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Cindy Wiesner

National Coordinator, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ)

Cindy Wiesner is the National Coordinator of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance Alliance (GGJ) and Co-Chair of the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) and the Our Power Campaign.  She has been active in the grassroots social justice movement for over 25 years. Cindy is originally from Los Angeles and is of Salvadoran, Colombian and German descent and identifies as Queer. She is based in Miami, Florida.

Areas of expertise: Overall context and information for the mobilizations and civil society activities National and International relations/context; Grassroots organizing sector in the US, Strategy, Just Transition, Gendered Impact of Climate Change, Climate Justice.

Angela Adrar

Executive Director, Climate Justice Alliance (CJA)

Angela is the new Executive Director of the Our Power Campaign and Climate Justice Alliance. She has committed her life to advancing the role of the grassroots sector and provides agile leadership to address the changing and complex priorities of local communities while influencing national and international agendas.  She has served as a leading member of local to international organizations that include; La Via Campesina North America, US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA), the Building Equity and Alignment for Impact Initiative (BEAI), US Friends of Movement of Dam Affected Peoples (MAB) and others.

Areas of expertise: Climate & Environmental Justice, Just Transition

Kandi Mossett

Lead Organizer on the Extreme Energy & Just Transition Campaign, Indigenous Environmental Network

Deriving her heritage from the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples of what is now North Dakota, Kandi Mossett of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) has emerged as a leading voice in the fight to bring visibility to the impact that climate change and environmental injustice are having on Indigenous communities across North America.After completing her Master’s Degree in Environmental Management, Mossett began her work with the IEN as Tribal Campus Climate Challenge Coordinator, engaging with more than 30 tribal colleges to instate community based environmental programs, discuss issues of socio-ecologic injustice, and connect indigenous youth with green jobs. She currently serves as IEN’s Native Energy & Climate Campaign Organizer, focusing at present on creating awareness about the environmentally & socially devastating effects of hydraulic fracturing on tribal lands.

Areas of Expertise: fracking, oil and gas impacted communities, Just Transition, renewable energies, wind and solar, food sovereignty, Indigenous perspectives, Indian Country in the U.S., oil and tar sands pipelines, gendered aspects of climate change; violence against women.

Dawn Phillips

Executive Director, Right to the City

Dawn is Executive Director of the Right to the City Alliance. Prior to coming on as Executive Director in January 2016, Dawn served as the Board Chair.  Dawn has been an organizer engaged in a range of social, economic and environmental justice organizations and fights in the Bay Area and nationally for almost 25 years, most recently with Causa Justa :: Just Cause (CJJC) in Oakland, California, a founding member of the Right to the City Alliance.

Dawn is also the Co-Director of Programs at CJJC, a Bay Area membership organization focused on community development, housing and immigrant justice issues. CJJC builds grassroots power and community leadership through rights-based services, policy campaigns, civic engagement, direct action and movement building. CJJC strives to improve conditions both in the neighborhoods they organize in and regionally, as well as to contribute to building the larger multi-racial, multi-generational movement needed for fundamental change.

Dawn leads the local, regional and national policy campaign work for the organization and was lead author on CJJC’s report “Development Without Displacement: Resisting Gentrification in the Bay Area”. This was a study on the impacts of gentrification and displacement on working class communities of color, which included policy recommendations for addressing these issues. Dawn has also authored several articles on topics ranging from equitable development, to organizing and movement building.

Areas of Expertise: displacement, housing, gentrification, human development, economic democracy

Tom Goldtooth

Director, Indigenous Environmental Network

Tom is Dine’ and Dakota and lives in Minnesota. Since the late 1980’s, Tom has been involved with environmental related issues and programs working within tribal governments in developing indigenous-based environmental protection infrastructures. Tom works with indigenous peoples worldwide. Tom is known as one of the environmental justice movement grassroots leaders in North America addressing toxics and health, mining, energy, climate, water, globalization, sustainable development and indigenous rights issues. Tom is one of the founders of the Durban Group for Climate Justice; co-founder of Climate Justice NOW!; a co-founder of the U.S. based Environmental Justice Climate Change initiative and a member of the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change that operates as the indigenous caucus within the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change. Tom is a policy adviser to indigenous communities on environmental protection and more recently on climate policy focusing on mitigation, adaptation and concerns of false solutions.

Areas of Expertise: Indigenous perspectives, climate justice, Just Transition, concerns of false solutions

Dallas Goldtooth

Keep It In the Ground Organizer, Indigenous Environmental Network

(Mdewakanton Dakota and Dine) is a the Keep it in the Ground Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network.  He is a Dakota cultural/language teacher. He is a co-founder of the Indigenous comedy group, The 1491s. He is also a poet, traditional artist, powwow emcee, and comedian.

Areas of Expertise: pipelines, Indigenous perspectives, Just Transition

Alma Blackwell

Causa Justa::Just Cause

Areas of Expertise: Housing Justice / Gentrification / Black organizing

 

Pam Tau Lee

Chinese Progressive Association

Lee is the founder and chairperson of the Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco, and the founder of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network.

Areas of Expertise: Environmental Justice, Just Transition, Racial Justice

 

Edgar Franks

Community Organizer, Community to Community Development

Edgar Franks is a C2C organizer in Bellingham, WA. He serves as the Civic Engagement Program Coordinator at Community to Community Development, working to engage supporters and develop a strategy that ensures the needs of the Farm Worker community are represented. Community to Community works on issues of Food Sovereignty through the lens of Farm Workers, with the goal of creating a politically conscious inter-sectional base that is fighting to create a local solidarity economy. Edgar currently represents Community to Community on the Coordinating Committee of Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, US Food Sovereignty Alliance, and many other national networks.

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition, Climate & Environmental Justice, labor organizing, translocal

Will Copeland

Co-Executive Director, East Michigan Environmental Action Council

Areas of Expertise: Detroit and frontline EJ/ CJ struggles; local PCM organizing; Black communities and Climate Justice

Yolanda Matthews

Community Organizer, Got Green

Areas of Expertise: Environmental and Climate Justice; Racial Justice; PNW Resistance Hub organizing

Denise Abdul-Rahman

Indiana NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice

Abdul-Rahman’s main passion everyday is working toward a vision that eliminates environmental injustice, increases clean energy, healthy, thriving, climate resistant and sustainable communities.

Abdul-Rahman holds a BS in management, MBA in healthcare management and a health informatics designation from Indiana University School of Informatics.

She successfully organized over 85 attendees from across the Midwest to the United States Environmental Protection Agency at Region V. On February 2016, Indianapolis Power Light stopped burning coal. She organized the Just Energy Campaign, and called for a retirement date by 2016, and won. The advocacy of the Just Energy Campaign was instrumental and crucial in the defeat of House Bill 1320, there are no fees charged to distributed generation of energy in Indiana. This victory rose to national coverage within LA Times and Bloomberg News. Abdul-Rahman has personally accepted three awards in recognition for this body of work.

She serves as the NAACP Indiana as an Environmental Climate Justice Chair,Climate Justice Alliance Steering Committee Member and service on many other related boards.

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition, racial justice

 

Melissa Miles

Community Organizer, Ironbound Community Corporation

Melissa Miles is Buddhist, mother of two, multi-lingual resident of Newark (Brick City) N.J.  More recently she has added the titles of environmental and climate justice activist, community organizer and grassroots feminist. She works for the Ironbound Community Corporation along with a powerful group of community members, organizers, activists, farmers and policy folks to protect the health and well-being of Newark residents from the harm being done by extractive, polluting industries and gentrification.

Areas of Expertise: Environmental and Climate Justice, Grassroots Feminism, Polluting Industries, Gentrification and Displacement

Jose Bravo

Executive Director, Just Transition Alliance

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition, labor organizing

Chris Woolery

How$martKY Program Coordinator

Chris Woolery became the How$martKY™ Program Coordinator in September of 2015 after four years with MACED as a Residential Energy Specialist. How$martKY partners with rural electric cooperatives to design, finance, and install home energy efficiency upgrades, which are paid for directly out of energy savings on utility bills. As a former ENERGY STAR® home builder and energy services contractor, Chris has been a pioneer in green construction and remodeling in Central Kentucky for over a decade. Chris is an active member of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth and works with their New Energy and Transition committee. When he’s not being an energy nerd, Chris lives in Lexington with his wife and kids, and enjoys many of the things that Kentucky is noted for: bourbon, basketball, and beautiful natural spaces.

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition

Stanley Sturgill

Community Organizer, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

I am a retired coal miner 71 years of age/41 years as a coal miner. I have been active in KFTC since 2009. Involvement events would be occupation of Kentucky Capitol Building weekend before “I Love Mountains Day,” and finally getting Governor Steve Beshear to visit eastern Kentucky. My own Kentucky 5th district congressman had my friends and myself removed and arrested from his D.C. office, because we wanted to meet with him (2012) concerning mountaintop removal and the destruction of our drinking water and the poison air we are having to breath in southeastern Kentucky due to emissions from coal burning electrical power plants.  I was honored to be allowed to testify at the Denver, CO. EPA hearing concerning “carbon dioxide emissions,” (July 2014). I attended and got to participate in the (August 2014) “Our Power Gathering” and march in Richmond, California. I was honored to be one of six guest speakers to over 400,000 people attending the “Peoples Climate March,” in New York City (September 2014). I have written and continue to write articles, letters to editors, op-eds, etc. and have been published in my home town, county wide, state wide newspapers. The New York Times and The Hill. I am totally against mountaintop removal and the destruction of our environment, known as “Global Warming.”  I am also a strong advocate of coal mine health and safety rules and regulations that protect the coal miners that are still mining coal. The miners will always be my brothers.

Areas of Expertise: Coal mining, climate justice, workers

Chavaysha Cheney

Community Organizer, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition

Trenise Bryant

Miami Workers Center

Areas of Expertise: Gender Justice / Housing / Displacement / Gentrification

Darnell Johnson

Right to the City Boston

Darnell coordinates our Boston Alliance in its core strategies of base building, community leadership development, political education, and community building. Darnell joined RTC’s staff in 2014 after years of community and labor organizing focusing on the intersections of race, class, gender and oppression. Darnell is a founding member of the African American Theatre Company at the University of Louisville and has been seen on stage with Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Kentucky Opera and the Juneteenth Legacy Theatre.

Areas of Expertise: Housing Justice / Gentrification / Black organizing

Elizabeth Yeampierre

Executive Director, UPROSE

Areas of Expertise: Just Transition, gentrification

Genesis Abreu

WE ACT For Environmental Justice

As the Bilingual Community Organizer for WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Genesis is tasked with strengthening the WE ACT membership by recruiting more Spanish-speaking residents in Northern Manhattan. She hopes to continue to collaborate in local efforts in confronting environmental injustices in her community. Prior to working at WE ACT, Genesis was awarded a Fulbright Research Grant to study the impacts of climate change in agricultural practices in Quechua indigenous communities in Peru.Genesis received a B.S. in Environmental Science and Political Science from Marist College.

Areas of Expertise: long-term EJ movement building