Climate+ Community Visions for Environmental Justice

This panel brings together organizers working across the country, from heavily polluted urban communities in California to communities in New Haven and Hamden, to share their work supporting community-led efforts to build sustainable and just communities and environments.

Thank you to our speakers: Jennifer Ganata, Communities for a Better Environment; Elizabeth Hayes, CONECT; and Latha Swamy, Food Policy, City of New Haven!

Jennifer Ganata joined Communities for a Better Environment in September 2018. Previously she worked at Communities for a Better Environment from 2007 to 2012 as a youth organizer and a legal fellow. She transitioned from doing environmental justice work to housing by starting her housing career at Eviction Defense Network. Before returning to CBE, Jennifer was a senior staff attorney at Inner City Law Center where she did eviction defense and land use.
Jennifer has a deep interest in connecting her passion for environmental justice and housing in order to defend frontline communities' right to housing and a better environment. She believes that organizing is key to helping move our communities away from investing in an extractive economy.

Elizabeth Hayes is a longtime environmental community activist and organizer representing the Newhall neighborhood of Hamden. Hayes helped found the Newhall Coalition, a group of local residents dedicated to working with the town government to clean up the area, which was built on top of a toxic landfill, and cataloguing the effects of the waste on resident's health and property.

Latha Swamy joined the City of New Haven as Director of Food System Policy in September 2018. In this role, Latha works to support and help manifest community-led efforts that envision and create an environmentally sustainable and socially just food system. To create this enabling environment for New Haven residents, Latha works on policy on the institutional, local, state, and federal levels. She is also an active leader in international processes that relate to urban food policy. Latha holds a Master's of Environmental Management from Yale University, prior to which she pursued an M.D. and a Ph.D. in systems neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

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