Communications Cohort Zine

WHICH COMMS COHORT MEMBER ARE YOU?

MEET THE TEAM!

SELASI-NATOR

• Organizer of the group

• Buys everyone food

• Has a secret stan twitter

LEXIE-PEDIA

• Existential writer of the group

• Knows everything

• Gingham for the win

CARLOS-OPHY

• Documentarian of the group

• Witty

• Has a golden heart

MALAIKA-MBASSADOR

• Influencer of the group

• A “hee hee ha ha” girly

• Thinks she is in a movie 24/7

NEAR-ACLE

• Artist of the group

• Fashion icon

• Hello Kitty collector

DANI-MYTE

• Storyteller of the group

• Literally the nicest person ever

• Always helping out

FOR THE ANXIOUS MINDS OF THE CURIOUS A PEAK BEHIND

THE CURTAIN

Youth Rise Texas – A youth-centered, activist (power-building/movement-building) organization that has affected many. To some, we are a kind stranger they’ve interacted with once, to others we are a close friend that you can rely on during hard times. We are mentors and peers. Made up of multiple people; both literally and figuratively. We exist as proof of our communities’ bodies, dreams, fears, hopes, connections, struggles, happiness, excitement, patience, and knowledge. We look to every interaction we have to equip us with new information, viewpoints and ways of living. We do not promise to be perfect but we do promise to grow and honor the experiences of those who work with us or engage with us.

This is what I would personally say YRTX is at its core; beyond the programs and the pamphlets. Our thought process, our decision-making, and our drive to keep going comes from this description of who we are. But why would I think this? Why is this the description I chose?

LET ME EXPLAIN: THE HISTORY OF YRTX

So in my introductory phase to Youth Rise Texas, I found myself wanting to know more about the history of the organization. Who were the people who started YRTX? Do they still work here? Why did they start it? These were questions that I only recently learned the answers to, thanks to this Portfolio Project that the Comms Cohort was doing. (We will come back to this later, so put a pin in it!)

Youth Rise Texas was created by a group of Latine and Black youth, namely, Silvia, Tania, Destiny, Taylor, and JT. They were connected and supported by Kandace, a multi-faceted Latina Austinite who “had her hands in many pots”. Kandace was involved with many local organizations and community programs, which ultimately gave her access to find the youth that would pilot our longest standing program, #StayWoke. A product of Kandace’s experiences, passions & dreams for youth of color, this group empowered and encouraged each other to be leaders for their communities. It was the picture-perfect start to an organization more significant than any of them would have dreamed it would be.

Now, in 2023, only two from the original group still work here but the sun that shined during that first summer is still as blinding as ever in its radiance. The intentions, dreams, and passion that created this organization still run within our veins–forever cherished. The story is inspiring and heart-warming, even more so when you see the way members of the organization’s eyes soften when discussing it. This is why I believe the description above is a perfect fit.

Founding YRTX #StayWoke Group; 2015

FOR THE TECHNICALLY CURIOUS: OUR CURRENT STAFF

CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS

DARRIANA DONEGAN Co-ED of Programs

BRIA VIRGIL Co-ED of Comms & Development

CHIEF FINANCE & OPS OFFICER DIRECTORS MANAGERS

FABIOLA BARRETO Policy & Advocacy

KEISHA GILLIS Interim

BRYTANI CAVIL Healing Justice

COORDINATORS

JAMES GIRALDO Operations

TANIA LARA Healing Justice

DESTINY HARRIS Healing Justice

GABRIELA TORRES Organizing SELASI TAGBOR Communications

AOIFE HOPKINS Donor Cultivation

YOUTH ORGANIZERS

CARLOS BARRON, MALAIKA BEG, SEBASTIAN DE ANDA, KYRSTEN HICKS, LEXIE LEWIS, DANIELA LUNA, NEAR RIVERA Communications Cohort & YPAR

FOR THE TECHNICALLY CURIOUS: FUNDING

What about the funds that keep this show going? Well, the way we currently support ourselves is by applying for grants. We look for individuals or organizations that align with our mission and ideals, apply for a grant, explain who we are and what we do/what we would do with the money, and if the individual/organization feels good about supporting us then we get the grant! One of our current goals, however, is to diversify our sources of income, this would ease a lot of anxiety and lessen the dependence on large donors. Currently, our longest-standing supporters are the Movement Voter Project, The Heising Simons Foundation, and the Hazen Foundation. These groups have done so much for our organization and we can’t thank them enough!

This money is currently powering our YPAR program, #STAYWOKE, and the Comms Cohort! Through the Comms Cohort, we essentially make content for the organization’s social media or website (art, writing, design, etc), and we are actually doing a portfolio project that this article will be a part of! This portfolio, funded by FCYO, will be our cohort’s answers to “Should YRTX take on climate justice?” using different types of media. (Mine is writing!)

Things like this are how YRTX pushes youth within their programs to interact with and think thoughtfully about the subjects they are introduced to.

GLOSSARY

Social Justice and activism can be very inaccessible and hard to understand. After all, most people aren’t privy to the space’s words & history, making it nearly impossible get involved in political education. I want to take a moment and explain some of the words I used here so that your time with us is as easy as possible!

POWER BUILDING

Now there is a missing word in this term and I think it would help if you had it: Community. Power-building is about building power for structurally marginalized communities. “Power” can look like a lot of things but I like to think of it as the ability to make a reasonable change and have a say in the decisions/livelihood of yourself or your community. A power-building organization works toward strengthening and giving resources to community members, with the goal being a self-sustaining community that can make changes for itself.

MOVEMENT BUILDING

Movement-building is a long game centered on organizing people. It hopes to move large groups of people to take a stand for an issue. It’s also about creating a shared vision with other organizations/communities/sectors so that they may work together in the long term.

ORGANIZING

Community organizing can look like a lot of things, for example: campaigns, rallies, marches, protests, etc. Ultimately, it kinda boils down to a group of people rallying together to make a difference in their community. It can be used to achieve both long-term and short-term goals!

HEALING JUSTICE

This one needs some more context – so that is exactly what I will give you! There are many different types of justices: Punitive, Restorative, and Transformational are the most well known ones. Punitive justice relies on punishment, with fear of punishment being the “prevantative” measure to stop future injustice. (This is our current system.) On the other hand, restorative & transformational justice (RJ and TJ) avoid punishment. Instead, RJ aims to focus on the victim’s loss in an attempt to address the harm done. TJ goes one step further, hoping to change the systems that made the wrongdoing happen in the first place.

Healing Justice (HJ) expands upon TJ and is more of a community practice. Here, “healing”is usually referring to mental/spiritual healing although it can mean physical healing too. HJ’s purpose is to try to address the long-standing (generational) trauma of historically marginalized communities. Some approaches include: providing group therapy, curating safe & fun spaces and experiences, community-building opportunities, and challenging the damaging habits of a community. Healing justice can take many forms!

CLIMATE JUSTICE

I told you there were many types of justices! This one is similar to HJ in that it doesn’t focus on legal justice. Instead, climate justice recognizes the way that climate change disproportionately affects marginalized communities and aims to address the core of the problem! A jack of all trades if you will, climate justice displays the universality of climate change.

WHAT IS YOUTH RISE TEXAS? IN OUR WORDS!

Near: Youth Rise Texas to me is my chosen home. It’s a place I can come back to when I’m sad or have strong emotions and I can talk those emotions out. I also can be part of change.

Malaika: Activism is something that I’ve always been very passionate about and very interested in. Youth Rise is just such a great environment in where we put youth in powerful positions to make decisions, to find research, and to talk to people. It’s been a really great opportunity.

Tania: Some of the joys that Youth Rise has brought me are building community with the youth. It’s very important to me as a manager. I want to hear what they need, what they want, where we are moving to the future. It’s truly a joy having this group of youth with me to fight these systems of oppression.

Selasi: We have a lot of programs that have the goal to give the youth an opportunity to learn in a space that is comfortable and safe.n After learning they can take that information to make a difference in their communities, teach other people, and grow.

OUR COVER & POSTER ARTIST: NEAR RIVERA

For my contribution to the zine, I decided to focus on digital art and create two pieces–the front cover & poster–that explore how healing justice could intersect with climate change. I specifically chose to use the game lotería as my inspiration because of its strong presence in my life and throughout Mexican culture.

Lotería cards present us with different images & phrases we see in our lives. (The traditional game includes pieces like El Gallo, El Árbol, and La Bota–the rooster, the tree, and the boot, respectively). My twist continues with this theme to emphasize the importance and presence of climate change and healing justice in our lives, especially as young people living in Texas.

The poster, La Justicia Curative (Healing Justice), commemorates one of my favorite healing justice practices: the Healing Circle. This piece is especially personal to me because it is a portrayal of not just any circle, but one made up of Youth Rise Texas staff and participants taking place in our old office. Healing can be rough, rigorous, intense and full of heat. It’s not an easy task, but it is an important one through which we can begin to grow into organizers and changemakers. This was the most obvious intersection of healing and climate justice, as healing is the necessary first step anyone must take before tasking themselves with creating a better world.

The cover, on the other hand, is of a lotería tabla with nine cards. Each card represents and touches on different topics that came up as I conducted my research for this project. These are the following cards, with translations.

• El Tiempo se Está Agotando; Time is Running Out

• La Hierbas Medicinales; Medicinal Herbs

• La Educación; Education

• La Resilencia Comunitaria; Community Resilience

• La Zine; The Zine

• La Ansiedad Ecológica; Eco-Anxiety

• El Árbol de La Vida; The Tree of Life

• El Convivir; Living Together

• La Justicia Ambiental es La Justicia Social; Climate Justice is Social Justice

INTERSECTIONALITY WITH CLIMATE JUSTICE

Aoife: I think Youth Rise is most definitely equipped to do Climate Justice even though that’s not our main focus right now, I feel like we lay very good grounds to do so. We absolutely have the tools, I just feel like we just do historical and social political work. Not that climate justice isn’t that, but we are definitely equipped to do climate justice work.

Bria: I do not think we should move into doing climate justice work as of right now outside of the narrative purely because we have allies in the field that are experts in this. And we really have a mission that we currently need to fight and focus on. Even though they do intersect and there’s a lot of work that can be done with other organizations, I think we need to focus on Healing Justice and Youth Organizing.

Sebastian: As of right now, I don’t see any intersectionality between our work and climate justice. I feel like we have to have these conversations and programs to help young people make change because at the end of the day climate change is going to affect everyone.

Selasi: I think that if Youth Rise wanted to join Climate Justice it could be through our Stay Woke program (a purely political education summer program). But I also think that’s a project that should be left to our local and state wide partners since they already get the funding for that work and our connections gives us enough to give our youth who’s interested in doing that work.

THE PART ABOUT POLITICAL BUZZWORDS

No, yeah, I’m tired too buddy. I love the intelligence and care that our community has put into figuring out how to talk about different things and giving words to difficult-to-understand concepts but sheesh! Language seems to be the largest barrier to participation from your regular person – a very intentional tool used by politicians.

Communication and language are incredibly important to our societal fabric, but often because it is so essential, the lack or the over-abundance of it can be used to manipulate and change perception. Public figures have been successfully using language in highly strategic ways for centuries, but they are not the only groups of people who manipulate language to achieve desired results. Ultimately, every person does this in individual or larger-scale ways. Even the most well-meaning of people or organizations can fall short in communicating in an accessible way, therefore alienating an audience and/or diminishing their message.

How did we get here? In what ways can someone manipulate the use of language? Why would they do that? And how would we identify when it’s happening?

Well, one thing that must be understood is that language and communication are abundant and exist in endless forms. Still, when something becomes normal (expected, constant, etc.) it becomes invisible. You stop paying as much attention to it, and you can lose your ability to really describe it.

For example, when you are constantly surrounded by a smell (bad odor from clothes, BO, or trash that hasn’t been picked up), your nose stops “noticing” it after a while.

Communicating is something we all do, literally every single day, without too much effort and our society often fails to teach the skill of really communicating and listening. Although it is bound to happen, the danger lies in the possibility of at least one person noticing this and using it to their advantage. Well, one became two, two became three, and as it consistently succeeded in reaching set goals, its power as a tactic grows. How does this look like in practice?

Let’s use a real-life example of this to give an explanation! Introducing, Intersectionality.

INTERSECTIONALITY:

A legal theory coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality argues against the belief that the American legal system was being held back by considerations of racism & bias. It is a theory which stems from critical race theory, also influenced by Crenshaw. To make things easy on us, here is a basic summary : Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the idea that racism is maintained by our “systems” (the structures that uphold our societal principles, like our government, laws, schools, etc.) rather than a few “bad apples”. Intersectionality expands on this by answering the question: what happens when systemic oppression affects multiple identities (races, genders, religions, etc.) in our society? The answer, and theory, is that it transforms the struggle. For example, a BIPOC woman and a white woman are going to have different experiences of womanhood and misogyny, just as a queer disabled white person is going to have a different experience than a disabled straight/cis person. It’s not a competition, but instead a recognition that identity impacts everyone’s lived experiences.

Great–that makes sense, right?

Well, now let’s discuss the way some have interpreted it and shifted its meaning. There is a belief that intersectionality is “a new caste system” that puts cishet white men at the bottom of our society. Those who believe this, think that it was created to give certain people special treatment. It’s been called a cult (for some reason?) or “identity politics on steroids” (again, what?).

So, some conversations around its meaning have resulted in critiques that make people believe that intersectionality suggests that, “we aren’t individuals who are to be judged on the basis of how we act but are merely members of groups to be judged on the basis of our group identity.” (source: Ben Shapiro, What is Intersectionality?)

Basically, from Crenshaw’s legal theory emerged the conspiracy theory that intersectionality is about a victimization competition.

HOW?

I want to make it clear that these are misguided perceptions that require quite a bit of misinterpretation (intentional or not) for us to get to this point. How in the world did this happen?

Based on what I have been able to find out, even though Crenshaw’s introduced the concept in 1989, intersectionality only became popular in 2015. The term got noticed by activists in leftists spaces and they quickly uplifted the importance of it and started to fold it into political conversations.

Then, after gaining the attention of the right, a huge debate regarding this formerly niche legal theory emerged. The biggest issue stems from misinterpretation – like a game of political telephone, with both sides having a different understanding of the term and its application to reality. Truly, both sides have also over-applied it to individual situations instead of exploring its impact on larger structures.

WHY?

Miseducation comes from simply not checking the facts. However, the consequences can be immense. Even if it was only one person who intentionally misinterpreted it, doing that would still fan the flames in a massive way. Especially in the context of our volatile political climate.

Furthermore, a person of power (politician) may use mass misinterpretation to their advantage to, generally speaking, create a non-existent issue that people can rally around. It’s also a classic example of the Straw Man Fallacy: a strategy reliant on punching down your opponent’s ideas instead of presenting your own. Since the main goal is to defeat the opponent, there is no actual need to be right; you just need to make sure people believe you. Plus, if it works and enough people believe the misinterpretation, your opponent wastes their time and effort on correcting the misinformation instead of sharing new ideas.

WHERE DOES THAT LEAVE US?

You are now more informed than you were before you got here! Hooray! But even if you know that this is a tactic that can and has been used, what do you look for? A lot of it is just practice and breaking down what is said but I can give a few pointers to get you started in the right direction!

• Identify the point of the conversation. Why is it happening, what does everyone hope to get out of it, etc.

• track (maybe intentionally).

HOW AND WHY

• Try to track down what the conversation participant’s first argument was, not what it turns into later. This will help you see if it starts to get of track (maybe intentionally).

• See if anyone is trying to use an opponent’s emotions or particular words to invalidate them and their argument.

• Research! Look up the people, movements, and words that concern the situation before and after the conversation takes place (look up the same thing from multiple sources!). Never take anyone’s word in these situations and inform yourself, if what they say is true then you only lost a few minutes of your time!

CONCLUSION

This list is not perfect and it certainly is not everything that someone could do to analyze an argument or conversation however it is a start. Even though there are many issues in the world that need to be considered, it is almost impossible to keep up with them and consider all sides with as little bias as possible. Political conversations are incredibly inaccessible to basically everyone and even this article may have been difficult to understand at points. All of these things are true but they have been true for a long time and because of that, there are already skills to combat these issues. Ever heard of critical thinking skills? Why don’t you join me for a little thought exercise as we wrap this up, all within the next article? (Pgs. 17 & 18)

Kimberlé W. Crenshaw is a prominent scholar in civil rights, critical race theory, and Black feminist legal theory. Her work highlights issues of inequality, including the “school-to-prison pipeline” and the criminalization of behavior among Black teenage girls. Crenshaw co-founded the Columbia Law School African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and co-authored Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women. The book drew attention to the killing of Black women and girls by police, and Crenshaw and the AAPF launched the #SayHerName campaign to raise awareness about police violence against Black women and girls. She writes for several publications and provides commentary for media outlets such as MSNBC and NPR. Crenshaw also hosts a podcast called Intersectionality Matters!. Her work on intersectionality has led to her facilitating workshops for human rights activists and constitutional court judges around the world. She is a woman who has been creating words for the indescribable in service of those who were never given the vocabulary to name their struggles.

IG: @ kimberlecrenshaw

LA SEPARACIÓN FAMILIAR

By: Daniela Luna

In this comic, I hope to represent what thousands of youth go through as they stick with their parents in hopes of a better future. There are many reasons for why immigrants choose to travel to America. Whether it’s for safety, a better life, or ,ore opportunities there are thousands of immigrants who need to take this dangerous and life changing journey. For youth, it is a time of confusion, fear, and anxiety. These feeling only get more intense as they are told they will not be ble to have their parents, their safety nets, with them, and will have to on on their own in a new and unknown place.

INTERSECTIONALITY WITH CLIMATE JUSTICE

Hello, my name is Carlos Barron and I’m a Youth Organizer at Youth Rise Texas. During my time as part of the Communication Cohort, I set out to interview and document our members and staff in an effort to answer our program’s founding question: Should Youth Rise Texas take on climate justice?

The goal of my project was to hear from the organization and for them to express their thoughts on not only the question, but also the context necessary to answer it. The topics included Youth Rise Texas, their personal history with the organization, their takes on intersectionality, and their understandings of climate justice.

In the first half of the interview, youth and staff were asked to explain the history of Youth Rise Texas, explain what were some of the missions and core values the organization holds within it, and discuss what the organization means to them . Throughout the process, Youth Rise Texas was described exactly as Lexie mentioned (pg. 2), an organization dedicated to youth voices & empowerment. Members and staff also identified the organization as a second home, a place to share their stories, somewhere they can create change, and a support system.

During the second half of the interview, youth and staff were asked about intersectionality, their knowledge of climate justice, and concluded with their own opinions on whether the organization should get involved. Ultimately, everyone interviewed agreed on the importance of intersectionality both in general organizing work and specifically within Youth Rise Texas. It was mentioned by multiple staff members that intersectionality is a large pillar that guides the work done within the organization. Furthermore, both youth and staff agreed that although Youth Rise Texas’ work does intersect with climate justice, we are currently too focused on our original issues of parental removal, healing justice, and SROs in schools to shift our vision into climate justice. Despite this, our interviewees did express hope for the potential of introducing more of climate justice into our work. Some suggested that it could primarily exist within our #StayWoke summer program, where facilitators could teach one or two lessons about climate justice. Other posited that we collaborate with local organizations to teach our youth & communities more about climate justice, and give them the resources to get involved.

DIY CLIMATE JUSTICE SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY

Whether your organization already has programs in place or if you are starting from scratch here is a guide on how to include climate justice intersectionality in your goal through social media!

ELEMENTS QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER YOUR NOTES

GOAL(S) AND/OR DEMAND(S)

• Why are you introducing climate justice in your goal?

• What do you want to achieve?

• How will you know when you’ve succeeded?

SOCIAL MEDIA TRACK

• What social media platform will you be using and why?

• How will this platform help you with your main goal?

EYE CATCHING

• What makes your mission & campaign one to stand out?

• What do you want to do differently?

TARGET AUDIENCE

• Who is your audience?

• Who is affected by your issue?

• Who isn’t affected but still cares?

COMMUNITY BUILDING & EXPOSURE

• What organizations could you collaborate with? How will your reach out?

• What others ways you will promote your social media mission/goal?

RESOURCES NEEDED

• What things/types of things do you need to achieve your goals?

• (Ex. funding, content making items, subscriptions & programs, a workspace, etc.)

TIMELINE

• In what timespan do you plan on achieving your goal? (Make time for building a team, delegating tasks, creating accounts, getting exposure through!)

A MOMENT FOR CRITICAL THINKING

Critical Thinking. Something that is made up of multiple skills that everyone says that one should develop but does anyone actually know what critical thinking is and looks like in practice? If asked, I’m not sure many would be able to give the correct answer or answer at all. So what is it? In its most basic form, it is the process of analyzing something to then make a judgment based on what you find. Within critical thinking, there are lots of skills but I am going to boil it down to six.

RECOGNIZE BIAS

You and everyone you know have never and will never be truly objective, it is slightly impossible with the ways humans work sadly. Everything we think and feel is informed by where we grew up and the people we grew up around as well as what we were exposed to. Being able to acknowledge this will allow for these biases to be dismantled over time.

RESEARCH

Being able to research effectively is a skill that many don’t even consider a skill but you need facts before you can answer any questions! Taking from multiple, unrelated, and reputable sources is a great start to whatever it is you are trying to do or find out!

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS FROM SAID RESEARCH

Research is instrumental but if you don’t have the ability to process and reach a conclusion after looking at the facts you gathered, then the facts can’t serve a purpose. 4

RELEVANCE JUDGMENT

Kinda related to the last one, the information you are able to gather will not have the same level of relevance. If it doesn’t apply, let it fly!

IDENTIFYING THE CORE PROBLEM

This also involves identifying outside forces that may or may not be affecting the same problem. Without being able to do this, you could continue going in circles forever if you keep missing what is keeping you from processing

Now that we have all of these building blocks, why don’t we put them to some good use? I’ve lightly touched on YRTX’s Communications Cohort and the project we have been assigned, but now is a good time to good over it again with some more detail. We were tasked with answering the question, “Should YRTX take on climate justice?” and to each choose a medium to answer that question within our own opinions. I’ll do that here and I hope observant readers will see where certain critical thinking skills are used within my process!

YOUTH LEADERSHIP

Youth Leadership is about giving youth agency and autonomy about issues that they care about and that concern them while also setting them up for success in pursuing more civic engagement as they get older and their problems change. Young people are often treated like public or private property than human beings and this aids in fighting that treatment as well.

PARENTAL REMOVAL

Parental removal can look like many things but the main two ways we deal with it at our organization is through incarceration and deportation. So, we deal with the issues that youth experiencing this may have as well as working to fight the systems that cause it to happen in the first place (the prison system, immigration, etc).

HEALING JUSTICE

This one is harder to explain but I will do my best, healing justice is the concept that there is a large gap between the health of marginalized communities and their privileged counterparts. Health is referring to physical, mental, and social well-being in this case and there is a large focus on the ways people are affected today by years of oppression and how that shows up.

Support to recognize this and finding ways to heal our communities and ourselves is how our healing justice programs are informed.

DO THEY INTERSECT?

Youth Leadership and Climate Justice pair quite nicely seeing as youth are going to be way more affected by climate change as time goes on than older people are and future generations are going to face unlivable weather conditions at this rate even though they were not even alive when the world was set on this course. Giving young people autonomy and agency to change this future now is imperative. Healing Justice’s biggest connecting link that I can find is the importance of interdependence and the ways in which our minds, bodies, and land have been damaged and continued to be damaged by systemic inequities and oppression. Parental removal was the one I had the hardest time finding a link for but I think I have something. The link is climate migration and this is the phenomenon of people being displaced from their homes because of the disastrous effects of climate change. Immigration and the parental removal that can come from that process is a very well understood thing so displacement that causes this is a very strong overlap.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, there is a lot more context that informs my answer. My stance is that we should definitely be involved in climate justice but, it should be through an approach that encourages work with other local climate justice non-profits. Recently, during an opportunity to attend a convening in Atlanta, I got to hear them talk about new strategies to implement or things to consider as they go forward in their work. However, something that stood out to me was the about the amount of work needed to be done and the lack of teamwork that organizations have shown. My takeaway is that we won’t see change unless there is cohesion with other organizers. If current orgs would worked together and focused on agreement, we would be able to create a solid foundation for structural change that couldn’t be hurt by the closing of one or more orgs. When it comes to climate justice, I believe that YRTX could put this into practice. This way, our finite energy and resources don’t deter us from fully serving our communities as we should. So, currently, I think YRTX would benefit more from working on our relationship with organizations near us and really starting to make us an organized front to make greater change. If we like it, maybe it can become a pillar later. This is my answer.

WHY IS INCORPORATING CLIMATE JUSTICE IMPORTANT?

Here are some examples of different organizations we admire for their incorporation of climate justice intersectionality into their mission. Can you match the topic with the reasoning behind the importance of climate justice intersectionality?

GENDER RIGHTS

Oxfam is a global organization that advocates for gender equality and climate action. They have created a zine on how climate, gender, and covid are intersected.

HUMAN RIGHTS

Amnesty International is one of the largest Human Rights organization in the world. They focus on human rights violations and climate care is a big part of their mission.

RACIAL EQUALITY

Black Millennials For Flint (#BM4F) is a grassroots, environmental justice and civil rights organization. They advocate against the crisis of lead exposure, specifically in POC communities.

Access to clean drinking water and good air quality are basic human rights. The climate emergency is a human rights crisis of unprecedented proportions. It threatens the civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights of present and future communities.

• Black folk are 75% more likely to live near toxic waste facilities.

• POCs are 40% more likely to live somewhere with extreme temperatures due to climate change.

• 68% of Black folk live within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant.

The climate crisis is worsening maternal health outcomes, jeopardizing progress on sexual rights, and increasing inequalities. The realization of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights will strengthen the adaptability of marginalized communities who are already experiencing the impacts of climate change.

The 2023 Youth Rise Texas Comms Cohort would like to thank FCYO for funding our pilot program and providing us with the founding question. We would also like to thank our Co-Executive Director of Communications & Development, Bria Virgil, for her support throughout the program.