“All of UPROSE's work is done in the interest of a Just Transition, a move away from the extraction economy and towards climate solutions that put frontline communities in positions of leadership. Our work occurs at the intersection of social, racial, economic, environmental, and climate justice, where different campaigns and initiatives naturally feed into, complement, and support one another.”
"I live here and I come from struggle, I have lived the lives that a lot of the people in our community live, and I'm very privileged to have had access to formal education and to get to do the work that I love and dream about. So I feel very blessed, but it's hard for me to accept more. Eric, you don't know me, and some people may think I'm a pain in the ass, but I just think that I wake up every single day thinking about climate change, and I think if everybody was working as hard as we were, and they weren't navel gazing, and they weren't trying to supplant leadership or duplicate efforts, if they were working in a way that was complimentary, we would be moving a lot faster with each other."
The work at UPROSE is all about relationship building, imagining what the community's goal is for themselves 10 days or 10 years from now, what they want their neighborhood to be like, and then building backwards from that. Like Yeampierre told me, "they may not see it yet, but we know how important they are."