Resourcing Youth-led Climate Justice Movements

Gloria is a young professional with strong personal connections to Environmental Justice issues. Her lived experiences growing up near the U.S.-Mexico border and later living as an immigrant in a former redlined community have reinforced her views on how planning can negatively impact socially vulnerable communities.

Gloria graduated from Sacramento State University with a double major in Metropolitan Area Planning and Geographic Information Systems. She currently serves as the Environmental Justice Advocacy Coordinator at Little Manila Rising. In this role, Gloria focuses on addressing external environmental justice advocacy needs. Additionally, she co-leads the Youth Organizers Piloting Program, empowering the next generation of advocates to champion environmental justice causes.

Roxana "Roxy" was born in El Salvador (Nahua-Pipil land) and migrated to the US when she was a young child. In 2012 she laid roots in the Bay Area (Ohlone land) and pursued her passion to work in service of achieving racial, educational, and social justice for the highest impacted communities. Roxy has over 10 years of experience in grassroots youth leadership development, youth organizing, campaign strategy, and coalition building to transform material conditions that impact QTBIPOC youth and their communities. One of the highlights of her organizing career is having expanded voting rights for 16-and-17-year-olds in Oakland school board elections. One of her hopes in her role as the Northern CA Lead Organizer is to lend her expertise to strengthen the youth organizing field in California. In her free time Roxy enjoys hiking, cooking, writing poetry, and traveling.

I am a Yurok Tribal Member from the Village of Morek. I grew up along the Klamath River and have relied upon the River and land to provide a fundamental foundation for me and my family. I am an active member of my community and proudly participate in my cultural practices, events and ceremonies. I have a degree in Early Childhood education and have had 12 Years of experience providing support and care to local families and children. I continue to work toward the well being of our eco cultural resources, revitalisation of our traditional practices and restoring our land and water. My goals is to contribute to restoring balance to the land, water and people.

 Lil Milagro Henriquez, M.A. (detribalized Nahuat Pipil descent), was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana and whose family survived Hurricane Katrina—one of the nation’s most infamous climate-change-related disasters. She is a 20-year veteran of social and environmental justice activism. She is a mother, passionate organizer, and lover of all things nerdy. In 2014, she won the Jonathan Daniels Memorial Fellowship for Social Justice award. In 2017, she founded Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to preparing and empowering frontline youth for climate change. In 2020, she received the Women’s Earth Alliance fellowship and the 2021 recipient of the Partners Advancing Climate Equity fellowship. She was recently recognized as one of the top 16 Eco-Warriors of 2021 by Marin Magazine and did a TEDx talk with the City of San Francisco illuminating the failures of conventional education to prepare youth for climate change in 2022. In 2023, she was featured in Climate Resilience by Kylie Flanagan as a climate resilience leader to watch and recently spoke as a panelist at the White House’s launch of the 5th National Climate Assessment report. 

Her work with Mycelium has been featured on PBS Newshour, the San Francisco Chronicle, For the Wild podcast, the Bay Area Monitor, and KQED radio.

She is currently the Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network. Mycelium has been named as one of the only organizations actively preparing young people for climate change in the United States by the International Transformational Resilience Coalition.

Genevieve Suan was previously a Youth Advocate under Little Manila Rising’s Youth Collective program. As a Youth Advocate, she became familiarized with South Stockton environmental justice efforts. Now a current Youth Organizer, Genevieve has taken a more action-oriented approach to environmental justice advocacy.