“You are the leaders. You are the ones fighting power plants and shutting down pipelines. You are doing it with a lot of sacrifice. You’re doing it in communities were the police are after you. You’re doing it in the middle of ICE raids. Leadership looks like the faces in this room,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, issued in her opening remarks at the Brooklyn-founded advocacy group’s seventh Climate Justice Youth Summit on September 21.
“People of color know how climate change is affecting them so that means they have the solutions. The people above us make decisions that don’t really help us in a positive way that we need,” Nyeshia Mallet, a student at Cooper Union School of Art and summit organizer, told BET.com about the importance of centering Black and brown voices within the movement. “With the strike that happened yesterday, I would've liked to see a lot of young people of color leading that strike. That’s why we had our own. We have always been involved and coming up with solutions.”
CHELSEA TURNER, 20 – BROOKLYN
“For generations, we’ve been experiencing different kinds of environmental racism, whether it's having nuclear plants in our neighborhoods or having garbage literally left on our streets. Now, we’re being threatened by extreme weather events, especially the Global South,” Turner said. “We’re not the ones who are going to be getting government aid. Climate change and climate injustices have been happening for decades, but now’s the time to act or we’re gonna die.”
NYESHIA MALLET, 18 – BROOKLYN
“[UPROSE] has a solar co-op that we are doing right now. It’s open to all of Brooklyn. We have a panel that’s going up around the Bushwick Terminal. We got that open a few years ago because there’s not a lot of green spaces in New York, especially Brooklyn, other than the cemetery and Prospect Park. We’re going to have solar panels, and people from Brooklyn can sign up through Con-Ed to power their house.”