New Voices Are Rising

This month, we’re featuring Belinda Faustinos, the newest member of our California Environmental Grassroots funding board. Belinda is our first and only Grassroots Funding Board member from Southern California. She brings with her years of experience focused in equity and conservation in the outdoors.

On Tuesday, our NVR Fellows joined a public hearing to testify against the proposed PG&E rate hike. This public process gave community members space to scrutinize PG&E’s plan and to consider alternatives. All of our seven fellows made a statement at the hearing. Learn more about PG&E’s history of putting profit before people as well as what our students had to say about it.

Every year, students from the Summer Academy are recruited to become New Voices Are Rising Fellows during the school year, giving them the opportunity to pursue environmental justice work in greater depth. The students use the skills they learned and the leadership potential they developed, applying it to community capacity-building and outreach projects called “externships” with New Voices and program partners. Each externship focus is different ranging from air quality management and climate resiliency, to media and communications.

Mykela Patton is returning to the Rose Foundation as our New Voices Are Rising Program Manager. She joined…

The tools we use for interaction, engagement, and education change from generation to generation. From textbooks to online learning, the way we present and consume information is constantly in flux. Our New Voices youth exemplify this trend, choosing to use video as a platform to share what they have learned in the Rose Foundation’s environmental justice leadership program. Our students’ work exemplifies the creative ways we can use technology to educate and engage younger generations.

Each week of the Summer Academy had a different environmental justice focus. From hands-on activities and experiments to…

The ultimate goal of the New Voices Are Rising program is to grow youth power from the communities…

A screenshot from this year’s Summer Academy!  This year we expanded our New Voices Are Rising Summer Academy…