Celebrating Powerful Women Leaders

From abolishing slavery to winning voting rights to the fight to end police violence, women of color have played vital leading roles in social movements throughout history. Today, they are among the most powerful — and most overlooked — organizers and advocates for environmental and climate justice. In honor of International Women’s Day, we spotlight some of the women leaders in the US South who are delivering clean energy and climate resilience in ways that build wealth and protect health in their communities; stopping the expansion of oil, gas, and other dirty energy industries in their backyards; and protecting democratic rights and holding government accountable. You can read about and hear from even more of these leaders on our stories page.

Christa Mancias and Bekah Hinojosa are part of a leaderful coalition fighting the expansion of liquified natural gas infrastructure, much of it on sacred lands, in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. New subsidies for carbon capture have made their work more challenging as companies try to recast themselves as “green.” Read their story

Ajulo Othow is a renewable energy entrepreneur, policy advocate, and community leader working to make sure North Carolina’s solar boom brings economic opportunities to the state’s largely Black and Brown rural communities. Read about the progress she and other community leaders are making in the state.

Last year, leading democracy champions Brionté McCorkle and Wanda Mosley, an early Hive Fund advisor, served as plaintiffs in a successful Voting Rights Act case that is forcing Georgia to redesign the way it elects its Public Utilities Commission. Only two Black commissioners have been elected to the utility oversight agency in 143 years, despite a Black population in the state of over 30 percent. Read news coverage of the lawsuit.

Twin sisters Jo and Joy Banner founded The Descendant’s Project to lift up the history and culture of the Black descendant community in Louisiana’s river parishes and build on its richness to foster alternative economic models to the region’s polluting oil, gas, and petrochemical industries. They are also leading the fight against a massive grain elevator planned next door to their home that would desecrate historic sites, including unmarked slave graves, and pollute the local air and water. Learn about their work.

Ariana Lee is the 2022-2023 Houston Youth Poet Laureate and a 2022 member of Meta-Four Houston, the city’s official youth slam poetry team. She performed this poem, “Through the Eye,” at an event organized by One Breath Partnership, Air Alliance Houston, and the Houston Climate Justice Museum to remember the enduring impacts of Hurricane Harvey, and also at our recent gathering of Houston grantee partners.

Video courtesy of One Breath Partnership

Excerpt of “Through the Eye,” by Ariana Lee

…Born in the year of Katrina,
graduating high school through a pandemic, my generation
will get diplomas in disaster, degrees in damage. What kind of city
are we inheriting? Each once-in-a-lifetime flood is a watershed
moment, but we’ve had so many they’ve watered down
this community. Five years later, are we still Houston
Strong? Do we still have that outpouring of love to fight
the downpour? We’re swamped with work to fix this swamp…
Our dams couldn’t hold
Harvey, but we have so much capacity in this city to say
in all our languages: 我爱你. Te amo. I love you.
I was 12 years old. I’d never seen love
of that magnitude. Yes, deeper injustices surfaced
from the floodwaters. Its murk made inequity clear.
But when we see rain, we remember
what kind of city we’re inheriting. A city
that floods. A city that loves. A city that survives.

Read the full poem here, and find Ariana on Instagram (@ari.purplecrayon), Twitter (@aripurplecrayon), or Youtube.

Guest UserMarch 8, 2023