Photo courtesy of Heather Wilson
Hello from Massachusetts, where we welcomed incoming Executive Director Ben Jealous to the Bay State earlier this week. During the visit, our staff, volunteers, and leaders shared with Ben how our locally-focused organizing has led to major victories protecting our forests, our waters, and our communities.
Sierra Club has been at the forefront of victories nationally and statewide when it comes to climate and clean energy, but we’ve also found by going deep and going local we can accomplish even more.
Before I came to work at Sierra Club, I’d learned first hand that we are most powerful when communities work together. As part of a volunteer team working on climate action planning in my municipality, it was clear that much of the climate action work in Massachusetts was happening at the community level, and that our potential to achieve climate progress depended on forging strong connections with one another.
Last year, with major legislative victories for climate at both the national and state levels, we knew there was opportunity to drive even more change by working together at the city-level to lower emissions and protect our lands. Staff, interns, and volunteers collaborated to create a website, masstownsforclimate.org, which has become a climate action hub for over 200 municipalities and counting.
And just this year, our chapter supported an enormous victory in Hyde Park, a vibrant neighborhood in Boston, as environmental justice groups in the Crane Ledge Woods Coalition defeated an attempt by a developer to clearcut the urban Crane Ledge Woods for luxury apartments.
Victories like this show the power of grassroots organizing and the way that we can overcome divisions and partisan politics to ensure that every single one of us can live in a healthy environment. This is something that Ben has emphasized as he comes into his role.
Reflecting on what he heard from our Chapter, Ben said, "It's clear that, each time -- whether working on forest protection, stopping the dumping of radioactive water into the Bay, or ensuring that Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding is implemented in a way that brings jobs to the Cape so people can stay and raise their families -- it's our intrepid volunteers working on the front lines of issues in their own communities, organizing other volunteers and working with partners who are leading real change."
We are so happy to have a new Executive Director who not only has an organizing background, but who is also willing to take the time to listen to our story.
If you are in Massachusetts, we would love to have you be a part of our 2023 volunteer team as we continue to build power to tackle the climate and biodiversity crises right here in the Bay State.