After nearly a decade at the SF Bay Chapter and three years as your Chapter Director, I am setting out on a new adventure. Working for the Sierra Club — seven years as your Communications Manager and three as your Director — has been a life-changing experience for me. Faced with the horrors of the climate crisis, environmental racism, and biodiversity loss, the greatest relief I’ve found is in throwing myself into the work of fighting for the structural and policy changes that our planet so desperately needs. I’ve found tremendous hope and inspiration in the Sierra Club community: children who send us donations they’ve raised through lemonade stands and climate bike rides, hike leaders who remind us of the wonders of nature that we’re fighting to preserve, members who sit through hours-long council meetings to share their testimony, volunteers who give up their evenings and weekends to canvass and phonebank.
If you’re feeling despair or frustration with the status quo, I encourage you to come to a Sierra Club meeting and get involved. Because together, we can achieve so much. The incredible grassroots movement we’ve built here in the Bay Area means that we have the power to implement cutting-edge environmental policy, set important legal precedents, and inspire the next generation of activists. In my relatively short time at the Chapter, we’ve beaten back Big Coal, helped birth the now-booming Community Choice clean energy movement, saved irreplaceable biological hotspots like Tesla Park, been at the vanguard of the building electrification movement, and so much more.
Chapter leadership has embarked on a robust recruiting process for our next Director, who will join the Chapter as we enter our 100th year. I can’t wait to see what the next century has to bring. As I make the transition from Sierra Club staff to member and activist, I look forward to working beside you to fight the climate crisis, support healthier and more just communities, and protect the landscapes and wildlife we all love.
In solidarity,
Virginia Reinhart