besides managing PSI’s newsletter and website, Byers promotes both legislative and voluntary plastic waste reduction strategies to commercial businesses, universities, and municipalities. At a time when the amount of plastic waste in America is at an all-time high of 34.5 million tons per year, her work with PSI is crucial.

Reducing plastic can be a hard sell. “I tried so hard not to sound like a telemarketer!” Byers said. As part of a PSI-led project in Long Island’s North Fork region in 2017, Byers had to persuade restaurant owners to implement plastic waste reduction initiatives. She did most of it over the phone. Known as the Trash Free Waters project, it aimed to get restaurants near the coast to reduce the use of disposable plastics so that plastics were kept off Long Island’s beaches. As a pilot, four participating eateries received direction and funding to switch to more sustainable alternatives. Byers notes that some restaurants were reluctant, and some were just not interested in taking part in the pilot. Her strategy? Appealing to their bottom line – making the case that reducing plastic waste would save them money.

PSI uses diverse messaging to convince restaurants and eateries to give up plastic. (Image from Product Stewardship Institute)

Byers champions PSI’s distinctive approach to environmental action: consultative, consensus-seeking, and informed by current research. The aim is to find workable solutions for the diverse stakeholders involved in reducing plastic waste. As advocating for plastic reduction always meets with resistance, her job entails being adaptable and presenting a suite of options. For example, Byers mentions that in stakeholder meetings with local government and municipal waste officials, legislative bans against single-use plastics were not a particularly appealing prospect. What was supported was public education and voluntary plastic reduction schemes.

Flexibility extends to how she conveys the reasons why reducing plastic waste should matter. “You have to diversify your message,” Byers said. “There’s a lot of other ways to frame it: it is also a social justice issue and a health issue.” She notes that PSI has a large spectrum of members and partners that includes corporate retailers, government officials, and non-governmental groups. This means that PSI’s recommendations need to be varied as well, while still aiming to minimize the negative impacts of consumer products and packaging.

Having the buy-in of all these groups is unique, especially in a time where environmental advocates often seem pitted against groups unwilling to go green. It is clear from our conversation that Byers succeeds by bringing stakeholders together. She highlights community engagement and relationship building as central to the work that she does with PSI, which often comes with pleasant surprises.

One of those surprises was how students got involved in the Trash Free Waters project: as participating businesses were set to meet with PSI in a local elementary school, two teachers came forward and volunteered their students to be involved in the project. Students participated in a logo competition. The winning logo was displayed in the windows of participating businesses.

Winning Logo for the Trash Free Waters project. (Image from Product Stewardship Institute)

“It’s really incredible how many chance meetings can turn into something bigger,” Byers reflected. The fact that students participated also attracted local media attention, which helped her promote her cause – as Byers commented, who doesn’t love a story about 5th graders trying to do good?

Community engagement does not take away from her approach of being well-informed. Creating best practices for plastic reduction is something Byers takes seriously. Part of her work also entails keeping abreast of the latest policy innovations around regulating single-use plastics and disposable foodware. She is familiar with global initiatives, such as Starbucks in the UK charging consumers for disposable cups, and India exploring extended producer responsibility schemes for plastics. The challenge is to figure out what works best and why.

“Every town is working on it separately from everyone else!” Byers explains. “My job is to synthesize all of their efforts and come up with best practices.”

Back in 2016, Byers researched trends in municipal plastic bag reduction policies. Some of this has already made its way to PSI’s website in the form of sample policies about placing a fee on carryout bags. She has also researched other forms of legislation to reduce plastic waste at its source, including requiring all foodware to be recyclable.

To my surprise, Byers shares a key insight that single-use plastic bans do not work well. Looking at plastic bags specifically, Byers notes that bans are usually written with a certain type of plastic bag in mind: bags of a certain thickness for example. The unintended result? People just switched to bags of a different thickness, which might even be worse for the environment. She remarks that bans constitute an older generation of policies; what has seemed to work better in the current landscape is to levy a fee on single-use plastics. That approach does not just ban a particular type of plastic – it can change consumer behavior.

What is next for Byers? She is excited about a future project that PSI will be carrying out in upstate New York, where they are looking to replicate the success of the Trash Free Waters project with restaurants in the city of Buffalo. Changing consumer behavior around reducing plastic use requires an understanding of what concerns various groups the most, and Byers’ consultative approach to advocacy is the way forward.

In Lawrence MA, Terry Greene worked on a project called, Casa De Salude that hired and trained residents to be community leaders on environmental health issues such as mercury, lead poisoning, and asthma. The leaders then conducted trainings at culturally familiar sites like daycares, public housing facilities, and faith-based places. The project proved the power of listening; mercury training was focused on mercury in fish, but residents asked, what about the tradition of sprinkling mercury on babies’ cribs? With this knowledge, Greene worked with the community to get local shops to stop selling mercury for such purposes. Casa De Salude, was among the first to test a peer-leadership model. Initial leaders also helped to identify new leaders, and so began a ripple effect.

Today, Greene is the Senior Environmental Health Associate at John Snow, Inc.(JSI)- a public health consulting organization dedicated to “improving the health of underserved people and communities” locally and internationally. Social determinants reveal that the most vulnerable communities are the most affected by environmental challenges to health. Greene’s work with JSI belongs to a broader movement for health equity via community-based participatory research (CBPR). CBPR’s collaborative approach involves community members as equal partners in research and decision-making. In this way, it aims to be responsive to community needs and address root causes of health problems.

https://medium.com/@JSIhealth/kickbutts-for-a-healthy-generation-270b972a1984

During graduate school Greene worked with an advocacy group addressing the childhood cancer cluster in Woburn MA. Residents had been the first to connect the leukemia outbreak to water contamination. The residents’ work is an example of barefoot epidemiology and, along with the pollution disaster of Love Canal in New York, paved the way for a public health model in which those who are affected become leaders in strategizing solutions. Greene’s advocacy work led, in part, to her and two colleagues founding the Environmental Health Center at JSI in 1990. This center, which provides communities with technical assistance, values that those most affected have expertise in the problems facing their communities.

“I guess what’s novel in what we’re trying to do is combine the field of health literacy with environmental literacy and CBPR,” Greene explains. The goal must be to both give individuals the information they need in ways that they can understand and “also to recognize their expertise and place in the decision making.”

Always with a warm smile, Greene spends a lot of time organizing community-based adult and family literacy programs in the field befriending everyone along the way. “Since so many of the affected populations are not necessarily literate [we] do things like adult education classrooms for English and speakers of other languages,” she explains. These programs offer lessons about issues including asthma, toxic substance exposure, tobacco use, and civic participation. Everyone can benefit. But as Greene explains, literacy barriers tend to overlap with poverty, racially segregated communities, and more harmful environmental exposures. That means that environmental health works needs to begin with basic literacy.

In Lowell, MA, Greene is collaborating with the Massachusetts Department of Public Health on the Reducing Older Adult Asthma Disparities Study. It’s the first asthma home-visiting intervention study to use a community health worker model. Using low literacy materials, health workers engage with residents in their homes, showing them how to reduce asthma triggers and properly use medications. Writing a prescription is ineffective if medication is unaffordable or inaccessible, instructions are complicated, or when a person’s home remains full of asthma triggers. Community health workers break literacy, language, and cultural barriers by serving as liaisons between medical providers and patients. The state health department is also conducting racial equity trainings for its employees in order to bring more awareness to racial disparities in health. Working groups are strategizing frameworks for applying a racial equity lens and identifying where changes can be made in existing programs and tool-kits.

Back in Lawrence, Casa Santos Nina Santos or “healthy homes for children,” was a project that trained daycare providers in keeping healthy homes free of asthma triggers. From the initial training, day care networks developed, and thousands were trained as providers both taught one another and the children’s parents.

The key to this approach is entering a community asking about residents’ interests and priorities, Greene says. “Don’t go in with a set program.” She expresses that we need to begin by leaning into conversation and asking: what’s the health status of the community and where are the overlaps in health outcomes, such as with cancer, asthma, and low birth rates? Then we can strategize solutions together. Strategies shouldn’t be done topeople, but with people.

Tox Town is one digital tool that Greene uses with residents and experts to help them to think about perceptions of health hazards. In this virtual town- which presents a variety of potentially polluted sites- residents tend to identify the vacant lot as the most hazardous location. Environmental experts tend to say it’s the least. This signifies that there are differing perceptions of risk, so shared learning needs to be a two-way interaction between residents and experts that combines local and expert knowledge.

But there are critics of course. Greene commonly hears, “these folks have so many stresses in their lives, they don’t have bandwidth to think about environmental health, they’ve got to survive day to day.” But she expresses that in her experience families are extremely concerned about their kids, especially with worsening pollution and droughts and floods due to climate change. Greene refuses to buy into what she calls “that elitism.” It is, she argues, “like that old jobs versus the environment argument…a false dichotomy.” Among people with better environmental health, there is less poverty, improved health conditions, and greater equity.

Community Based Participatory Research offers a promising pathway to health equity. The Center for Health Equity was formed at JSI in order to expand diversity and value the stories of those with lived experiences in the practice of public health. In 2018, the American Public Health Association’s focus has been “health equity now” which speaks to growing recognition of the value of Greene’s efforts. To move the needle in public health, Greene shows us that opportunities for residents to learn at their literacy level and be active stakeholders in bringing about changes in their environment must be present.

https://www.apha.org

“It’s not hard to find leaders, it’s a matter of giving them environmental health information. It’s great when you share it, and then they run with it,” Greene says. “In communities highly impacted by environmental justice, say, or environmental health, I mean, there’s a leader on every block.” With passion and care Greene is finding them, and that is making all the difference.

Feature image: https://cssr.gmu.edu/cssr-capabilities/community-based-participatory-research

Julie Wormser didn’t always see herself as a change maker.

In her younger years, Julie’s father, a Holocaust survivor, would ask her, “how will you change the world, singlehandedly?” It wasn’t until her mid-20s that she realized the folly and burden of this question. “Nobody does anything singlehandedly.”

Since then, Julie has realized her passion for facilitating change. She recently took the position of Deputy Director for the Mystic River Watershed Association (MyRWA).

Julie Wormser recently became Deputy Director for MyRWA, where she’s spearheading a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed level.

With MyRWA, Julie is facilitating a groundbreaking effort to organize coastal resilience at the watershed scale. She is focusing on building the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, which spearheads climate resilience efforts throughout the watershed. In trying to coordinate the Mystic River Watershed’s 21 municipalities, 500,000 residents, and countless stakeholders, Julie is ambitious. But Julie’s strength lies in communicating climate science and motivating community action. In her words, “there’s a problem and we can do something about it—and, we can be more beautiful at the end.”

Julie is no stranger to being at the forefront of making positive environmental change. She has a history of successful coalition leading and people organizing. For 20 years, she was a senior strategist in multiple regional and national conservation and fisheries policy campaigns with the Environmental Defense Fund, The Wilderness Society, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. But by 2010, bipartisan environmental policy-making at the national level had become almost impossible, as Congress increasingly butted heads along party lines.

That’s when Julie shifted her focus more locally: she became the executive director of The Boston Harbor Association (TBHA). She spent the next 5 years ringing alarm bells in Boston about flooding and the risks of climate change. In 2014 she devised and co-led the Boston Living with Water international design competition, in which more than 250 people from 7 countries submitted resilient design proposals for Boston. Julie got the City of Boston and the Boston Society of Architects on board, which both cosponsored the competition with TBHA.

The competition fueled the city’s focus on climate change. “It infused both city officials and the design community with this idea of this can be beautiful, and we actually have to think about this, this is a real challenge,” Julie explains proudly. It was largely due to Julie’s efforts and community organizing strategies that the City of Boston began to take climate change seriously.

Accessible Waterfront, Vibrant Resilient Community: one visualization in a winning entry from the Boston Living with Water international design challenge. Becoming more resilient also means making our waterfront more beautiful and accessible. Courtesy Daniel Bernstein, Ellen Watts, Nikul Patel, Caitlin Gilman, Pete Hanley, Jaime McGavin, Matt Calvey.

Now that this communication campaign in Boston has paid off, engineers and contractors are picking up where activists like Julie have already done their job. Julie moved on to work with MyRWA, covering new grounds outside city limits. “So what I’m doing in the Mystic River is really the same process we did in the City of Boston,” she explains. There is one big difference: while Boston is tackling resilience on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, MyRWA wants to make change on the watershed scale.

Working at the watershed scale is inherently difficult. Numerous municipalities must make changes with the hydrology, ecology, and chemistry of the entire river system in mind. The Mystic River Watershed spans 76 square miles, starting with the Aberjona River in Reading which feeds into two lakes, Upper Mystic and Lower Mystic, which then drain to Boston Harbor via the Mystic River.

Map of the Mystic River Watershed. Image courtesy of MyRWA

Land use in each of the 21 municipalities along the watershed has major impacts on its hydrology and ecology. Environmental problems in the Mystic are inherently directional, pushing damage done upstream onto communities downstream. Gathering system-level knowledge about the watershed is hard enough, let alone getting communities to work together.

Creating coastal resilience through watershed management may seem far-fetched, but with Julie facilitating the movement, it seems possible. She’s a self-identified extrovert, down to earth, and relatable. Her expertise is organizing and motivating groups of people. While it’s clear she is proud of her central role in Boston’s journey towards resilience, she sees herself more as a facilitator than an iconic leader. “It’s how we lay the groundwork for people to be creative. And for people to discover ideas on their own,” Julie says. She brings this mindset to every aspect of her work.

Julie explains that making change at the watershed level makes conceptual and even practical sense for the communities along the Mystic River. For example, flooding in Medford has its origins in upstream communities. Conversely, flood damage downstream to resources like Logan Airport could have impacts that reverberate regionally.

With Julie’s leadership, MyRWA reached out to nearly 50 stakeholders throughout the watershed about interest in regional collaboration. Turns out, there’s a lot of interest. It just needs to be coordinated. Municipalities continually expressed that they can’t manage coastal and riverine flooding on their own. Flooding doesn’t stop at municipal boundaries, nor do floodwaters always originate in the places hit hardest. Without strong county governance in New England, MyRWA is filling an essential gap by organizing multiple municipalities around the Mystic River Watershed.

Julie throws out a number of possibilities for regional collaboration. Managing the amount of water that enters the watershed is the central goal. Every municipality could decrease impermeable surfaces like pavement and concrete by 20 percent, for example. Or, downstream communities could pay upstream communities to build parks where they might make more of an impact and reduce runoff.

Right now, Julie’s top priority is building coalitions and relationships. She’s starting with the Resilient Mystic Collaborative, a group of stakeholders from 10 of the 21 municipalities most interested in making change and getting prepared. The collaborative seeks to better understand regional challenges throughout the watershed, and just what exactly is at risk.

By carrying out a regional assessment, they’re beginning to understand the large-scale implications of managing the watershed in the face of climate change. Julie effortlessly reels off what’s in harms way: Logan Airport, two subway lines, major road networks, 100 large fuel tanks, Deer Isle wastewater treatment plant, the Mass General Hospital’s business center, and one of the largest privately owned fruit and vegetable distributors in the nation. In a nutshell, “energy, transportation, and food security are all at risk,” Julie explains.

It’s not just regional resources at risk. Half a million people live along the Mystic Watershed. They are diverse in every way. From Nobel prize winners to recent immigrants, the Mystic is home to a huge range of socioeconomic levels, people with different backgrounds, and privilege. That will make equity and climate justice a central piece of the climate resilience puzzle. “In doing this climate collaborative, we’re really trying to share resources across the income spectrum,” Julie says.

Recently, the climate collaborative held a meeting to pin down its values. They found wealthier communities want to help communities with fewer resources. “We’re not just looking at resilience of buildings, but resilience of people and communities,” says Julie. “That’s exciting.” The collaborative hopes to support an environmental justice peer group that brings best practices to the entire watershed.

Julie is organizing people who will take the lead, communicate risks, and infuse the watershed’s communities with motivation and passion. Working at the watershed level, she’s taking on an ambitious project, because watersheds inherently distribute impacts of environmental disaster unevenly, due to their directionality.

But Julie is a change maker. “My superpower is to help groups of people to move in the same direction,” she says. Her superpower is facilitative leadership, and with it, she’s bringing a watershed of change to the Mystic.