Can we navigate a Just Transition through COVID-19 and the climate crisis? What would it take to make this happen and how can we get started in our communities right now?

We dug into these questions and more with Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan from Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project.

Michelle was a founding co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and recently published an article outlining the 10 reasons why the time for Permanently Organized Communities is now.

The following is an excerpt from the first episode of the third season of Shareable’s The Response podcast.

Tom Llewellyn: Can give a brief history of how Movement Generation came to be and explain some of the work that you do?

Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan: Movement generation started about 13 years ago. We are a collective of organizers who came out of union organizing, environmental justice, economic justice, workers rights, racial justice, a range of different organizing fronts. It was at a moment in which many of our sectors of the movement were not necessarily engaging with an understanding of how climate change was going to impact our understanding of what it was going to take to transform the situations that our communities find themselves in.

Movement Generation is working with a pretty amazing array of organizations, both nationally and internationally through the Climate Justice Alliance. Can tell us a little bit about who’s in the Alliance and what you have accomplished so far?

It’s an amazing body of people who have been organizing in their communities for decades. It includes the Indigenous Environmental Network as a founder and Grassroots Global Justice Alliance as a founding member, right to the Right to the City Alliance as a founding member. Those are networks of grassroots groups that are deeply rooted in place. They bring a perspective of the root causes of these crises that we find ourselves in.

Read the full article about navigating just transition during crises by Tom Llewellyn at Shareable.