Seattle’s Got Green has its finger on the pulse of the South Seattle community, evolving to fit the moment and people of South Seattle. With three focal areas of Food Access, Young Leaders, and Climate Justice, this grassroots organization exemplifies meaningful community engagement and works to ensure that folks of color and low-income communities benefit from the environmental movement. To highlight the work and people of Got Green in a two-part feature series, I sat down (virtually) with two members of Got Green’s board: Climate Justice Organizer, Nancy Huizar, and Food Access Organizer, Tanika Thompson Bird.

 The following narrative comes from a transcription of a conversation with Nancy. All of her original words are preserved but have been edited for clarity.

Nancy comes to Got Green with a natural science background and community organizing experience. She is currently working to increase emergency preparedness in South Seattle communities and create climate-resilient neighborhoods by building the capacity of emergency hubs throughout Seattle. Nancy also co-chairs the City of Seattle’s Environmental Justice Committee and participated in COP25, the United Nations’ climate change conference.

When I entered the workforce, I worked for a conservation group and the City of Shoreline looking at water quality. I saw a real lack of engagement with folks of color in those spaces, even though lots of folks of color live near polluted sites. We’re seeing this in other cities too; not engaging with folks in the most polluted areas and most polluted neighborhoods was really off-putting for me. Also, with aquatic and fisheries sciences, there are a lot of barriers to continuing education. I worked throughout college, and trying to keep my grades up while working and supporting myself was a lot. I felt like it was a huge barrier. The first project I worked on with Got Green was the Green Job Pathways program, where fellows get paid a living wage and don’t have to have an environmental degree. I’m excited for our community to enter the green sector and not feel like they aren’t allowed to be in the space because they don’t have degrees.

My parents are both immigrants. My mom immigrated from the Philippines. My dad came from Mexico. I’m able to talk to folks like them that aren’t really into science; the culture is different in the U.S. than where they grew up. That’s the value I’ve been bringing into environmental justice work. The baseline thing when you start to do equity work within the environmental field is just doing the communication. People often are not really thinking about the perspectives of other people, or they aren’t asking folks what they need to properly engage. The language that people use in this work is not always accessible. When you’re trying to engage with working class folks here, you wouldn’t use the same language as you would in an academic setting. For example, when we talk about a “just” transition or a Green New Deal, some people don’t know that language. However, if you’re just talking about the root causes of things that people are facing, that decreases the barrier.

Broadly speaking, Got Green makes sure that folks of color benefit from the environmental movement. A lot of our work is base-building. When other environmental justice groups that need to interview people, need to get data, or do a town hall, they come to us and our base; we usually engage up to 1000 people. With Got Green, if we’re asking you to come to community meetings, we are providing childcare, food, and stipends for participation, decreasing the barriers for you to come. We build leadership within the folks of our community, providing pathways for folks when they enter. Because of Got Green’s reputation, people are able to get jobs.

The Green New Deal was a way to push the work we’d been doing for so long. [However], we’re stepping back because we realized that the work was moving so fast, we weren’t checking in with the community about their priorities. We supported a push for a natural gas ban, and Mayor Durkin’s executive order included an oil tax, which is going to impact a lot of folks in Beacon Hill. Sixty-to-seventy percent of the homes there have oil heating, and a lot of these people are immigrants or refugees and don’t know how to access the resources to move away from oil heating. It’s hard to know who to ask if you’re not familiar with this area of work. So we are now just trying to backtrack; especially with COVID, people don’t have the resources to pay more.

In Seattle there’s a false sense of being progressive. We have progressive council members, but there’s still a hesitancy to go into the deep environmental justice work. For example, the Duwamish River cleanup has been going on for over 20 years now. They were saying back then that it would be cleaned up in 10 years. Even the folks that live in South Park or in Georgetown, they’re not going to see the benefits of the cleanup because they’re getting displaced by gentrification as well. There’s a lot of frustration because people see that the government is spending millions of dollars to clean up this river, and if you’re not helping us stay in this neighborhood, then what are we putting this money toward? How do we care for people and the environment and linking them together to show that benefiting the environment will also benefit them?

When it comes to emergency preparedness, dissecting the word “emergency” is important. When you say you’re going to create an emergency preparedness plan, people think of “the big one,” like an earthquake that’s going to happen who knows when. But there are emergencies now. Someone is having a mental health episode because it’s too hot outside, so who do you call to respond? It’s most often the police, and when that happens, we’ve seen that folks of color and folks with different abilities have been killed because they’re having some sort of mental health episode. There are studies that show that with increasing temperatures there is an increase in violence. How do we make spaces safer and bring in more resources to a community?

I live in Beacon Hill. You can look at Beacon Hill as a mini Seattle because you can see how different the north end houses are to the south end houses. We know that a lot of the folks in South Beacon Hill are immigrants and refugees, folks who may not know English very well, so creating emergency hubs would look a lot different than they would in North Beacon Hill where there are mostly affluent white folks. With that in mind, we’re still trying to collect baseline data around what are the things that people need.

Currently the city uses P-Patches (community gardens) as emergency hubs. We were doing interviews with people and asking if they knew their closest emergency hub, and all 23 people said no. But even after we asked a follow-up question (“If you knew where your emergency hub was, would you go to it?”), a lot of people still said no because they weren’t sure about the folks who are living in their neighborhood. That also speaks to gentrification and displacement and how we’re losing connection with our neighbors. For a lot of people in New Orleans when Katrina happened, the first person to check on them was their neighbor, but some of our folks don’t know their neighbors.

We really try to look at root causes of what are impacting people. The environmental movement and environmental justice are still very different things. Even “environmental justice” is jargon. It is justice, that people can have what they really need. What we try to work on is making sure that language and space are accessible for folks. With COVID, we’ve seen the ways that we lack in the work that we do. We could be better with disability justice and making our meetings more accessible to people. Especially with Zoom technology, having closed captions and ESL interpreters are things that we can be better on in the future.

Have you heard of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine? When there are shocks to the system, you can pass a lot of policies that you otherwise wouldn’t. This is that time. We’re seeing moratoriums on evictions and moratoriums on utility shutoffs. The question is how we’ll be able to normalize these changes so that we’re caring more for our people, instead of perpetuating capitalistic, extractive systems.