About - Climate Justice Alliance

About

Climate Justice Alliance

Introduction

Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) formed in 2013 to create a new center of gravity in the climate movement by uniting frontline communities and organizations into a formidable force. Our translocal organizing strategy and mobilizing capacity is building a Just Transition away from extractive systems of production, consumption and political oppression, and towards resilient, regenerative and equitable economies. We believe that the process of transition must place race, gender and class at the center of the solutions equation in order to make it a truly Just Transition.

Together, We

1) Inspire and organize bold action by communities on the frontlines of climate change to challenge the extractive economy that is harming people and ecosystems;
2) Build resilient, regenerative and equitable economies rooted in place-based webs of social and ecological relationships;
3) Expose false promises posed as ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis, so that precious resources are not allocated to programs that exacerbate social or economic inequality or cause further ecological disruption;
4) Confront governments and industry to act boldly on climate change.

Our members have won significant victories against polluting and extractive industries, preventing new carbon emissions from reaching our atmosphere. We are building local alternatives that center traditional ecological and cultural knowledge and create a pathway for a regenerative future.

 

Membership Profile

We are a growing member alliance of 89 urban and rural frontline communities, organizations and supporting networks in the climate justice movement. Member organizations lead CJA by anchoring major Just Transition projects focused on the social, racial, economic and environmental justice issues of climate change.

We are locally, tribally, and regionally-based racial and economic justice organizations of Indigenous Peoples, Black, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and poor white communities who share legacies of racial and economic oppression and social justice organizing.

Example areas of work include popular education, Just Transition, Energy Democracy, PCM and Reinvest in Our Power.

Member Highlight

 


The Chisholm Legacy Project

Rooted in a Just Transition Framework, the Chisholm Legacy Project serves as a vehicle to connect Black communities on the frontlines of climate justice with resources to traverse the path from vision to strategy to action plan to implementation to transformation. In support of frontline leadership, the project seeks to link movements and mainstream entities with the tools necessary to advance systems change centered in equity and justice.

Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV)

Acta Non Verba: Youth Urban Farm Project (ANV) elevates life in Oakland and beyond by challenging oppressive dynamics and environments through urban farming. Founded and led mainly by women of color from the surrounding neighborhood and larger community, ANV creates a safe and creative outdoor space for children, youth, and families in East Oakland, CA. ANV engages and strengthens young people’s understanding of nutrition, food production, and healthy living as well as strengthens their ties to the community.

Alliance for Appalachia

The Alliance for Appalachia is a regional alliance with the goals of ending a devastating form of coal mining called mountaintop removal coal mining, putting a halt to destructive coal technologies and supporting a sustainable, just economy in Appalachia.

Alternatives for Community and Environment

ACE builds the power of communities of color and lower income communities in New England to eradicate environmental racism and classism and achieve environmental justice. We believe that everyone has the right to a healthy environment and to be decision-makers in issues affecting our communities.

Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative

Another Gulf Is Possible Collaborative explicitly centers women of color leadership from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, bringing indigenous, latinx and desi (a.k.a. “brown”) perspectives into a region often split physically, politically and socially on black and white racial lines, through cultural organizing, arts-based trauma healing, direct action, policy advocacy, and locally-led training.

Asian Pacific Environmental Network

APEN brings together a collective voice to develop an alternative agenda for environmental, social and economic justice. Our work focuses on Asian and Pacific Islander communities.

Black Dirt Farm Collective

Black Dirt Farm is a small-scale diversified agroecological farm operation based in Preston, MD at Mt. Pleasant Acres Farms.

California Environmental Justice Alliance

California Environmental Justice Alliance is a statewide, community-led alliance that works to achieve environmental justice by advancing policy solutions. Together, we are growing the statewide movement for environmental health and social justice.

Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy

Working in collaboration with grassroots communities, policy makers and researchers, CEED conducts research and provides community education on important energy, environment, and development issues – so that all members of society may effectively participate in public decision-making.

Center for Story-based Strategy

CSS is a national movement-building organization dedicated to harnessing the power of narrative for social change. We offer training and strategic support to social justice organizations and alliances to change the story on the issues that matter most.

Communities for a Better Environment

CBE provides residents in blighted and heavily polluted urban communities in California with organizing skills, leadership training and legal, scientific and technical assistance, so that they can successfully confront threats to their health and well-being.

Community Housing & Empowerment Connections Inc. (CHEC)

Community Housing & Empowerment Connections Inc. (CHEC) is a community-based organization whose primary focus is building community power on the frontlines to address climate and environmental justice through: Delaware EJ Community Partnership; Community Air Monitoring Network; and Clean Energy Future 4 All Campaign. We are the BIPOC communities that we serve.

Community to Community Development

We believe that another world is possible and we are active participants with other popular people’s movements. We strive to reclaim our humanity by redefining power in order to end settler colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy in their external and internalized forms.

Connecticut Coalition for Economic and Environmental Justice

The mission of Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice is to protect urban environments primarily in Connecticut through educating communities, through promoting change in local, state, and national policy, and through promoting individual, corporate and government responsibility towards our environment. We define environment as including the places that we live, work, play, and go to school.

Cooperation Jackson

The broad mission of Cooperation Jackson is to advance the development of economic democracy in Jackson, Mississippi by building a solidarity economy anchored by a network of cooperatives and other types of worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.

Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

The organization was founded to ensure that Detroit’s African American population participated in the food movement and because we are the vast majority of the population in Detroit, that we are in the leadership on that movement locally.

East Michigan Environmental Action Council

For over forty years, EMEAC has been working in the community, in the courts, in township halls and in schools. Our work is rooted in the principles of environmental justice and in community organizing. We work to fight environmental racism and extreme energy while building community solutions and resilience inside Detroit: the community where we live, work and play.

Energy Justice Network

Energy Justice is the grassroots energy agenda, supporting communities threatened by polluting energy and waste technologies. Taking direction from our grassroots base and the Principles of Environmental Justice, we advocate a clean energy, zero-emission, zero-waste future for all.

Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint

The Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint grows diverse environmental justice leaders and just relationships to secure a healthy, sustainable future by and for Flint residents.

FANG Collective

Founded in 2013, The FANG Collective seeks to escalate resistance to the fracked gas industry while supporting other movements for justice.

Farmworker Association of Florida

FWAF’s long-standing mission is to build power among farmworker and rural low-income communities to respond to and gain control over the social, political, workplace, economic, health, and environmental justice issues that impact their lives.

Florida Rising

Florida is changing demographically and politically, and Florida Rising is poised to be the democratic engine that helps move the Sunshine State onto the path of equity and justice for all people and not just a small band of well-connected elites.

Florida Rising works daily to create an inclusive multiracial, multilingual and multicultural movement that seeks to unite people across economic, racial, religious and gender lines through a shared love of a democracy that serves all.

Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives

GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 800 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration.

Got Green

Got Green organizes for environmental, racial, and economic justice as a South Seattle-based grassroots organization led by people of color and low income people. We cultivate multi-generational community leaders to be central voices in the Green Movement in order to ensure that the benefits of the green movement and green economy reach low income communities and communities of color.

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance

GGJ is a national alliance of US-based grassroots organizing (GRO) groups organizing to build an agenda for power for working and poor people and communities of color. We understand that there are important connections between the local issues we work on and the global context, and we see ourselves as part of an international movement for global justice.

Grassroots International

Grassroots International works to create a just and sustainable world by building alliances with progressive movements. We provide grants to our Global South partners and join them in advocating for social change. Our primary focus is on land, water and food as human rights and nourishing the political struggle necessary to achieve these rights.

GreenRoots

GreenRoots works to achieve environmental justice through community organizing by engaging residents, environmentalist and health advocates.

Indigenous Environmental Network

IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues. IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities.

Institute for Policy Studies

IPS believes that true systems change happens through the power of social movements. To reach our shared vision, IPS activist-scholars work with grassroots groups, donors, policymakers, and other allies to shift public discourse, promote game-changing policy, build capacity of social movements, and grow the next generations of public scholars.

Ironbound Community Corporation

Founded in 1969, ICC’s mission is to engage and empower individuals, families and groups in realizing their aspirations and, together, work to create a just, vibrant and sustainable community.

Jobs With Justice

Jobs With Justice believes that all workers should have collective bargaining rights, employment security, and a decent standard of living within an economy that works for everyone. We bring together labor, community, student, and faith voices at the national and local levels to win improvements in people’s lives and shape the public discourse on workers’ rights and the economy.

Just Transition Alliance

The Just Transition Alliance was founded as a coalition of environmental justice and labor organizations with frontline workers, and community members who live along the fence-line of polluting industries. We create healthy workplaces and communities focusing on contaminated sites that should be cleaned up, and the transition to clean production and sustainable economies.

Just Transition Northwest Indiana

Formed out of years of local organizing, Just Transition Northwest Indiana (JTNWI), was established in April 2020. JTNWI launched, in part, to ensure the clean closure of the NIPSCO Michigan City plant, to remove the toxic coal ash waste that is poisoning the local water supply, degrading air quality, and threatening Lake Michigan.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth

We believe that today we have our best chance in decades to build New Power in Kentucky. New Power means thousands of new jobs, healthy communities and opportunities for our children.

Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition

The Kentucky Student Environmental Coalition is a group of students working in solidarity with one another to pressure our universities and communities to make better choices for the planet.

Kheprw Institute

Community Empowerment Through Self Mastery is the mantra of our organization. It highlights our focus on developing people’s capacity to think and act critically to improve themselves, their community, and speak from their experiences.

Labor Community Strategy Center

The strategy center is a think tank/act tank for regional, national and international movement building. Our campaigns, projects, and publications are rooted in working class communities of color and address the totality of urban life with a particular focus on civil rights, environmental justice, public health, global warming, and the criminal legal system.

Labor Network for Sustainability

We believe that workers and environmentalists must be engaged together in order for our society to address the dual deepening crises of both climate and income inequality.

Little Village Environmental Justice Organization

The mission of LVEJO is to organize with our community to accomplish environmental justice in Little Village and achieve the self-determination of immigrant, low-income, and working-class families.

Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition

The Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition (MEJC) works to achieve a clean, healthy, and safe environment for Michigan’s most vulnerable residents in alignment with the Principles of Environmental Justice.

Micronesia Climate Change Alliance

Micronesia Climate Change Alliance is a network of individuals and corporations dedicated to creating community-centered solutions to climate change. MCCA is committed to building a resilient community through planned action, a collective understanding of climate change as a threat to South Pacific Islanders as well as enforcing urgency around our shared home.

Minnow

Minnow envisions a world where all beings experience joy, safety, and belonging in right relationship with land and each other. Settler colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy have delayed this world’s existence by severing the relationship between colonized peoples and their lands in an effort to hoard the Earth for profit-driven extraction. This has caused genocide, destroyed ecosystems, accelerated climate change, and created the racial wealth gap. Only by restoring these severed relationships to land for colonized people, specifically those who tend to the Earth to cultivate our sustenance, can we end the cycles of violence of these systems that prevent the arrival of the world we deserve. Our role in this transformation of the world is to restore secure land tenure in California for farmers of color and indigenous communities.

Movement Generation

Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. We are rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient and life-affirming local economies.

Movement Strategy Center

MSC supports people, organizations, alliances, and networks to have the leadership, vision and relationships necessary to move from grievance to governance, from incremental change to transformation.

NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program

Environmental injustice, including the proliferation of climate change, has a disproportionate impact on communities of color and low income communities in the United States and around the world. The NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program was created to support community leadership in addressing this human and civil rights issue.

National Family Farm Coalition

NFFC promotes socially just farm and food policies and empowers family farmers to reduce corporate control of agriculture.

Native Organizers Alliance

The Native Organizers Alliance, a project of the Alliance for a Just Society, is dedicated to building the organizing capacity of activists, organizers and groups building people’s power among native peoples across the continent. It also provides a forum for Native organizers and organizations to work in collaboration with each other, share best practices, and promote their work with national allies.

NC Climate Justice Collective

By convening intergenerational, multiracial, multi-issue spaces for popular education, the NC Climate Justice Collective engenders the cultural shift necessary to address the root causes of climate change while broadening grassroots engagement in the climate movement at the local, regional and state levels.

New Economy Coalition

The New Economy Coalition (NEC) is a network of organizations imagining and building a future where people, communities, and ecosystems thrive. Together, we are creating deep change in our economy and politics—placing power in the hands of people and uprooting legacies of harm—so that a fundamentally new system can take root.

New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA)

New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA) is a statewide coalition of Environmental Justice advocates and organizations. We have been instrumental in making Environmental Justice and cumulative impacts a part of mainstream environmental work in the state.

New York City EJ Alliance

NYC-EJA empowers its member organizations to advocate for improved environmental conditions and against inequitable environmental burdens by the coordination of campaigns designed to inform City and State policies.

OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon

Founded in 2006 by and for people of color and low income, OPAL is the grassroots-driven hub at the center of Oregon’s movement for Environmental Justice. We develop community members’ leadership skills, and motivate them to take action. Together, we lead campaigns, impact public processes, and win victories in policy and procedure to achieve a safe and healthy environment where we live, work, learn, play, and pray.

Organización Boricuá

Ser el ente primordial y canalizador de la agricultura ecológica en Puerto Rico.

Promover la soberanía alimentaria y la conservación del ambiente, siendo un ente facilitador para la comunidad a través de la educación y capacitación en agricultura ecológica y familiar, las alianzas locales e internacionales y el rescate y la perpetuación de prácticas tradicionales, ancestrales e integralmente sanas.

Parable of the Sower Intentional Community Cooperative

Parable of the Sower Intentional Community worker – owned cooperative is for black women with children. They are women with partners gay and straight, bi and trans, children and grandparents, but the ten core cooperative members are black women. We are working on the bylaws and exactly how we will live this out, day to day, not 9-5, but 24 hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, in charge of our own destiny.

People Organizing to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights

PODER’s mission is to organize with Latino immigrant families and youth to put into practice people-powered solutions that are locally based, community led and environmentally just. We nurture everyday people’s leadership, regenerate culture, and build community power.

People’s Justice Council

People’s Justice Council engages and equips communities with tools and access to build power from the grassroots up for change at the policy level.

Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada

The Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada (PLAN) was founded in 1994 to bring together diverse and potentially competing organizations into one cohesive force for social and environmental justice in Nevada. Since 1994, our organization has grown from 12 original founding member groups to a current membership of nearly 30 organizations. PLAN is recognized by the IRS as a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charitable organization.

Push Buffalo

PUSH Buffalo is mobilizing residents to create strong neighborhoods with quality, affordable housing; to expand local hiring opportunities; and to advance economic and environmental justice in Buffalo.

Rich City Rides

Rich City Rides is creating opportunities for the most vulnerable members of society by using cycling to improve health, economic stability, and individual and collective capacity.

Richmond Our Power Coalition

The Richmond Our Power Coalition is made up of local community organizations fighting to keep us in our homes, make sure we have clean healthy air, water, food, transportation, and different ways we can have meaningful work and co-governance that’s inclusive of the most marginalized of our communities. Collectively we hope to develop models of success for a Just Transition for and by local frontline community members.

Rising Tide North America

Rising Tide is a grassroots network of groups and individuals who take direct action to confront the roots causes of climate change and promote local, community-based solutions to the climate crisis. Employing popular education and direct action to address the root causes of climate change with a focus on climate justice, Rising Tide now spans three continents.

Smile Trust

The Smile Trust, Inc. is an International Nonprofit Organization that Fights against homelessness and works toward fixing food insecurities. Our programming includes: Smile Day, The Community Emergency Operations Center, Rent Gap and Agrihoods.

Soil Generation

Soil Generation is a constituent-led coalition that collaboratively magnifies the voice of urban agriculture, garden and open space advocates across the City of Philadelphia.

Soulardarity

Soulardarity is building a brighter future in Highland Park with education, organizing, and people-powered clean energy. We are working to install solar-powered streetlights, save money on energy bills, and work together with our neighboring communities to build a just and equitable energy system for all.

Southwest Organizing Project

The SouthWest Organizing Project was founded in 1980 by young activists of color to empower our communities in the SouthWest to realize racial and gender equality and social and economic justice.

Southwest Workers Union

Based in San Antonio, Texas, SWU empowers and organizes its 3,000 members through education, leadership development, and direct action. The aim is to build multi-generational grassroots power to create sustainable systemic change for social, economic, and environmental justice and to build the movement for dignity and justice.

Sunflower Alliance

The Sunflower Alliance brings together individuals and organizations committed to environmental justice and the health and safety of all Bay Area communities threatened by toxic pollution and climate change. We work toward building an equitable, sustainable economy fueled by renewable energy.

Sustainable Economies Law Center

Sustainable Economies Law Center cultivates a new legal landscape that supports community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment.

Taproot Earth

We in the Gulf South are on the frontlines of these crises and we have had enough. The climate crisis is here: the time is now for us to address the root causes of these problems. This is not just a Southern problem — it’s a global one. And our solutions require solidarity from the Gulf South to the Global South.

Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services

Our goal is to promote environmental protection through education, policy development, community awareness, and legal action. Our guiding principle is that everyone, regardless of race or income, is entitled to live in a clean environment.

The Ruckus Society

The Ruckus Society is a multi-racial network of trainers dedicated to providing the necessary tools, preparation, and support to build direct action capacity for ecological justice and social change movements.

Thousand Currents

Thousand Currents envisions a world in which self-determined and connected peoples share and uphold the abundance of life. There is enough…for all and for future generations.

Trade Unions for Energy Democracy

Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) is a global, multi-sector initiative to advance democratic direction and control of energy in a way that promotes solutions to the climate crisis, energy poverty, the degradation of both land and people, and responds to the attacks on workers’ rights and protections. There are 76 trade union bodies representing workers from 24 countries currently participating in the TUED network.

UPROSE

Founded in 1966, UPROSE is Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization. An intergenerational, multi-racial, nationally recognized community organization, UPROSE promotes sustainability and resiliency in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood through community organizing, education, indigenous and youth leadership development, and cultural/artistic expression.

Urban Tilth

Urban Tilth cultivates agriculture in west Contra Costa County to help our community build a more sustainable, healthy, and just food system. We hire and train residents to work with schools, community-based organizations, government agencies, businesses, and individuals to develop the capacity to produce 5% of our own food supply.

US Food Sovereignty Alliance

USFSA works to end poverty, rebuild local food economies, and assert democratic control over the food system. We believe all people have the right to healthy, culturally appropriate food, produced in an ecologically sound manner.

Vision and Principles

Frontline, community-based organizations have the solutions to the extractive industrial systems that are eroding human’s primary means of existence on the planet. Nature and humans are interdependent. Effective climate crisis solutions honor human rights and the rights of nature. Localized democracies that champion community rights to energy, land, water, and food sovereignty are the best answers to combating exploitation.

Shared leadership produces community wellbeing and the most innovative solutions to our climate crisis. Workers should be at the forefront of shaping new economies rooted in fairness, equity and ecological values.

What Do We Mean by Just Transition

Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste free. The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.

What We Do

We build “local living economies” models focused on clean community energy, regional food systems, zero waste, efficient, affordable, and durable housing, public transportation, ecosystem restoration and stewardship within scientific planetary boundaries.

We promote community resilience, economic equity and climate stability by creating new climate jobs with equitable relationships, good-paying salaries, and that put workers formerly employed by extreme energy industries to work in ecosystems that reduce the cost and pollution burden for present and future generations.

Our Power Communities

Just Transition local living economy model projects underway by seven member organizations in eight cities.

People’s Climate March

We organized people to lead the historic Peoples’ Climate Marches in NYC and DC.

Pathways

1End the Era of Extreme Energy (fossil fuels, nuclear power, waste and biomass incineration, landfill gas, mega-hydro, and agrofuels) which pose extreme risks to local ecosystems and communities.

2Reduce carbon emissions in line with what science says is necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.

3Build urban and rural economic societies that offer real-world solutions to the climate crisis and strengthen worker and community governance by advocating for collective worker and community control of land, water, and food resources.

 

4Popularize a framework for a Just Transition to Local Living Economies by organizing economic priorities that provide a path to sustainable, resilient, and regenerative economic systems that transition away from exploitative and extractive economies.

5Collaborate on a national “climate jobs” program creating 10 million good, green, and family-supporting jobs through meaningful work.

 

6Develop and implement infrastructure that protects and promotes cultural and biological diversity, creates local seed banks and protects communities and workers that are most vulnerable to pollution, climate disasters, and economic disruptions.

 

 

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