Even in places with established low- and moderate-income community solar programs, reaching those customers can be challenging. Community-based organizations can be instrumental partners for solar engagement. Take UPROSE, a multi-racial, women-led community organization in Brooklyn, New York, that has helped develop a cooperatively-owned CS project on the roof of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The project promises to deliver bill savings to about 200 households in the neighborhood, where over 30% of residents live below the poverty line. UPROSE breathed life into the project through local meetings, door-to-door outreach, and disseminating informational materials in multiple languages.
These Women Of Color Are Leading The Charge Against Environmental Racism
“It really starts in…colonialization, in the extraction of our land and our labor,” says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Brooklyn-based UPROSE, an organization that focuses on sustainable development and a myriad of community issues, including climate and racial justice. “It starts with us having access to the worst food, being put in places where all of a sudden, we’re surrounded by petrochemical industries, having the worst water, the worst health care…for us, environment is everything.”
Climate change is all about power. You have more than you think.
Activism doesn’t always have to mean going on strikes or other escalated action. Elizabeth Yeampierre, director of the climate justice-focused Uprose, based in New York, points to volunteers who have cooked meals to support a protest or led learning circles to educate fellow members on issues like gender justice within the climate movement. She argues many climate groups tend to be siloed in how they think about building community power, but climate justice groups are “really more centered on community itself.”
“People show up in a lot of ways,” Yeampierre says. “They show up to support direct actions. They show up to testify at hearings. They show up to write letters and make phone calls and do that kind of stuff. They show up on social media, but they also show up with ideas of things to do.”
Perspectives on Climate Justice: Elizabeth Yeampierre
Elizabeth Yeampierre is the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and the executive director of UPROSE, a community group focused on environmental justice in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Her work at UPROSE centers around community organizing in Sunset Park, targeting large-scale sustainable development and tackling environmental issues that threaten historically marginalized populations. Since joining UPROSE in 1996, Yeampierre has contributed to efforts that have doubled the amount of open space in the neighborhood; in 2014, the community celebrated the opening of the 23-acre Bush Terminal waterfront park, the culmination of a 15-year effort by UPROSE.
A ‘Warehouse’ By Any Other Name
Bautista dreams of blue-collar jobs to build the wind turbines needed for one of the country’s largest offshore wind projects, slated for Long Island Sound. But the distribution center crisis has shown him that growth has to be done carefully. That’s part of the reason why NYC-EJA, Earthjustice, city assembly member Marcela Mitaynes, and the grassroots organizations UPROSE and The Point CDC launched a coalition urging the city to include a definition of last-mile trucking facilities in the zoning code based on size and the number of vehicle trips per day.
“We would like to see a definition or special category made for e-commerce facilities, which would allow for special permitting, public review, and/or extra mitigation,” said Disa, from Earthjustice. Ideally, the amendment would define last-mile trucking facilities based on size and the number of vehicle trips per day, allowing regulators and communities to fully understand the impacts.
YSE Class of ’22: Lovinia Reynolds is Headed Home to Fight for Climate Justice
“That’s why I came to YSE,” says Reynolds, who admits that after her undergraduate studies in geology and biology at Brown, she wanted more space to “address issues of racial injustice” in environmental challenges.
For Reynolds, the next step will be returning to UPROSE as a policy planner addressing climate justice in New York City — with a bolstered passion for justice, a deep investment in the city that raised her, and a network of environmental professionals at her back.
New York City Elected's, Advocates Outline Priorities for State Climate Action Council
Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, said that investments in disadvantaged communities should be at least 40% of spending under the new climate plan.
“The CLCPA must serve as a model across public and private sectors and prioritize moving a minimum of 40% direct investments to frontline communities- those most impacted, but least responsible for climate change,” Yeampierre said. “40% investments is the baseline and not the ceiling in order to protect communities and build equitable systems that allow communities to survive and thrive in the face of disasters.”
Environmentalist Elizabeth Yeampierre warns of contempt for climate change
Miami, May 3 (EFE) .- Puerto Rican Elizabeth Yeampierre, one of the leading Latina environmentalists in the United States, fights to "change the hearts and minds of people" about the consequences of climate change, which in her opinion almost no one take seriously in this country.
"The crisis is very serious, but we do not take it seriously enough," he declared in an interview with Efe, and warned about the earthquakes, floods, fires and tornadoes that often hit the US.
Vecinos preocupados por contaminación ambiental ante apertura de grandes almacenes de distribución
“La meta es asegurar que nuestra comunidad no sea más vulnerable a la contaminación ambiental, para que nuestra comunidad no tenga que sufrir más asma, más problemas respiratorios”, dijo Elizabeth Yeampierre, directora ejecutiva de UPROSE.
Mapping the inequities of fossil peaker power plants
The data powering the map, which comes from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Power Plants and Neighboring Communities Mapping Tool, can be easily downloaded from the tool so that communities can gather the information they need to support peaker plant opposition efforts and local and state policymakers can make more informed decisions about prioritizing equity in accelerating the retirement of polluting peakers and incentivizing the development of local renewables and energy storage to meet peak demand.
CEG will be hosting a webinar on June 23 to introduce the mapping tool and hear from two community-based organizations, UPROSE and Berkshire Environmental Action Team, that are working to oppose peaker plants impacting their communities
The 2022 Energy & Environment Power 100
52. Elizabeth Yeampierre
Few environmental advocates have had as significant an impact fighting inequities in their community as Elizabeth Yeampierre. The climate justice leader helped the Sunset Park community get behind a new plan to turn the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into an offshore wind hub while also creating jobs. Yeampierre has sought to shutter peaker plants that pollute the air and make the fashion industry more sustainable as well. She is also backing pending state legislation that would require fashion companies to track their environmental impact.
Sunset Park subway attack rattles a multicultural, working-class community
"Sunset Park is a transformational, leader-full, working class community dealing with challenges of displacement, ice raids, health disparities, but responds with collective care & love every time there is a [crisis]," wrote UPROSE, a grassroots social services organization based in Brooklyn.
Local voices are drawing attention to the fear and disruption that Tuesday's incident has caused, especially in a city and community where the subway is the most affordable means of transportation.
New York passed one of the nation's most ambitious climate laws. What will it do?
Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Brooklyn-based climate justice nonprofit UPROSE, worried about the Climate Action Council plan promulgating market solutions, such as continued reliance on lower emitting fossil fuels, that won't address long-standing issues in communities of color that often live in closer to proximity to pollutants.
"We are trying very much to honor how the legacy of historical harm has manifested in poor health for our communities and vulnerability to extreme weather events," Yeampierre said. "What happens in governance is that the response is like, 'Let's fix it,' without addressing the root causes."
Seeding Sanctity
For Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latine community-based organization, spirituality and environmental activism are inherently intertwined. Yeampierre grew up in New York City with a mother who shared her spiritualism with her children. She has fond memories of her mother reciting stories about the orishas and learning about their connection to nature.
During Climate Week NYC in September, Yeampierre’s face adorned bus stops throughout the city, promoting the event wearing a headwrap over her curly dark hair and statement hoop earrings.
“[People come into UPROSE] seeing me with my beads and my bracelets and how extra I am, right? But they know that I can have a really honest conversation,” she laughed over the phone.
Yeampierre practices Santeria. Some practitioners also call the faith Lukumi (or La Regla Lucumí), Santeria is derived from a pan-African spiritual practice that centers on “orishas,” deities that originate in Yoruba religions from what is now known as Nigeria, Togo, and Benin. The practice was born in Cuba after enslaved people were brought from West Africa and Yoruba spirituality mixed with Catholicism. Adjacent practices intersect, and Santeria varies across geography. For example, Candomblé is an African spirituality developed in Brazil during the nineteenth century. In Candomblé, practitioners also worship and look to the guidance of deities, or “orixas.”
When Yeampierre started her career as an lawyer and activist, she was involved in police reform and criminal justice. She began advocating for environmental justice in the late 1990s when New York City planned to expand the Gowanus Expressway—a major elevated highway through Brooklyn that spews pollution into the immediate area. UPROSE helped the community fight against that expansion.
“Some people came into the [UPROSE] office and…they were concerned because they lived under the Gowanus Expressway. They would get up in the middle of the night to see how their kids were breathing. I realized that there was nothing more fundamental than the right to breathe,” she explained. “I could see the connections between how I grew up in our belief systems and this environmental thing.”
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Lawmakers urge clean energy investment in Queens
Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of UPROSE, said that the conversation is more important than ever on the heels of a pandemic that disproportionately impacted Black and Latino New Yorkers. The Environmental Justice For All Act, she said “gives [BIPOC communities] the opportunity to fight for our right to breathe.”
“We are the ones who lost families to COVID; we knew the people in our families would die because they were living next to pollution, next to toxic exposure in the midst of power plants that were sited because people thought they could, because they believed that we were powerless,” Yeampierre said. “Today… we’re walking in our power, we have legislators standing with us.”
By Rachel Vick
A community approach to solar power comes to Brooklyn
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, there’s a new concept in solar that could benefit people or families who don’t live in a house.
Sunset Solar is a project that is expected to come online this year. It’s a cooperative approach to solar.
UPROSE, a community organization in Brooklyn, is constructing New York State’s first owned community solar project. It’s being built on top of the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
The New York City Economic Development Corporation arranged the roof lease. Up to 200 residents can sign up for the program.
Agreement finalizes deal to transform South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into wind energy hub
“After decades of advocating to bring offshore wind to South Brooklyn, UPROSE is happy to see this climate justice victory progress in a community with a legacy of fossil fuel pollution and health disparities,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, a Sunset Park-based environmental advocacy group. “UPROSE and the Sunset Park community have long fought to preserve the industrial character of New York City’s largest industrial waterfront.”
To Bring Down Energy Bills, NY Must Invest in Clean Energy Production
AUTHORS: Elizabeth Yeampierre, Justin Wood and Daniel Chu
”Most of our neighbors have received painfully high electricity bills this winter from ConEd. For the millions of New Yorkers facing steep rent increases and rising prices for food and other necessities, this is an especially hard blow, and is likely to get worse this month.
The reason bills have shot up is because during peak demand hours, electricity prices have almost tripled. As ConEd explains, the problem is the rapidly rising cost of acquiring energy on the wholesale market that the utility then passes on to customers. Natural gas prices have indeed been spiking worldwide, driven partly by heating demand during the coldest winter months. Prices for both oil and natural gas are now being further exacerbated as energy markets react to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
But there’s much more to this story in New York City that the big energy corporations and their backers in Congress aren’t telling us. Our electric grid is especially vulnerable to price shocks because 70 percent of our electricity is generated by power plants that burn fossil fuels—a sharp contrast to nearby regions that use more renewables like wind, solar and hydroelectric power. These fossil fuel plants are particularly susceptible to demand-driven price spikes, and even worse, the emissions released by these gas-burning power plants are particularly unhealthy for nearby residents, often people of color and low-income communities.”
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Join the Club: Building Community Solar Projects
“This project is really the culmination of almost 10 years’ worth of advocacy and organizing, particularly after Superstorm Sandy in 2012,” said Summer Sandoval, energy democracy coordinator at UPROSE, a women-of-color-led grassroots organization and a partner selected to develop and operate the project. After Sandy, UPROSE held climate resiliency planning workshops in the community to identify issues and solutions to focus on. One was local energy production.
Together, UPROSE, partners, and the community worked to develop a “scalable, replicable model” for a local clean energy supply that brings local economic development and builds community wealth. Beyond signing up residents as subscribers, UPROSE engaged and provided the community with the in-person workshops, training, multilingual fact sheets, and other information they needed to meaningfully participate in their own clean energy systems.
Linda Greene, former EDC executive VP, appointed head of Brooklyn Navy Yard
‘‘Frontline communities that have endured historical trauma have been further destabilized by the disparate health impacts of COVID-19 and economic instability,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director, UPROSE; and co-chair, Climate Justice Alliance. “These contemporary challenges demand visionary leadership grounded in community priorities with the ability to operationalize the just transition our communities deserve. Lindsay Greene’s appointment as CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is cause for celebration for all of us!”