Connecting Climate Change, Health and Racial Equity

Environmental change-maker Chantelle Mendonsa '11 shares how she got her start and why she's nowhere near finished trying to help the planet and everyone on it.

It's almost like she has x-ray vision. When Chantelle Mendonsa '11 looks at a problem, she can see, down to the bones, so to speak, how the pieces come together. It's an essential skill in her position as the Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge (SPARCC) Community Lead at the National Resources Defense Council, where she focuses on identifying connections between the environment, racial equity and health equity, then helping make structural changes to improve all three.

"The lens that helped me begin to understand climate change and the environment was public health," says the Santa Ana, California, native, who now resides in Washington, D.C. "There were days growing up in Southern California when the air quality was so poor you couldn't go out and play, and I noticed in my neighborhood, a lot of kids had asthma."

In order to figure out how we got to the place where your race or your income can determine the quality of air you breathe, you have to understand the way that our history and our communities — particularly surrounding racial and environmental justice and policies like redlining and sundown towns — purposefully pushed polluting industries out of white and affluent neighborhoods and into communities of color and low-income communities.

Her understanding of the links between health and the environment deepened during college at Syracuse University. Mendonsa began to "really connect to the fact that the way in which most Americans actually engage with climate change and our environment is through their health," she says. "It's through clean air, water."

At the same time, she learned not all health impact is experienced equally. "The ways in which an income can be a determinant for air quality is frightening," Mendonsa says. "And in order to figure out how we got to the place where your race or your income can determine the quality of air you breathe, you have to understand the way that our history and our communities — particularly surrounding racial and environmental justice and policies like redlining and sundown towns — purposefully pushed polluting industries out of white and affluent neighborhoods and into communities of color and low-income communities."

A fellow environmentalist at Syracuse inspired her to turn concerns into action. "He got me to really think about the ways in which [these] systems are connected," she says. "He pushed me to be like, 'Okay, if you care about the environment, then why are we learning about climate change while our school endowment is funded from big oil and polluters?'" (Sadly, the inspiration her former classmate continues to give Mendonsa to fight climate change is due to the fact that he was overcome by wildfire smoke while working in agriculture in California and has been in a coma for the past three years.)

Collaborating with a group of students and local partners, Mendonsa and her classmates staged a sit-in, met with Syracuse University's administration and campaigned to force the school to address their concerns. It worked. In 2015, the university publicly committed to divest its $1.8 billion endowment from oil, coal and gas companies and make investments in clean-energy technologies. Divestment of the entire SUNY school system followed.

Mendonsa kept that positive momentum going after college, working at the Council on Environmental Quality in the administration of President Barack Obama. "It helped me recognize that we need to talk about climate through health, through how people are experiencing it, connecting health and climate to where we live," she says." I reflect on that as probably one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life, working with a team of people fully dedicated to public health and to having a livable planet."

At the NRDC, an organization that Mendonsa says shares her goal of figuring out how to build a safer world, and one in which all can thrive, Mendonsa works on the "Strong, Prosperous and Resilient Communities Challenge." She partners with organizations and individuals in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Memphis and San Francisco on community practice work around climate resiliency, health equity, racial equity, and the intersection of health and climate.

"I'm really lucky to work with partners who are all really passionate," she says. "They're determined to improve their own communities and make sure that where they live is not a place that negatively impacts their health but, instead, is someplace where they can really thrive and want to build a family. You can really feel the urgency when you're working directly with people who are impacted."

The job could sound complicated on paper, but to Mendonsa it's all really quite simple: "I don't think any of us should have to expect that we will live a shorter life or have more health impacts because of where we live, because of our race or income." She readily admits that she doesn't have all the answers, though.

"Honestly, what I'm most proud of is the fact that we've gone through an incredible learning journey in recognizing that we, as environmentalists and as experts in climate change or health, are not experts in lived experience," she says. "The people who know best what's happened to a community aren't scientists who don't live in that community. It's actually people who live there and who understand what those daily impacts are. [Then for others like me to] help co-create projects to help the community, that I think has been the biggest learning."

Mendonsa's learning continues every day now, since she became a Bloomberg American Health Initiative Fellow. "It's a partnership between Johns Hopkins and the NRDC, so it's been really great because it's allowed me to continue trying to build the connection between public health inequities and climate change," she explains.

Of course, tackling such weighty, all-encompassing issues can feel heavy at times. "It is really easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom of 'Everything is terrible,' with climate change exacerbating the impacts on those who are most impacted: on low-income communities, on communities of color, on all of us," she admits. Looking to her NRDC partners and fellow environmentalists makes all the difference.

"I've been really blown away by the number of people, and the number of young people specifically as well, who recognize that this is the time to stand up and do something," she says. "That gives me a lot of hope."

Plus, Mendonsa adds, "Working with people who know what they want to do in their community, and who are really eager and working tirelessly to push forward, it's hard to say, 'Oh, but everything is bad!' It's a lot easier to say, 'Let me help, let's do this together.'"