Susan’s story

As children we often do not appreciate the experiences that our parents take us on. It is only as an adult that I fully leaned into how truly blessed I was that my parents took my three siblings and I on frequent excursions into the wilderness, and took the beauty of the natural world for granted. My first 10 years of work were spent teaching children about nature through a variety of diverse experiences, where I first became acutely aware of injustices. I would meet kids from Marin County who had easy access to nature one week, and with students from San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point who had never seen the ocean the next week. It is this deep reverence for the natural world and acute attention to equity that I base my work on.

My love for community organizing began as a Peace Corps Volunteer; I was assigned to live and work in a rural Costa Rica town that had a deep reverence for community engagement. I collaborated with the residents on some memorable projects, from planting 100 trees with 40 schoolchildren during a thunderstorm to organizing the town’s first recycling and trash education programs. I later re-engaged with community organizing after being introduced to the Transition Movement, whose founder Rob Hopkins noted “If we wait for the governments, it’ll be too little, too late; if we act as individuals, it’ll be too little; but if we act as communities, it might just be enough, just in time.”

Equity runs through my commitment to resourcing grassroots organizations. Having fundraising skills has been a sense of freedom to me, being empowered to start new projects without relying on organizations I am working with to do so. I created a bicycle education program, co-created and implemented a waste reduction program with Berkeley Unified School District and raised funds for a leadership training program. These small projects add up to a huge impact. But they are often run by under-resourced organizers I visualize a world in which community organizers are more important than CEO’s of tech companies.

My passion also lies as a bridge builder, as a weaver, a connector. I have seen the harm when movements remain siloed, when communities do not connect, when sectors do not speak each other’s language. I think we have the tools to move beyond, we just need the training and the willingness to learn, to take a risk. I loved the value of bringing together a nonprofit organization (Presidio YMCA) with a school district to create San Francisco’s first after school bicycle program. I brought together 10 governmental agencies, 30 sites and 100 individuals to an 8-month leadership training, again the first of its kind. To build trust and relationships, let’s think beyond the power point presentation, the zoom meetings. How can we authentically build relationships with each other?

Community. Nature. Equity. Regenerative practices. I stand alongside so many climate justice warriors who are doing this work out of a love for this earth. I take solace in meeting climate justice organizers who are pouring their hearts into the work to both stop the bad and build the new.