Founding Members

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Network Advisors

Emi

Yoko-Young

Reclaim Our Power

Biography coming soon.

Emi

Yoko-Young

Reclaim Our Power

Dr. Angela

Chalk

Founder & Executive Director, Healthy Community Services

Dr. Angela M. Chalk is a 4th generation 7th Ward resident. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Healthy Community Services, a non-profit organization, located in the 7th Ward of New Orleans, LA. She is a Past President of the Louisiana Public Health Association and has served on the American Public Health Association’s Center for Climate, Health & Equity Steering Committee. Chalk's expertise and research focuses on Community Science, the Urban Heat Island Effect and its effects to overburden African American Communities. Her passion and life's work is highlighted by her commitment to mitigate the impacts of severe weather events, urban flooding, food insecurity and coastal resiliency at the intersection of climate health and public health.

Additionally, she is a Climate Health Ambassador with Eco-America as well as a Community Science Fellow with the American Geo Physical Thriving Earth Exchange. Healthy Community Services received the 2022 Outstanding Non-Profit Award by the U.S. Water Alliance.

Dr. Chalk received a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communications; and a Minor: in Public Health from Dillard University; an MS in Health Care Management from the University of New Orleans, and a Doctor of Health Administration from Virginia University of Lynchburg. Dr. Chalk serves as a Visiting Adjunct Professor at the Tulane University Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health, Environmental Health Sciences Department. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.

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Dr. Angela

Chalk

Founder & Executive Director, Healthy Community Services

Cynthia

Hererra

Consultant, Oakshire Consulting, LLC

Cynthia Herrera is a mission-driven sustainability professional with over thirteen years of experience advancing racial equity in public policy and program design at the intersection of health, energy & community resilience. She holds a Master of Science degree in Sustainability Management from Columbia University's Climate School and a certificate in Climate Change and Public Health from Yale's School of Public Health. She is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer and former Senior Climate Justice Fellow with the Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice & Health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. She currently serves as Senior Director of Health, Energy & Community Resilience at Green & Healthy Homes Initiative headquartered in Baltimore, MD.

Cynthia

Hererra

Consultant, Oakshire Consulting, LLC

Sarah

Saydun

Climate Planner & Community Organizer

Sarah Marie Saydun is a climate planner and community organizer. They have spent over a decade in Boston working with youth and organizing for environmental justice, and they currently work with community groups and municipal governments across New England to develop inclusive and participatory climate planning processes. In their spare time, you can find them tending lovingly to their plants, attempting to roller skate, or devouring urban fantasy novels like N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

Sarah

Saydun

Climate Planner & Community Organizer

Chris

Selig

Consultant, Christine Selig Associates & Advisory Board Member of PODER

Chris (Christine, she/her) is an independent Consultant for Christine Selig Associates and an advisory board member of PODER and has lived in the Mission District for over 25 years. Chris has consulted with PODER to co-develop equitable building decarbonization climate justice work. She received her PhD from the University of
California, Berkeley, with a specialty in political education, popular education, and social transformation. She has over 20 years of experience in applied participatory research, working with government, NGOs, CBOs, and philanthropy in the US and Internationally. Chris has focused her career on environmental justice and community-based solutions.The granddaughter of Scottish immigrants and French and German heritage protestants, Chris grew up in rural Western Massachusetts.

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Chris

Selig

Consultant, Christine Selig Associates & Advisory Board Member of PODER

Faculty

Nwamaka

Agbo

CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund (REF)

Biography coming soon.

Nwamaka

Agbo

CEO of the Kataly Foundation and Managing Director of the Restorative Economies Fund (REF)

Anthony

Giancatarino

Strategy Partner, Taproot Earth and Strategy Lead for the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy

Anthony (he/him) is Strategy Partner for Taproot Earth. Anthony brings over a decade of experience advancing energy, climate, and economic policies through participatory policymaking processes. He has worked from the local to national levels, most recently growing statewide climate justice efforts in Pennsylvania.

Anthony led the Just Community Energy Transition Project for six years. In this role, he co-created and authored multiple toolkits and movement resources, including the Energy Democracy Scorecard (in partnership with the Emerald Cities Collaborative), the People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy (in partnership with the United Frontlines Table), Collaborating for Bold Possibilities (in partnership with the Climate Justice Alliance), Black Work Matters: Green Jobs Report (in partnership with POWER), and the co-creation of the We Power Policy Toolkit. Additionally, he has supported the design and implementation of climate justice fellowship programs that support the leadership and decision-making of frontline communities. Anthony spent seven years at the Center for Social Inclusion (now known as Race Forward) working with grassroots leaders — particularly in the Gulf South — on strategies to achieve racial equity in US policies. Anthony has an MPA from New York University and a BA in Theology and Political Science from the University of Scranton. He is the father of three rooted in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on Lenni Lenape lands.

Anthony

Giancatarino

Strategy Partner, Taproot Earth and Strategy Lead for the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy

Taj

James

Director, Full Spectrum Labs | Partner, Full Spectrum Capital Partners | Founder, Movement Strategy Center

Taj James is a father, poet, practitioner, strategist, designer, and philanthropic and capital advisor. Curator at Full Spectrum Labs and Principal and Cofounder at Full Spectrum Capital Partners. Taj is also the Founder and former Director of the Movement Strategy Center. He is an official dance instructor at the intersection of wild possibility and urgent practicality, where play and unleashed potential find each other.

Taj thrives in building a community around the shared questions that matter most in our lives: how can we build relationships and express the love needed to transform our world? How do we support leaders and communities to unlock potential and possibility, see the ecosystem and the whole, and design and act in ways that bend the long arc of history toward justice?

Working with transformational leaders, small teams, networks, and anchor institutions, Taj enjoys exploring what it means to nurture the community we have and create the community we need. What are our sacred responsibilities as stewards of land, capital, energy, and life to past generations and our children’s grandchildren?

By living into these questions together, Taj works to create space and fertile ground for seeds to be planted and nurtured, for fruit to be harvested, and for us to thrive in the web of our watersheds and relational ecosystems.

Taj

James

Director, Full Spectrum Labs | Partner, Full Spectrum Capital Partners | Founder, Movement Strategy Center

Colin

Miller

Senior Associate, E/J Solutions | Communications Organizer, Reclaim Our Power

Colin has over a decade of experience as a community organizer, coalition builder, and convener. His skills include community outreach and mobilization, real-time interpretation, and meeting facilitation. He is the former Coordinator of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition and formerly provided interpretation for the Berta Cáceres International Feminist Organizing School. Colin is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish.

Colin

Miller

Senior Associate, E/J Solutions | Communications Organizer, Reclaim Our Power

Levana

Saxon

Co-founder, Partners for Collaborative Change

Biography coming soon!

Levana

Saxon

Co-founder, Partners for Collaborative Change

Marybelle

Tobias

Founder and Principal, E/J Solutions

Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Marybelle graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a degree in Political Science/Political Theory concentration and received a law degree from the University of California, San Francisco College of the Law (formerly UC Hastings). In 2007, Marybelle began her legal career as a nonprofit attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, co-directing the Civil Rights Project with late executive director, Luke Cole. Marybelle represented the town of Allensworth and other environmental justice communities across California’s Central Valley and the United States in successful civil rights and environmental litigation and federal administrative complaints, Marybelle worked in tandem with community organizers so that all cases were embedded into community-based campaigns.

Following adoption of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, Marybelle expanded her focus to include climate justice policy. Marybelle represented community groups working on the California Air Resources Board’s 2008, 2013, and 2017 Climate Scoping Plans, the state’s blueprint for achieving its greenhouse gas reduction targets. At Public Advocates, she led the 535 Coalition’s successful efforts to help the state of California develop meaningful benefits for disadvantaged communities through the California Climate Investment program. The campaign successfully unified local, regional, and statewide coalitions, secured robust investment guidelines, and ensured hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to climate projects that benefit environmental justice communities across the state, including affordable housing in transit-oriented development, clean mass transit, clean freight and urban forestry.

During this time, Marybelle also taught environmental justice as a visiting lecturer at both the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and the International University College of Turin. After leaving the nonprofit sector in 2016, Marybelle founded Environmental/Justice Solutions to advise public and private actors on how to carry out meaningful community engagement and design and implement equitable and sustainable environmental justice initiatives.

In her free time, Marybelle enjoys playing the piano, writing music and fiction, painting, and reading novels and magazines.

Marybelle

Tobias

Founder and Principal, E/J Solutions

Our Network

Founding Members

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Network Advisors

NACRP Fund Advisors

Faculty

Members

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