We try really hard to not only make sure that we're centered on the matriarchal, but that we are willing to engage in self-transformation. To be intr… - Elizabeth Yeampierre

I didn't come to this work with a degree in environmental policy. It happened organically: as a child, my family was displaced so often that I went to eight schools in five years. I remember walking past the burning embers on Simpson Street in the South Bronx. I had no idea then that we were living in the midst of brownfields, contaminated lots with lead, asbestos, PCBs, arsenic, and other toxics and toxicants that seeped through our walls as fugitive dust and landed in our developing lungs. Families like mine all over New York City were the targets of government and developer-driven-planned shrinkage public policies created to deny our communities basic services in order to encourage our departure. The New York City environmental justice movement was born and raised in the midst of this rubble.

Young people come with hope and with a renewed vision of a future that transforms.

We won't have power if we don't have intergenerational power. That's not just rhetoric. We can solve problems when we're together.