Moving Forward, Together

written by Leslie Centola

When the Climate Justice Collaborative (CJC) launched in 2020, we had the barest idea of the direction that this seeding initiative would take what was then Nine Mile Run Watershed Association (NMRWA). The successes of the CJC in the first two years throughout Homewood, East Hills, and Wilkinsburg triggered our hunger to grow. After our rebrand to UpstreamPgh in 2021, it seemed our next steps were clear: to spark collective impact in the region by taking a collaborative, regenerative approach to the work that we had already begun as NMRWA. And this is just what we’ve been working on.

Over the last 6 months, the CJC has been building partnerships with organizations and community leaders across Allegheny County, taking a grassroots approach to community investment by engaging the intersections of people and their environment. However, as we have started this work, we have had to acknowledge that we, as environmentalists and community activists, have unintentionally worked ourselves into silos, as if water, the Earth, and human society are not fundamentally connected. Over time collaboration has decreased as our society becomes more focused on individualism, not collectivism. Barriers to collaboration between organizations, such as competition among nonprofits for funding and audience, has left those entities, low-income communities, and individual people short on time and resources. “Profit over people” mentality is a disease entering the nonprofit sector, and it is harming vulnerable communities across Allegheny County.

It’s time we step back, examine what caused this to infiltrate our communities and begin to heal the damage.

On that note, over the next several months, the CJC will use the groundwork we have laid to solidify strong local partnerships between local organizations and communities they serve, with the goal of creating a resident-led coalition. This coalition will function to develop climate-justice-focused campaigns within the region, focusing on skill-building and leadership development within their communties. The coalition will also develop a regional climate crisis resource network that will serve as a pipeline to organizational services to ensure equitable access to climate resliency resources for all.

It is only as a committed whole, working as a community, thriving together that we actually create a better future for ourselves and our planet. We each bring our own strengths and weaknesses to the table, which is why we cannot, and never could, achieve this goal alone. We are one big village, and we cannot lose sight of that.