The critical need for diversity in senior leadership at environmental organizations

See below, Joint Center Senior Energy and Environment Fellow Danielle Deane’s op-ed in the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

If you were fighting a war against a well-funded opponent and trying to save civilization as we know it, would you leave any combat units underfunded?

Not likely. And yet this is the environmental movement’s puzzling state of affairs. Diversity among the senior ranks of its largest funders and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remains scarce.

The working group Green 2.0, created by leaders of color who have experience across various sectors of the environmental movement, has examined diversity efforts in the environmental sector over the last two decades. Unfortunately, despite the stakes—as we face extreme weather impacts and climate disruption, and warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The World Bank, and Federal Emergency Management Agency—progress has been glacial. The inconvenient truth is that we need to tackle low diversity among the pool of funders and NGO executives making decisions about who and what to fund and prioritize if we are to win more battles.

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Morgan McLeod is the Program Assistant and New Media Strategist at the Joint Center