Environmental Policy & Law

A climate and racial justice organizer, Wes is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Black environmental networking & career development organization BlackOak Collective, and co-founder of Evergreen Action.

Patrick is an organizer and activist whose studies are focused on energy grid and building decarbonization, and community wealth building in low-income and working communities of color.

Dyanna is studying policies to guide long-haul economic transition pathways to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. Before graduate school, Dyanna organized with grassroots movements to design and win climate policy for over a decade.

Claudia studies how cities across the United States are designing, financing, and implementing policies that serve not only to mitigate or adapt to climate change, but also to improve social justice in urban communities.

An aspiring movement lawyer, Ben is focused on advancing environmental justice, alleviating poverty, and defending workers’ rights in communities burdened by the fossil fuel industry.

Kerry is committed to making good on the promises of California for all of its residents and supporting historically marginalized communities to advocate for themselves and succeed in their own futures’ creation. Their work focuses on environmental justice, drinking water and a Just Transition.

Liz Jacob (she/her) is working to build a practice of community-based lawyering alongside movements for a just transition. Liz is dedicating her life to working in community to collectively dream and build a transformative new world grounded in mutual aid, justice, and equity so that all people and the planet can thrive. Liz is a recent graduate of Yale Law School and will be serving as a Skadden fellow with the Sugar Law Center for Social and Economic Justice and the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, where she will serve as an environmental justice lawyer to advance environmental, climate, and energy justice alongside communities of color and low-income residents in Detroit, Michigan.

Amaya is an educator and researcher pursuing accessibility of environmental stewardship within the BIPOC community by increasing diverse representation in the classroom and investigating how education and sustainability policy influence environmental justice.

Chelsi Sparti is an energy professional with 12+ years of experience in North America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Europe. She holds a Master’s of Energy and Resources from UC Berkeley, and a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Point Loma Nazarene University. Chelsi currently works for Brookfield Renewable where she studies and responds to electricity policy, regulation, and markets in the Western United States.