Make It Work Nevada is a policy-driven organization that is shifting the landscape of our community through advocacy and education to support the long-term health and vitality of Black families. We center the lived experiences of Black women and Black families in our work as we fight for long-term change that measurably improves our lives. We’re also a member of the Nevada Environmental Justice Coalition.

So often the women and families we work alongside are left out of the conversations that are related to climate change and environmental injustice. These conversations directly impact their lives and their communities. We’re here to amplify how nuanced this conversation is and how important it is to listen to a racially and economically diverse group of Nevadans that are adversely impacted by climate change and environmental injustice.

In order to fix any problem you have to have a full and comprehensive understanding of the roots causes – this means hearing from people who best understand the totality of the problems they are facing. We’re living through climate change and its effects are only worsening the hardships our community members already face in their day-to-day lives, but the conversation can’t stop there. It’s short-sided to think that if we only curb carbon emissions or reduce global warming that it will yield greater justice for our community – it won’t.

You can’t talk about solutions to climate change without talking about solutions to environmental injustice. True environmental justice means shaping public policy to encompass the fullness in humanity of those who have been structurally written into society’s margins – i.e. Black, Brown, Indigenous, women and families. It means having access to the resources necessary to live full, whole, thriving lives. It means ensuring we have access to fresh food. It means ensuring we have public transportation that doesn’t cause more health care issues. It means ensuring we have access to community parks and green spaces.

We have to do more than merely make our air and water cleaner. We have to fundamentally change the systems and structures that have allowed for countless families go without these basic human needs that are all too easy to take advantage of.

We, at Make It Work Nevada, are committed to creating this world and we welcome any partners that are committed to expanding the conversation to include those most directly impacted by not only climate change, but the perpetual hardships created by environmental injustice. Racial justice is climate justice.