By Emily Abendroth, PCW Senior Program Coordinator
Greetings everyone. My name is Emily Abendroth, and I joined the Sierra Club in May 2022 as the new Senior Program Coordinator of Philly Climate Works (PCW). I’ve been living in the city of Philadelphia for the past twenty years and have spent much of those previous two decades teaching literature/poetry and engaging in organizing against mass incarceration and for community health/healing. I was a founding member of Decarcerate PA, the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CADBI), and LifeLines: Voices Against the Other Death Penalty.
I am especially excited about how this position at Philly Climate Works allows me to make new connections and collaborate with others in the essential and ongoing work of connecting the struggles/demands for social and climate justice. Philly Climate Works envisions a strong, diverse, and broad-based climate justice movement led by people of color, low-income community members, and impacted workers in Philadelphia to build a more just, equitable, and resilient city. It advocates for the city to combat climate change by justly investing in its workforce and its impacted communities.
PCW’s major project of the last year and a half has been HERE4CJ (Housing Equity, Repair and Electrification for Climate Justice). HERE4CJ is a collaborative and coalition-building project to advance home repairs and building electrification in Philadelphia, prioritizing outcomes for black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) residents, low-income communities, and workers. HERE4CJ is committed to promoting and improving housing justice while also decarbonizing housing here in Philly. When we say “decarbonizing,” we mean moving away from fossil fuels and other energy systems that produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions whose release into the atmosphere accelerates climate change.
In this upcoming year, HERE4CJ is focusing its energies on: 1) Transitioning Philadelphia Gas Works away from fossil fuels and into a different kind of utility that no longer delivers gas to buildings; 2) Starting and sustaining pilot programs in the city that retrofit homes and electrify their energy delivery systems while prioritizing habitability and affordability for vulnerable residents; 3) Developing public-facing education and messaging materials to build power and support among decision makers for scalable solutions and meaningful policy interventions that advance home repairs and building electrification through a climate justice lens.
Both PCW and HERE4CJ operate from the belief that everyone can and should have access to healthy homes and affordable energy, and that such energy can and should be generated from non-extractive, renewable sources that reduce the damage which humans are currently exacting upon the planet. As a Philadelphia resident and community member, I share this vision and am grateful for the opportunity to devote a greater part of my time contributing to its actualization.
In the several years prior to taking this position, I found myself increasingly focusing my own efforts as an organizer on the intersections between the climate crisis and the many other social crises happening in my community. For instance, while we were working to end various human rights abuses taking place inside the Pennsylvania state prisons, it was impossible to ignore that many of those same prisons were built on top of or next to old coal mining sites and had active fracking pads/wells nearby, if not on, their property.
In the summer of 2020, several of us formed a small grassroots project here in Philly called Holobiont Laboratory that uses a combination of practical strategies, wild experimentation, affordable tools, and creative interventions to enhance community sustainability and local resilience to climate crisis. In the past two years that project has, among other things: installed autonomous solar power systems in community gardens, built solar-powered mesh boxes to support the distribution of free wireless service in North Philly, and designed a solar powered irrigation and misting system for a mobile shade structure prototype intended for use within city spaces that lack tree canopy or other green spaces. This has been exciting and rewarding work, and I’m eager for the many new ways that the role of Program Coordinator at Philly Climate Works allows me to extend and expand upon that.
Currently, our society's many and long-standing inequities -- such as the pervasive lack of healthcare access, structural racism, education disparities, mass incarceration, reproductive injustice, and a paucity of investment in public infrastructures -- are all being exacerbated and multiplied by the climate crisis within an extractive economy. That reality of deep interconnectivity is being made especially visible in the case of climate change feedback loops wherein the destruction and/or degradation of one habitat is resulting in significant and often unforeseen negative impacts elsewhere. And, of course, what is true about feedback loops in the natural environment is also true of those in our social environment as well.
However, those loops and reverberations need not be and are not always negative in their orientations. We also see them in the ways that a victory towards greater justice and/or improved health in one area can and often does open up the possibility for new successes and more widespread beneficial ripple effects in many other areas as well. In the spirit of those ripples, I look forward to participating (and continuing to participate) with all of you in some of the many faces and phases of that creative, reparative, and healing work.
If you’re interested in connecting, please feel free to reach out at emily.abendroth@sierraclub.org.
This blog was included as part of the August 2022 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!