A lifelong artivist and community organizer, attorney by trade, college professor and homeschooling mother, Mama Erin has joined the Sierra Club of Michigan to bring together her passion for Mama Earth and her love of her people through a lens of decolonization, reIndigenization, and reclamation. 

"Mama Erin is the Sierra Club of Michigan's newest community organizer, where she will be facilitating green stormwater infrastructure programs in addition to her personal gardening work anf her professional work with Black urban farmers in the city of Detroit. She is the Chair of the Board of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network and a co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund."

Mama Erin Preston Johnson, Esq. is an unapologetically Black, lifelong organizer and unschooling mama of a 7-year-old as well as co-founder of Detroit’s Urban Forest School. Mama Erin honed her skills as an organizer and activist during her enrollment at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she served as President of the campus NAACP and earned a B.A. in History. She went on to the Howard University of Law where she graduated as the President of her class and has practiced law in the District of Columbia and Michigan for the past 17 years. 

Most importantly, a student of the Earth centered culture and the cosmology of her African ancestors, Mama Erin’s most meaningful contributions come from intentional cultivation of the land, her family, her community and her village. Being a musician, grower, educator, community leader and mother inform her work leading the Urban Forest School, a free, outdoor, nature-based, culturally rooted program for BIPOC Detroit children under 12, as well as her other community endeavors. Mama Erin is a co-founder of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, current board president of the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network (DBCFSN) and a Board Member at the Black to the Land Coalition. She is also a member-owner of the Detroit People's Food Co-op, which is opening to the public on May 1, 2024, in Detroit, MI!