The Power of Environmental Justice Education For Youth and Communities of Color
Alexia Leclercq is Co-Founder and Director of Youth Organizing & Campaigns at StartEmpowerment.
By Alexia Leclercq
Growing up, I lived in many places from France to Singapore to Austin, Texas, where I currently reside. While living in these places, I was exposed to the social and environmental disparities that exist in our world firsthand and through storytelling.
My grandpa's stories about life under colonization, experiencing typhoons, and watching the negative effects of the petrochemical industry in communities of color in Texas are some of the reasons I became interested in the social-environmental world.
My journey as a climate activist started in middle school when I introduced a recycling program to my school. But it wasn't until my late teens that I learned the value of having both traditional and Indigenous knowledge, as it allowed me to understand the extent of systemic oppression and environmental racism seen in today’s society. With this knowledge, it became clear to me that the climate crisis is primarily a problem of our political economy.
In 2019, while I was at New York University, I attended the Wallerstein Exposition where 100+ climate education organizations showcased their programs, and was surprised when no one was focused on environmental justice or the social-political aspect of the climate crisis. After the exposition, I called my friend Kier and we wrote an environmental justice curriculum that we ended up implementing at a high school in the Bronx and that became the beginning of Start:Empowerment.
Since then, Start:Empowerment became a non-profit that has worked with over 5,000 students, created a climate justice community school, and led several advocacy projects from fighting pipelines to changing drinking water policies. Our mission at Start:Empowerment is to provide high-quality social-environmental justice education and programming, skills-based training, and grassroots organizing support to youth and communities of color!
““Our mission at Start:Empowerment is to provide high-quality social-environmental justice education and programming, skills-based training, and grassroots organizing support to youth and communities of color.” — Alexia Leclercq, founder, Start:Empowerment @eeealeixa #PowerToChangeStories”
Alexia Leclercq is Co-Founder and Director of Youth Organizing & Campaigns at StartEmpowerment and a member of the Tom’s of Maine Incubator. www.tomsofmaine.com/incubator; https://twitter.com/eeealexia ; https://www.instagram.com/alexia.leclercq/; https://www.start-empowerment.org/