Policy, Climate Justice, and Advocacy Program

Co-directors:

Recognizing the disparate impact climate change has and will have on BIPOC land stewards, this program facilitates leadership, engagement, and collaborative policy development among and in support of our land steward network. Together we craft and promote NEFOC’s policy platform, calls to action with feedback from members, and forge climate justice links with other Black and Indigenous-led land trusts across Turtle Island. Our work is rooted in NEFOC’s reparations, rematriation, and Indigenous reciprocity frameworks and in our ancestors’ approach to land care as sacred practice of climate stewardship. As we strive to ensure that considerations of structural racism and historical land and labor theft factor into state, regional, and national decision making, we demand investment in BIPOC-led training, research, and technical assistance programs and in policies that expand access to resources for current and aspiring land stewards. Policies beholden to the life of ecosystems must channel resources to the original land stewards and to our communities currently dispossessed of land, while creating pathways for BIPOC stewards to build livelihoods, communal wealth, and thriving land relationships across generations. Along with collaborators, we will continue to seed and grow a resource library of tools and resources related to policy, legal, stewardship practice, and other protections for ecosystems and their rights (also called Personhood or Rights of Nature).