We Are Our Own First Responders

Community Organizing During Crisis

In honor of Black History/Black Futures month, we want to uplift this conversation between Amirio Freeman and Valencia Gunder on community care, climate gentrification, and the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer.

First published in our 2022 magazine, Black & Native Attention as Miracle, this interview is a lodestar for us at Loam.

We also want to share this interview because we need everyone of us right now sharpening our skills as organizers in pursuit of climate justice, disaster mitigation, social transformation, and a Free Palestine. As Gunder reminds us, organizing is a creative and community-oriented practice. It’s as much about building power and narrative strategy as it as about sweeping the floor after a meeting or cooking for your crew before a daylong action.

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Within two years of a pandemic, billionaires have taken joyrides to the edges of space, the excessive wealth of a minority of the planet has become even more bloated, and the daily churn of violence against many of our cherished communities has continued — from sustained threats to reproductive and gender-affirming healthcare to the emergence of a critical race theory bogeyman.

And yet, in the wake of systems and individuals prioritizing profit and power over people and the planet, our neighbors have stewarded life-saving and life-generating care. Young people on our blocks have co-created vital mutual aid projects; beloved elders have distributed extras from their gardens to those with empty pantries. Valencia Gunder — Executive Director of The Smile Trust, Inc., a nonprofit organization that works towards community resilience, housing, and food security for all, and National Lead for the Movement for Black Lives’ Red Black and Green New Deal — reminds us that those transformative acts of community care are nothing new. In fact, they’re why many of us are still here. 

In conversation with Amirio Freeman, Valencia shares the origins of her community organizing life, reflects on the subversive social justice blueprint of revered changemaker Fannie Lou Hamer, and grounds us in the truth that all our fights for justice — from movements for Indigenous sovereignty to Black liberation to climate justice — are and must be practices in ensuring our neighbors are thriving.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

PHOTOS BY JESS DRAWHORN

Valencia Gunder (VG): I'm Valencia Gunder. I use she/her pronouns. Most folks just simply call me Vee. I'm from Miami, Florida. I actually live here; my family's been here for a long time. I'm a community organizer. I like to keep it super simple when I give my title because I believe that no matter what kind of work we do in the movement, it should all go back to organizing. I think everybody should be organizing at all times. 

I am honed in on the issues of climate change, environmental injustice, and food insecurity. 

Amirio Freeman (AF): I always feel like “organizer” is such a broad term. What does being an organizer mean to you?

VG: I think it's building power, sharing power, understanding how to use power. It's also co-creating what the world could look like in our liberation. That's what I believe organizing is. It’s talking to the masses as much as possible. That could be digitally, in the meta world, or in person — canvassing, talking to people as I move through my community. 

I feel like I'm organizing at all times. I’m sharing the information that I learn with people; I'm sharing the solutions and the tools that I’ve learned about so that we can have a better world. I believe if our communities aligned as much as possible, we could shift the things that we don't want and start to live in the things that we want.

AF: You’re making me think of Keguro Macharia, an amazing independent scholar. They’ve talked about what if we shifted our lens from focusing on what we want less of to focusing more on abundance, on what we want more of. So I love that you're centering that latter idea in your work. 

Also, I love that you're talking about co-creating the worlds that we want. And it sounds like while communities are co-creating those worlds, communities must also live those visions into existence at the same time, which I think is interesting. Can you talk a little bit more about what it means to co-create the worlds we want while also living out those worlds?

VG: I do my work in two parts. I first build power amongst and with the community against the government — the people who harm us, the oppressor. And I think that's one way of co-creating. How do we co-create strategy and plans to contest current power dynamics, or shift the power terrain that currently exists? 

I also believe in models of self-determination. And that looks like us practicing new ways of life, even if we’re practicing them in small sections of the world, so that we can try something different.

One time I was organizing here in Liberty City, and I met a group of residents. They were complaining about the trash in the neighborhood. (Black people don’t like trash in their neighborhoods.) Illegal dumping was a huge issue that you’d think the government would resolve. When you’d see the bulk piles of trash, you’d think, The government's supposed to take care of that. So, I asked, What can we do if the government won’t take action?

We got this whole plan together to partner with our commissioner and the mayor and others. Then I suggested, Next week, we need to get some garbage bags and put on some gloves and go out here and clean up our own neighborhood. Some of the residents felt, Well, if it’s the government’s job… And I responded, See, that's the thing: It's everybody's job to make sure we have a clean and safe community. And that’s the self-determination piece. What if the government doesn't show up? Because we see that all the time. Do we then just live in the trash if the government won't move it? Or do we figure out a way to live in a clean and safe community?

That's a very small, hyperlocal example of both building power and enacting self-determination. We can rattle the foundation of the State every single day, and we still need to be in our communities practicing new ways of being. What does the world we want look like? How do we start practicing healing harm without the police? What does it look like for us to start thinking about food insecurity without depending on Big Agriculture? We could start to dream answers to those questions on a small scale. And, unfortunately, thanks to how messed up things are due to the pandemic and this economic crisis that we're in, we gon’ have to start practicing some of those ideas fo’ real, very, very soon.

AF: I want to come back to that idea of “models of self-determination” and pivot to talking a little bit more about Florida, about Miami. Can you talk about your community? What are the people like? What was it like growing up there and what about growing up in that community led you to the work that you're doing now? How do the issues you work on show up where you live?

VG: People always say Miami is the New York of the South. Its nickname is “The Magic City.”

Miami don't function like no other place in the U.S. It's a Caribbean and South American hub. The weather is usually beautiful. It's a world of culture that I love. 90 percent of the Black people here are not American, so I grew up listening to different types of music and learning about different cultures and different politics. I think they say 72 percent of the entire population, Miami is their second home; a majority of residents have migrated from other places outside the United States. And that makes Miami so great. And it's been like that my entire life. I think having access to Cuban and Honduran and Dominican and Haitian and Jamaican and Bahamian culture at my fingertips all. the. time. — all the time — makes Miami beautiful. 

One part of my family is Tequestan, so they're Indigenous to this land. My family has been here an extremely long time. I feel as if I have a birthright to be here.

Miami is a young city. I always say that it's “a child with a mustache.” Miami was incorporated post-slavery. South Florida never participated in slavery — but they definitely participated in racism, oppression, and Jim Crow.

The land I’m on was colonized in the late 1800s, and it was named Miami. Miami actually means “sweet water.” It's an Indigenous name; Miami is an Indigenous word. 

As far as growing up in Miami, it was interesting — being born in the '80s, raised in the '90s. The War on Drugs, the crack era — all those things hit Miami. I think sometimes people forget that Miami was housing the drug cartel that was moving all of the crack through the country. I had a front-row seat to those moments. I am the middle child of five, raised by my grandma. Both of my parents were addicted. Shout out to them for being clean now and living flourishing lives. I'm really proud of my parents for achieving and being successful in saving their own lives. 

My father got clean when I was 13, and I was real proud of him. My dad is a natural organizer. He don't refer to himself as an organizer, but when my daddy got clean, he got really involved with the NA community — the Narcotics Anonymous community.

My dad would always go to the meetings early, and I would go everywhere with my daddy. (I'm a daddy's girl.) And my father used to have me help set up the meetings, telling me, We got to set the chairs up and set up the table. And I remember as a child putting the booklets on the table and learning how to make the coffee; I knew where to put everything at the NA meetings.

AF: Are those the seeds of your organizing life?

VG: Yes, yes! Those are some of the first memories I have of doing a level of organizing, of being of service to somebody.

In those meetings, I was listening to folks' testimonies, learning and knowing how to handle when people share their trauma with you, being respectful and practicing confidentiality at a young age. That work is a community effort; it's always been a community effort. And my dad, as he continued to be involved in the community, he became a sponsor. I saw my dad hands-on helping people and guiding them out of their addiction into healthy lives. He started to plan more NA meetings in our community, and he helped coordinate NA meetings in other places. And I used to be right there. 

My grandfather, Donald, also influenced my organizing work. I always thought my grandfather was a conspiracy theorist because he used to say things like, You don't know these people. They oppress and do this and do that. During those moments, I was just a young child. I was learning all of my news from TRL and MTV and BET; I would never watch local news or national news.

Once, he said to me — and I still remember, because I pushed back on him so hard — They gon’ steal our communities because it don't flood around here. I think I was 14 or probably younger when he said that. And I looked at him and I said, Granddaddy, nobody gon’ want Liberty City. It's a mess over here. Nobody want it. He pushed back, saying, I'm telling you, I'm telling you. They gon’ take Overtown. They gon’ take Little Haiti. They gon’ take Liberty City. They gon’ take it. Watch. All the white people are going to move in. I kept insisting, Nobody is going to come over here. He kept pressing, repeating, It don't flood over here. I'm telling you.

When I was older, I went off to college, and then I came back. And when I got back, he was right on the money when he said it didn't flood over here and they were going to take the community. 

I was invited to a community meeting about climate change — this was 2014. I was in a room full of Liberty City residents, and they were saying, They're pushing us out because it doesn't flood. I heard a whole room of residents saying the same exact thing as my grandfather. They didn't have the “science words”; they didn't even have the data to prove what they were saying, but they felt it. They saw the rent going up, people getting displaced. And in that same meeting, Miss Paulette Richardson, a local community activist in Liberty City, stood up and said, This is climate gentrification.

When I heard those two words in a sentence for the first time, it was like lightning struck me. I thought, Oh my goodness — Miss Paulette just gave a word to a thing that people have been feeling.  She should be getting all the credit for coining that term. Even President Barack Obama gave her, a Black woman here in Liberty City, an award for that term.

I went home to Google “climate gentrification,” and it was found nowhere on the Internet, those two words in the same sentence. There was nothing; there was no data to prove it. Nothing. 

I was taught as a young organizer that people's lived experience is bigger than any data; people's lived experience is more important than any analysis, than any words from an academic. That's just how I was raised. Especially when you have so many of the same people saying the same thing. My granddaddy says, A lie don't tell itself that many times. It got to be some truth to it. If so many people are experiencing and saying the same thing, there has to be some truth to their words. 

So, I started to canvas. I canvas in my community. It's about 64,000 people in Liberty City; I think I talked to about 20,000 people. It took me two years. I was canvassing with my family. I was canvassing with my cousin, Robert, and my friend, Munch. We would go out every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We would print out our own documents, our own survey. I didn't even know if I was collecting the right data; I was just walking the neighborhood. I'd find the housing projects and the apartments and high-traffic areas and just ask folks for information. And folks were giving it to us. They put us onto things we didn't even know were happening in our community. All of these things were going on, and residents were talking to us about them.

I also helped coordinate community meetings, and an individual who’s a scientist and professor started coming to them. I peeped because he used to be the only white person in the room. Honestly, I thought he was a developer, but he wasn't — he was Dr. Hugh Gladwin from Florida International University. And this man listened to our community, and he created the first map to prove that climate gentrification was a thing. The day he called me and he passed me that map, I felt, Oh, they done fucked up now because we proved it. 

Every time I would host something, this man was sitting in the back of the room and he’d be listening, taking notes, listening and taking notes. I am so grateful for him for believing in the community. In the end, not only did we put a name to what our community was facing — shout out to Miss Paulette — we also did the work of continually advocating for somebody to listen to us, to give us a tool to be able to advocate with.

When I was doing all of my personal research, I learned that Miami is ground zero for sea-level rise in the world and that my community actually will not flood, even with six feet of water coming into the city. Miami is a short city, too. I think we peak at 17 feet above sea level, while places like New York are 400 feet above sea level — and California sits at 2,000 feet. I learned about sea-level rise and elevation and sunny-day flooding and high tides. I learned that climate change, heat exhaustion, and sea-level rise are things that Black people are concerned about — that these topics are a part of everyday conversations. I learned that children were passing out during P.E. classes because it’s so hot, or that elders can't walk to the store on a sunny-day-flood day because the water is up to their waists. I learned that on certain days we can't swim in the ocean because of waste. And I understood that none of those things is okay. They’re not okay.

I also learned that the solutions that our government was thinking about were inaccessible and inequitable. When I first was introduced to organizing in a more formal way, I was always taught to show up for my block first. Miami needs to know that Valencia is here for Miami, and that's what I did. When people call Miami “The Magic City,” I ask, Well, who is the magic for? And who's feeling this magic? Because the everyday working class and populations that are under-resourced and unsheltered are not feeling the magic.

AF: You talked about your block-first model, self-determination, and looking to communities for solutions — all in the face of recognizing that governmental solutions are often inadequate, insufficient, and inequitable. And this ties to one idea of yours that I really love: We have to be our own first responders, especially amid governmental inaction, compounding crises being exacerbated, and the powerful becoming even more powerful and violent. You say that the solutions we need won't come out of capitalism or white supremacy — they're going to come from us. 

Can you talk about what that phrase, we have to be our own first responders, means to you? Why is it so critical when it comes to climate, food insecurity, and more that we are the ones who are coming up with the ways that we address harm and violence?

VG: I also do disaster relief work, and I do food insecurity work. I do both through service; I don't just do advocacy. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of people ain't actually doing the stuff they claim they're doing. I still have never seen the Red Cross in my community. Even during Hurricane Andrew in the '90s.

AF: Can you say that one more time?

VG: I have never seen the Red Cross in my community, ever servicing my community, in the 37 years of my life. After surviving many hurricanes, I have never seen the Red Cross show up. I also know, after doing all this advocacy, that they have no plans to show up. As far as our government, they take care of the businesses first, then the folks who got money. And then they give whatever’s left to the populations that are under-resourced. And for populations that are unsheltered and trans? You can just forget about it. Nobody got nothing for those two populations. It's a real thing. 

In 2017, I was leaving a county meeting in the back of an Uber, and I was pissed off. I probably got put outta working group that day or probably cursed at the mayor — some shit like that. (That mayor hated my guts. And I made sure he did, every single day of his life, while he was in office. Every time he seen me walk in the chambers, I wanted him to know, Just know you finna have a bad day, sir, because I'm coming.) Anyways, I'm in the back of an Uber, and I'm on the phone venting about the meeting. I'm complaining about this disaster response plan the county had and saying, It's not going to work. Trust me. I felt, Nobody wants to listen to me because I don't have an alphabet soup behind my name. Even though I went to school for agricultural business, even though I knew what the fuck I was talking about, they weren’t listening. And every time I used the word “equity,” folks thought I was talking about financial equity. And I corrected them, saying, I'm not talking about financial equity. I'm talking about human equity.

When I hung up the phone with my friend, the Uber driver said to me, I was listening to your conversation, so sorry if I'm overstepping. I'm from Cuba. There, if you notice, we never need outside help after a storm. And I responded, You're right. He then said, Communities compile resources. We put everything in one place in our neighborhood, and after a storm, we know to go to that pick-up location to get all the stuff we need. And we can survive three, four days until the government actually has the capacity to come to us.

I thought to myself, Yo, that's smart as fuck. That is amazing. I brought up, It's different here in the United States because it's a way bigger terrain. It's way more people. I knew we would have to move differently, but I felt, Okay, that model makes sense.

And then Hurricane Irma was coming. Hurricane Irma was coming the next week. I felt, Oh my goodness — this is super ironic that this is happening right now. And I told my friends, I got a plan and I got an idea. And I wonder if folks gon’ do it.

One of my mentors has this huge warehouse. It's about 12,000 square feet. It's huge. And at the time it was empty. I called her and said, Doc, I really need to use this warehouse because I wanna respond to the folks during the storm. And she responded, Sure, just come get the key. This was two days before the storm came.

I rounded up all of the folks that I do climate work with and I said, Listen, y’all, we gon’ get out here and we're gon’ feed our own community. We gon’ do this thing. And they asked, Valencia, how are we going to do that? I responded, We got it, we got it. Just meet me at the warehouse the day after the storm. And these motherfuckers actually showed up (laughs). I put information about the warehouse on social media, other people showed up.

Originally, the warehouse was slap empty; there was nothing in it. I said, We finna get out here. We gon’ feed our community. And the folks with me asked, Well, how we finna do that? I responded, I know it’s a store somewhere open and we gon’ get some stuff. There was a meat store open in Liberty City, and I cleaned it out. I got my grill from the back of my house, and we started going to community after community. 

After our first day, a volunteer said, Well, Imma come back to this spot, and y’all go set up another spot. We ended up setting up 18 pop-up kitchens across South Florida, and we fed 23,000 families. We did that in a few days. It was a thing.

That warehouse went from empty to this whole central hub of information. We had maps up on the wall. We had communications happening. We had medical students going to people's houses. We had food going to nursing homes and food trucks moving. We ended up calling the warehouse the Community Emergency Operation Center. We started doing wellness checks on our elders. We got younger folks involved. If residents were stuck in high rises, we brought food to them. People were asking, Well, who are you all? We answered, We're just your neighbors and we care.

AF: That's powerful.

VG: We are our own first responders. And we were out there doing all of this work. We saw no county response. We saw no Red Cross while we were in the community feeding 23,000 families. I was saving to buy my home at the time; I had about $14,000 in my savings account — and that’s what I did that work with. 

Over 800 volunteers showed up. We were able to scale our work quickly. And ever since then, I've felt, This is the answer. People just need logistics and people need the resources, but people know how to feed they self; people know how to respond to they self. If folks have the information, if they learn how to do this stuff, they'll do it.

I have been actively opening the Community Emergency Operation Center when we have extreme weather events, and it works every time. We’ve not only provided support here in the state of Florida, but we've also provided support in seven other Southern states in the U.S. We’ve serviced the Bahamas, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts, St. George, Dominica, sometimes sending three to four hundred tons of supplies into another country. And it's literally grassroots. We're grassroots. We find grassroots organizations and churches in other countries to connect with, and those groups do the same exact work that we do here in Miami. They can feed 15,000, 20,000, sometimes 30,000 families, and sometimes provide medical supplies and help set up triage centers. And it's grassroots; no government involved. We don't take any government money or government funding. Philanthropy steps in a little and community steps up a whole lot. People be surprised; the first time I got a grant for this work was in 2020.

AF: Holy shit. Now I'm gagged because I'm looking at the government like, Y’all have millions of dollars; y’all have the resources to scale things out. And y’all spend hours arguing over ideas for how to help communities. But you were in the back of an Uber, got an idea, used $14,000 to seed something, and scaled that effort out in so many ways. So now I’m thinking, What's going on?

VG: The truth of the matter is capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy stop people from serving. When you remove those things from your plan, you can make some shit rock. 

Since we started doing projects like The Smile Trust, Inc., which is my local organization — the one that seeds this work — it's all been super community-focused. It's run by community. Even last year when we did relief for Haiti, we were out there in a parking lot for 41 days because we don't have our own building. We always borrow space. And we had volunteers who were out there the entire 41 days who said, We wanna do this thing. We wanna help out. I remove all of the red tape. This is community-driven, community-focused. We follow through all the way to the end.

I’ve done this work in Georgia. Definitely several times in Florida, the different Caribbean islands. It works, and it's literally community helping community. That's what it is. Government is not involved in it. None of that stuff. Nobody tells us how to do it or puts together a timeline for us. It seems like we move faster and more concisely when the trust is there and it's community. I am honored that people trust the leadership and the guidance that I give. And I am also honored that people are actually just good fucking human beings. Our people, our communities, the populations that are under-resourced, the folks that are unsheltered, our queer and trans family — they are some nice fucking human beings. When it's time to serve, nobody do it better than us. Because we’re in community with one another all the time. 

I want everybody around the world to realize that we are our own first responders. All we need are logistics and access to the resources and we can take care of ourselves.

AF: Online, you call yourself a modern-day Fannie Lou Hamer, which feels so appropriate in so many ways. Fannie Lou Hamer is probably best known for being a voting rights activist, and you have been a leader in restoring the right to vote for returning citizens in Florida. Hamer was a Black, disabled, middle-aged, Southern woman with a sharecropping background who totally defied what a movement leader looks like, and you’ve been vocal about the need to ensure that our movement spaces are fully representative of those who’ve been pushed to the margins. Hamer has been celebrated for her food justice analysis, especially with the creation of the Freedom Farm Cooperative, and you yourself have a degree in International Agricultural Business from Florida A&M. Most importantly, Hamer, like yourself, really centered community-based liberation, especially after living under a sharecropping system of debt and exploitative dependency, and saw her work as cross-issue, later in life calling herself a human rights activist versus just a civil rights activist. 

How did you first come across Hamer’s life and work, and why does her legacy resonate so much with you?

VG: After I helped feed those 23,000 families, a community member said, Valencia, you remind me of Fannie Lou Hamer. You're like the modern-day Fannie Lou. My community started calling me that. And I was honored. One, because, I mean, it's Fannie Lou Hamer. Period. 

Also, as I was doing this work and reading a lot about different elders and ancestors that have been in service of the work way before I was even thought of, I didn’t feel like I was represented. Although a lot of people I was looking to had a great analysis, I could not identify with them. They looked the same, they had a certain type of background. Fannie Lou, on the other hand, was a plus-size Black woman — and I am, too. Also, she had a very strong voice, and she was unapologetic when she spoke. I feel as if I live in that, too. And on top of everything, I like that she had a Southern vernacular. Folks usually tell me how I have this Southern drawl, and sometimes people look at me sideways because I don't speak “academically” like most folks.

And when I learned more about her, most folks talked about the voting rights work that she did, but I was more interested in the food justice work she did. No matter how big her name got, no matter if she was at the DNC or in the White House, wherever she was, her hometown always felt the presence of her work. Her hometown is where she did food security efforts. Her people were who felt all of the goodness of Fannie Lou Hamer; I want to make sure that’s the same for me.

I also just identify with the way she came into the movement: She was a full adult who got engaged and cut her teeth in youth organizing with SNCC. And the work she was doing with sharecroppers — she was doing the work of advocating for the populations that are the most vulnerable: the people who didn't have access to education and information, and didn't have access to come to certain organizing rooms and meetings. She just made sure their voices were always heard. And I feel as if I do the same exact thing in my own way.

AF: Over the past few years, amid moments of uprisings for liberation to greater calls for workplaces that prioritize human and more-than-human well-being, there’s been a transformative shift in people’s relationship with the status quo. Here in the U.S., and globally, we’re signaling that we’re fed up with the list of billionaires growing as more people than ever struggle to have their basic needs met, we’re signaling that we’re tired of our systems of governance being captured by corporations. And, borrowing words from Hamer, as we’re growing “sick and tired” of being “sick and tired” (literally, amid a pandemic), we’re seeing more communities join forces to create change. 

This all reminds me of another Hamer quote: “But what was the point of being scared? The only thing [the whites] could do was kill me, and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.” I think we’re all becoming less afraid, and a manifestation of that is the Movement for Black Lives’ Red Black and Green New Deal initiative, which you’re a part of. Can you talk more about the promise of the RBG New Deal and how folks can be involved to support the initiative’s efforts?

VG: The Red Black and Green New Deal is grounded at the Movement for Black Lives; I am the National Lead. The Red Black and Green New Deal is a safe space, a safe haven for Black climate and environmental justice leaders around the world. Right now, it's 187 of us sitting in this space; about 65 of us are hella active. We’re building a platform for us to think about climate and environmental justice solutions for Black people. 

The climate movement is extremely white. We are not often given the space or the time or the resources to focus on solutions for our people, so that's what we're doing with the Red Black and Green New Deal. We launched our program in 2021; we also released our Black Climate Mandate, which you can find on our website. 

We focus on six pillars: water, land, democracy, energy, labor, and economy. We do our work through a few different tactics: organizing, political education, policy and legislative strategy, data and research. We also think about communications and culture.

The goal is for us to, one, redistribute power from the states through our policy platform, the Red Black and Green New Deal Act, which will make sure that Black people are included in the Green New Deal space. We know that many years ago with the original New Deal, Black people were prey; we didn't benefit. And if we're not careful, things will end up the same exact way with the Green New Deal. So, we decided that it would be a good idea for us to have a Black Green New Deal space. Our “RBG” stands for red, black, and green; it’s inspired by the Pan-African flag. That’s the flag for our diaspora, from our ancestor Marcus Garvey, of the Garvey movement that was focused on a strategy for Black people. 

It's been a joy. We're the Black Hive — that's what we call ourselves, that's the nickname for us as a body — because Black people are going to save the Earth. We already know that. 

The Black Hive is literally the smartest group of Black people I ever met in my life. These people are scientists. These people are lawyers. These people are strategists. These people know policy. These people know how to speak on these issues. They know education. They know all the things. These folks do youth organizing. Everything that we need in order to think about climate and environmental solutions is in this space. And we’re all Black. Literally — it is a room full of Black people. And not just African Americans, either. We were very intentional about that. 

We make sure that “all of the Blacks” are included in our space. We have people who are differently abled. We have queer and trans people. We have women. We have men. We have gender-nonconforming folks. We are trying to open up the space for the youth. We are building out our global platform to have our brothers and sisters from the Global South join in on this conversation. It's big, it's huge, but we know we can hold it. Eventually, we're trying to become a global swarm of bees that's going to pollinate solutions for our community.

And I am hella proud. Out of all of the advocacy work that I’ve done, I think this has been the most fun, because it's the thing that I believe in the most. I heard Leah Penniman from Soul Fire Farm say this on a panel one time: All the issues we fight don't matter if we don't have an Earth to inhabit. Ever since I heard that I been like, That's the truth. That's the whole truth. If we don't have drinking water, if we don't have food, if folks don't have safe housing, if folks can't live in their full liberty, then what are we doing? If we don't have, literally, an Earth to live on, nothing else matters.

And the Earth is falling apart. The rich human beings did that; the oppressors did that. We know that people of color, Indigenous people, queer and trans folks are not the people who are causing this issue. We know that people from “developing countries” are not causing this issue, but they're feeling the biggest impacts of it. 

I feel as if my work around climate and environment is the most important work I’ve done; it’s the thing that I'm dedicated to for the rest of my life. Between the work that I do with The Smile Trust, Inc. and the work that I do with the Red Black and Green New Deal at the Movement for Black Lives, I finally feel like now I've sewn a quilt of a body of work that I can hold until I retire.