Youth organizing: Planting new seeds

by Lauren Ballesteros-Watanabe, Chapter Organizer | Reading time: 5 minutes

The Sierra Club has been calling for waves of change within the organizational structure and throughout the environmental justice movement for years. Back in 2017, Nellis Kennedy-Howard, the Sierra Club’s first director of equity, wrote about the difference between a diversity-based approach and an inclusion-based approach in response to heightened racialized, gender violence, and fascism following the 2016 election. She argued that diversity is an outcome of an inclusive community with equitable practices and priorities rooted in justice. The call to action in her piece was to denounce “diversity” as a goal for resistance but rather a commitment to “equity and justice, to establish transformational relationships with people and communities and to lift up the voices of those who have been historically excluded from access to opportunity and democratic process.” Since then, there has been a slew of efforts and shifts to redirect Sierra Club as a traditionally white-led organization that not only includes but shares power with BIPOC communities.

More recently, Hop Hopkins, Director of Organizational Transform at the Sierra Club and author of the well-read “Racism Is Killing the Planet” article, expanded on heeding Kennedy-Howard’s “diversity” call. “Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Diversity in the Environmental Movement” was published in March and outlines the Sierra Club’s on-going struggle with how to transform everything we do and how we do it on the basis of racial justice and equity.

Hop strikes an important note, “equity transformation doesn’t mean changing the face you show the world, and keeping your heart the same. When you say you want equity in our society, it means you want a fundamentally different society, one that shares the benefits as well as the burdens of our extractive economy more equally. In the process of developing an intersectional analysis of how we address climate chaos, the issues and campaigns the Sierra Club takes on will look different than those we’ve taken on in the past.”

I can’t help but feel that a pathway to this fundamental shift in our work and society is through our commitment to the next generation’s leaders. Not because “they are our future” or because they very much lead the climate justice fight today, but because they readily understand the intersectional realities of racial, economic, gender, and ecological injustice. In order for our climate justice movement to be successful against reckless extraction, carbon fundamentalism, and complacence with environmental racism as an inevitable consequence of renewable energy development, we must reject notions of separation. To expound this point, I will quote youth leader and Policy Director of Hawaiʻi Youth Climate Coalition, Dyson Chee:

“Intersectionality is important because we can’t steamroll one another in our pursuit for justice like the fossil fuel industry has done to us. They harm our environment, people, and places we love for profit. If we aren’t thinking and caring for one another then instead of working towards solutions we will just end up making more problems for one another.” 

The Hawaiʻi Youth Climate Coalition, our partners since its establishment in 2019, is a collection of driven youth who work in close collaboration with Hawaiʻi for Black Lives and SunriseMovement HNL, two grassroots youth lead organizations. Policy and action support between each of these organizations has demonstrated a strong commitment to solidarity and mutuality—one of the Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing adopted by the Sierra Club in order to build community partnerships with integrity. I have seen organizers from each of those groups show up for one another in big and small ways. The fact that they see the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi as a place for them to grow their leadership, advocacy, and organizing skills speaks volumes to the trust they have and the value they see in the Sierra Club today. That excites me for the future we will forge together. 

But just as important to understand why we work with youth is our philosophy of how we do it. Just as the risk of tokenism is high in aims for diversity, so is approaching youth—especially BIPOC youth or those from rural working class communities, in a meaningful way. My goal is to dismantle the power dynamics that often play out between youth and adults. I most often take a step-back-and-down approach to build a just relationship with them—another Jemez Principle.  In my experience, there is something to be said when we work alongside one another, it builds a natural confidence and ownership in the work we do as collaborators with varying degrees of knowledge but equal worth. 

This also speaks to the kinds of partnerships I build with like-minded organizations. Since the fall of 2019, our youth organizing program has embarked on a series of initiatives to advance environmental justice, community building, and creative media for social awareness. For example, last summer we co-hosted an online camp with Hawaiʻi Women in Filmmaking, a nonprofit feminist organization rooted in an intersectional lens, which had their best participation based on content provided—environmental justice. This year, we are inviting the Hawaiʻi Youth Climate Coalition to help craft our curriculum. For the first time ever, we will partner with Purple Maiʻa, a nonprofit organization educating youth to be culturally-grounded, community-serving, technology makers—to teach aloha ʻāina through Minecraft. Each is an exciting transformative approach to engage youth and I am excited about the growing possibilities. 

My hope is to build upon the legacy of the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi by actively pursuing pathways that build confident youth leaders of today and tomorrow. Perhaps they become a part of our executive leadership one day, a leader in their community, or they enter elected office. Either way, the stronger our youth allies are, the stronger our movement to rebuild our systems to work for us all will become, which consequently will save our planet.