YELA Climate+ Series

Thank you to our speakers! Sharon Lewis, CT Environmental Justice Coalition; Kearni N. Warren, Energy Justice Network; Aziz Dekhan, Connecticut Roundtable on Climate and Jobs; Annel Cabrera-Marus, Green City Force

[Bios to come]

Sharon Lewis is the Executive Director of the CT Coalition for Environmental and Economic Justice (CCEEJ). CCEEJ promotes environmental justice through community advocacy and engagement. She chairs the CT Zero Waste Coalition and serves on the Board of the Climate Justice Alliance, the Rivers Alliance, as well as several environmental working groups convened by the State of Connecticut's Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

Kearni N. Warren is the Philadelphia Area Organizer for the Energy Justice Network. She is an author, advocate for union and home care worker's rights, speaker, and founder of The Caregiver Society. Prior to joining Energy Justice Network, Kearni was a political/member organizer and member lobbyist with SEIU Healthcare PA. Working towards a cleaner and safer climate and ending Environmental Racism is more than justice work for Kearni. As a resident of Chester, where the country's largest trash burning incinerator is located, this fight is not only work related, it is personal.

Annel joined Green City Force in 2021. Prior to joining GCF, she was the Senior Director of Engagement and Programming for the New York Restoration Project. She has over fifteen years of professional experience in economic and community development, poverty alleviation, economic self-sufficiency, environmental justice, sustainability, and workforce development; Annel has worked across sectors – government, private, and nonprofit. While much of her professional career has focused on New York City, she has worked on environmental justice issues in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and workforce development in Memphis, Tennessee. Her passion and admiration for GCF began while she worked at NYCHA's Office of Resident Economic Development and Sustainability as an inaugural Zone Coordinator focused on the Lower East Side and later the Manager of the NYCHA Resident Training Academy. She has a Masters of Science in Environmental Policy & Sustainability Management from The New School, Milano School for Public Engagement. Annel lives in Queens with her multi-generational family; her husband Peter, toddler Clementine, and mom, Yvonne.

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.

How can movements for queer liberation inform movements for climate justice, and vice versa? Please join us for an exciting conversation on the intersection of climate change, ecological justice, and queer resilience!

Thank you to our speakers! Leo Goldsmith, U.S. Global Change Research Program, National Coordination Office; Mike Mendez, Environmental Planning and Policy, UC Irvine; Vanessa Raditz, Director Fire & Flood Film, Geography at University of Georgia.

Climate change is increasingly driving displacement of communities as sea level rise and extreme weather events accelerate. How are activists, lawyers, and communities responding to this crisis? Please join us for a conversation on the implications of climate-induced displacement on housing, immigration, community economic development, and environmental regulation.

Thank you to our speakers! Robert Verchick, Tulane Law; Daniel Aldana Cohen, Sociology, UC Berkeley; Clement Yow Mulalap, Permanent Mission of the Federated States of Micronesia; Denise Ghartey, Community Justice Project

Thank you to our speakers! Kevin Chand, Blue Ocean Law; Monaeka Flores, Prutehi Litekyan; Tiara Na'puti, Global & International Studies, UC Irvine

Thank you to our speakers: Monte Mills and Frances Roberts-Gregory!

Monte Mills is currently a Professor and Co-Director of the Margery Hunter Brown Indian Law Clinic at the Alexander Blewett III School of Law at the University of Montana. Prior to joining the law school, he served as Director of the Legal Department for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe (Colorado) where he worked on a variety of natural resource issues on the Tribe's behalf. Mills has taught a variety of Indian law-related courses, including Native American Natural Resources Law, in which he utilizes a textbook of the same name that he recently joined as a co-author, along with Professors Judith V. Royster, Michael C. Blumm, and Elizabeth Ann Kronk Warner (Native American Natural Resources Law (Carolina Academic Press, 4th ed. 2018)). In addition, Mills co-authored A Third Way: Decolonizing the Laws of Indigenous Cultural Preservation (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020), which focuses on tribally-led reforms to federal and state cultural protection laws. He is also the author of numerous law review and other articles, as well as amicus briefs submitted to the United States Supreme Court (Herrera v. Wyoming, No. 17-532 (2019)) and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dr. Frances Roberts-Gregory is a feminist political ecologist and Climate Justice Program Officer for the Foundation for Louisiana. Dr. Roberts-Gregory earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College and later completed a Future Faculty Fellowship at Northeastern University and earned a PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management from UC Berkeley. From 2019-2021, she taught courses on gender, environmental justice, and sustainable development at Tulane University, Bard Early College New Orleans, and the University for Peace in Costa Rica. Dr. Roberts-Gregory has also spoken at UNFCCC COP25 and COP26 press conferences and formerly consulted for the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the City of New Orleans and C40 Women4Climate Mentorship Program. She currently serves as a co-founding member of the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal and as an advisory board co-chair for the HIVE Fund for Climate & Gender Justice. Reach Dr. Roberts-Gregory via her website blackngreenphd.org.