Back in 2019, during the federal election cycle, Manvi Bhalla was talking to friends at a wine and cheese night when the group collectively realized they didn’t have a clear understanding of each political party’s environmental platform — and didn’t know how to find a breakdown. 

So they decided to make one themselves, put it on social media, and Shake Up The Establishment — what’s now a youth-led, grassroots organization that disperses information about “human and social justice issues that are exacerbated by the climate crisis” — was born. 

But the organization’s principles weren’t always what Bhalla, who’s now the group’s president, would call intersectional, a term coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how different socioeconomic factors like race, class and gender affect a person’s experience of the world. Many of the group’s members were more focused on the ecological side of climate change than the crisis’s human or social impacts. 

“I was the one saying, ‘Let’s involve a just transition, communities, jobs,’” she says. “What about all the oil jobs? What about traditional knowledge systems? My whole brain does not function without thinking about other people, but that’s what being a person of colour is. You fundamentally don’t see things the white way.” 

So, over 2020, in the midst of a pandemic that shined light on deep systemic inequities, the organization underwent an entire strategic transformation. They changed their leadership team and rewrote the organization’s mission and values. Bhalla describes it as a reorienting toward climate justice, a term that acknowledges the disproportionate impacts climate change has on vulnerable socioeconomic groups. 

Bhalla describes the difference between climate action and climate justice as this: climate action, especially in a colonial and capitalist context, often focuses solely on addressing the ecological symptoms of the climate crisis — greenhouse gas emissions primarily. Climate justice, on the other hand, does two things: It aims to get to the root of the problem — extractive capitalism — and it considers ways the climate crisis impacts people with lower socioeconomic status disproportionately.

A transformation from climate action to climate justice is what Bhalla, along with four other climate activists Future of Good spoke to, says any social impact organization aiming to meaningfully participate in tackling the climate crisis needs to take on. Here’s what they told us about how to do it:

Start local. 

Sarah Hanson, the North America regional director for a global environmental NGO called Youth4Nature, encourages social impact organizations to begin working toward climate justice by connecting to the land they operate on — and the Indigenous people whose land that is. 

Youth4Nature underwent a similar transformation to Shake Up The Establishment recently, from an ecologically-focused organization to one that centres the human impacts of climate changes — or a shift from climate action to climate justice. One of the first ways they went about this was by gathering leaders from the six global regions the organization operates in and discussing ways their teams could connect to the Indigenous communities whose land they operated on. “Who are the Indigenous peoples of the region? What barriers do they face, and how can we be more inclusive to them into the future?” 

Hanson, who is Indigenous from Biigtigong Nishnaabeg in Northwestern Ontario, says making an organization’s land acknowledgement deeper and more meaningful is an important step toward climate justice. 

This means “going into (a land acknowledgement) with the intention of why you’re talking about it, and doing a lot of self reflection, because the land provides so much for us and we’ve treated it so badly for so long,” Hanson says. “Reflecting on whose land you’re on, what your relationship is to it, and how your organization or your company benefits from it, is really beneficial to then talking about sustainability.”

Beware of the one-size-fits approach.

Anjali Appadurai, a climate justice campaigner with the environmental charity Sierra Club BC, says a justice-oriented approach to the climate crisis recognizes privilege and holds powerful people accountable. “Those who are least responsible for creating the climate crisis are the most vulnerable to it,” she says, “and those who are most responsible for creating the crisis have the most resources in order to tackle the crisis.” 

Research shows that those who are the most responsible and least vulnerable are the leaders of major corporations. Those who are least responsible and most vulnerable are racialized people, particularly those living on lower incomes. If an organization’s approach starts and ends at encouraging its donors, beneficiaries, and broader community to recycle, reduce their plastic waste, or take other individual action, it’s misguided and it’s not climate justice, both Bhalla and Appadurai say.

Even environmental policy advocacy can lack intersectionality. For instance, Bhalla says, “plastic serves a lot of needs for people who are not privileged. There are 58 First Nations without clean drinking water. Stop banning plastic. Get them water first and then maybe talk about that. It’s disgusting to me how little we value human life over the zero waste (agenda).”

Appadurai suggests organizations create a process, though a list of preliminary questions to be answered, for “thinking through all the equity aspects” of any climate-related project before it begins. “Climate justice begs the question: who is being sacrificed in the name of progress?”

Fund and legitimize grassroots movements. 

And the very first question organizations should ask themselves before beginning a climate justice project, Appadurai says, is whether it has the endorsement of grassroots, social movements. If it doesn’t, it might be considered climate action, not climate justice. “Social movements are often born of actual lived experiences of the impact of climate change and the impact of various other social injustices that are linked. When progressive institutions aren’t in conversation with social movements, that’s when we start to move away from climate justice,” she says. 

Appadurai even suggests that all climate justice projects should stem from social movements. “You take a social movement and you build policy demands, you build the more institutional aspects of it from that core.”

Climate justice “can’t be dreamed up in a boardroom,” she says. Instead, climate justice for mainstream social impact organizations means using their institutional power to legitimize social movements’ resistance. These environmental movements don’t need to have ‘climate action’ in their name or explicitly in their mandate either. Indigenous communities, for instance, have stewarded and protected land against climate-damaging activities for centuries.

One tangible way organizations, particularly in the philanthropic and corporate worlds, can do this is through funding. Environmental movements need “a lot more unstructured funding,” Appadurai says.

As one of those grassroots organizations, Bhalla says it’s been difficult, to find funding for Shake Up The Establishment’s work — compounded by the fact that the teams doling out government and philanthropic funding are often less than diverse. “How are we going to get funding for things we need when they don’t have the intersectional viewpoints or the knowledge or parameters to give us funding for those things?” she says. 

If organizations “want to help,” Bhalla continues, “they have to decentre money. They have to, no strings attached, just give money to people and trust that they’re going to be able to solve the issue better.”

Create equity-based success metrics. 

“How are we defining success?” asks Kluane Adamek, Yukon Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations. While an organization might measure success of a climate action project by reduced emissions associated with the organization’s activities, for example, a climate justice approach asks questions like, “are we open and willing to have hard conversations about our work as (for example) a development company in the community around us?” 

Brynna Kagawa-Visentin, climate recovery coordinator with Youth Climate Lab agrees. “Climate change is actually not the problem. I know it seems like the most doom and gloom situation, but what are the values that got us there in the first place?” she asks. 

“Our structures, our economy, our systems, are geared in a way where we think that we can control everything.” Kagawa-Vistentin suggests organizations measure success of their climate justice projects by whether they’re moving the needle on changing the root cause of climate change — extractive capitalism.

Decentre yourself and your power. 

One of the first items on Shake Up The Establishment’s transformation to-do list was to change its leadership. Those who weren’t up to speed with a version of climate action that prioritized human equity stepped down or were asked to leave. 

Bhalla says any organization committed to climate justice needs to be willing to ask themselves: are we equipped to lead this project? And if not, who is?

“You can invest hours and hours and hours doing a lot of learning on your own to be competent in these spaces, but if you’re not competent, you’ve got to know when to step down and take time to learn,” says Bhalla. “People who are not able to have uncomfortable conversations need to leave the space.”

Climate justice is about “putting the cause above yourself. Intersectionality begins with that — begins, and then it goes from there,” she says. There’s no room for ego: “The purpose is to phase ourselves out, because we shouldn’t need these organizations in the first place.” 

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