Name: Harvey F. Mollison

Social Justice Group: Global Warming (A)

Date of Fieldwork: February 14, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):Aja Two Crows From The New York Climate Exchange

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

We interviewed Aja Two Crows from the New York Climate Exchange. She spoke about how she was very interested in the arts and culture, K-12 education, community-based research, citizen science, and micro-grants programs. She and her coworkers essentially develop programming for the new NYC Climate Exchange trying to push forward new plans and ideas.

She also talked about how we should accelerate projects that already exist and uplift other multidisciplinary issues. In other words, thinking about it from many perspectives. This can include buildings, food, air, building decarbonization, and many more. The idea of having many partners also came up a lot, regarding their relationships with over 12 universities, 3 corporations, and 33 community partners. They are there to help forge connections between them to help the issue at large. For example, they could pull together a bunch of scientists to discuss with writers about the impacts of climate change to attempt to get the word out.

This all was very amazing to me as the entire organization is fairly new to the world. It had only been founded in April of 2023 and Aja has been there for 8 months. To already have this much work completed and in place is quite an achievement. It is good to know that whilst there is so much to feel badly about regarding climate change there are also so many people and organizations that support this effort.